Salesforce Introduces New AI Automation and Integration Capabilities Within MuleSoft to Boost Developer and Business Team Productivity

Salesforce today announced AI-powered enhancements to its MuleSoft automation, integration, and API management solutions that help business users and developers improve productivity, simplify workflows, and accelerate time to value. 

MuleSoft’s Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) helps teams quickly extract and organize data from diverse document formats including PDFs and images. Unlike other automation solutions, MuleSoft’s IDP is natively integrated into Salesforce Flow, which provides customers with an end-to-end automation experience. Additionally, to speed up project delivery, MuleSoft has embedded Einstein, Salesforce’s predictive and generative AI assistant, in its pro-code and low-code tools. This empowers users to build integrations and automations using natural language prompts directly in IDP, Flow Builder, and Anypoint Code Builder. 

Why it matters: Most IT teams are overloaded with project requests. Last year alone, these teams saw requests rise by an estimated 39% — making it difficult for developers to keep up with the pace of business-critical work. Fortunately, generative AI makes it possible to automate many processes, which is a key reason why 86% of IT leaders believe the technology will soon play a prominent role in their organizations.

What’s new in automation:

• MuleSoft’s Intelligent Document Processing enables teams to rapidly extract and structure data from documents to integrate with downstream systems and simplify processes like budget reconciliation, order fulfillment, or supplier onboarding. IDP uses advanced AI algorithms to extract and structure data from diverse formats such as PDFs and images. This data can then be seamlessly integrated and automated with all Salesforce Clouds, MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, and MuleSoft RPA. IDP also includes pre-configured templates for purchase orders and invoices, minimizing the need for setup and document training. Customers can also incorporate human-in-the-loop reviews of AI-generated output for improved governance. The addition of IDP provides a comprehensive solution that enables a fully connected, end-to-end business automaton. 
• Einstein for Intelligent Document Processing makes it possible to use natural language prompts to easily extract data from unstructured sources, eliminating the need for training AI models or document templates. Embedding Einstein in IDP also allows users to easily extract unstructured data fields, format responses into JSON outputs, classify and summarize documents, and trigger subsequent tasks.
• Einstein for Flow helps Salesforce admins automatically create workflows using natural language prompts. For example, users can ask Einstein to automatically create marketing journeys, Data Cloud-triggered flows, and prompt templates — all enriched with contextual CRM data.

What’s new in MuleSoft integration and API management:

• Anypoint Code Builder Configuration Panel — MuleSoft’s next-generation IDE for designing, developing, and deploying APIs, integrations, and automations from a single environment now has a configuration panel that empowers users to configure flows, operations, and components directly through the user interface (UI). In addition, with access to accelerators and templates in Anypoint Exchange and support for external Version Control Systems (VCS), developers can jumpstart projects fast and streamline collaboration across teams. For example, developers can use Einstein for Anypoint Code Builder to generate a starting point for any custom flow. The configuration panel makes it easy to configure these AI-generated flows to produce fully functional, customized APIs and integrations without having to write code.
• Einstein for Anypoint Code Builder enables teams to generate integration flows using natural language prompts and introduces new use cases for connectors like SAP and NetSuite, accelerating integration development. For instance, a developer working on order-to-cash integration projects can ask Einstein to create an integration that synchronizes data between a new opportunity object in Salesforce and newly placed orders in NetSuite.
• MuleSoft Accelerators for Industries now provide new use cases for retail, financial services, and healthcare. MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare can be used to remove identifiable patient information to enable medical research and train AI models to power innovative healthcare initiatives. For example, developers in healthcare organizations can securely connect to their electronic health records (EHRs) systems and modify the output to allow for use of emerging technologies while maintaining patient privacy. 
• Observability with Anypoint Monitoring enables developers to monitor API workloads that embed AI into their application ecosystems. For example, developers can trace requests across application networks and LLM APIs to build comprehensive models of an AI ecosystem, pinpoint performance bottlenecks, and ensure seamless LLM user experiences.

Salesforce perspective: “Developers are on the frontlines of implementing AI. But to unlock this exciting technology’s full power at scale, organizations need to activate their business users to participate in this implementation. With Einstein powering MuleSoft automation and integration products, every team across an organization can use AI to build and drive seamless customer experiences.” – Vijay Pandiarajan, VP, Product Management

But to unlock this exciting technology’s full power at scale, organizations need to activate their business users to participate in this implementation.

Vijay Pandiarajan, VP, Product Management

Customer perspective: “We have fewer resources and increasing customer demands, so we must find ways to improve our processes and increase productivity wherever we can. AI with integration and automation can help us do this. It’s table stakes now. MuleSoft and Einstein can help us make the most of our data securely to generate relevant outcomes, and overall allow us to innovate faster.” – James Grover, VP – Director of Software Engineering and System Development, at BankUnited

Availability:

• MuleSoft Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is currently in pilot and will be generally available at the end of April 2024.
• Einstein for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) will be generally available in the third quarter of 2024.
• Einstein for Flow will be generally available in June 2024.
• Anypoint Code Builder is generally available to all customers.
• Einstein for Anypoint Code Builder is currently in beta. 
• Anypoint Accelerator for Healthcare (PHI data cleansing) will be generally available in May 2024.
• Observability with Anypoint Monitoring is generally available to all customers.

Learn more:

• Learn more about MuleSoft Intelligent Document Processing 
• Learn more about MuleSoft Anypoint Code Builder
• Download Anypoint Code Builder for Desktop 
• Learn more about MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare
• Learn more about Anypoint Monitoring

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.