Einstein Copilot, Salesforce’s conversational AI assistant, is now generally available with new out-of-the-box actions for driving sales productivity

New Copilot Analytics enables admins to track and audit usage of Einstein Copilot, uncovering trends in adoption to scale deployments

San Francisco — April 25, 2024 – Today, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) announced the general availability of Einstein Copilot, the conversational AI assistant for CRM, along with new capabilities designed to enhance seller productivity and scale adoption of generative AI.

Introducing new sales actions

For 25 years, Salesforce has been helping sales teams find, win, and keep customers across every facet of the sales cycle – from prospecting and activity tracking to forecasting and revenue operations – all of which can be tailored to a customer’s business through customizable metadata. Salesforce is using this wealth of experience to collapse the most common and valuable seller processes into conversational AI interactions grounded on an organization’s business-specific data and metadata, and delivered at scale through new analytics and testing tools.

A key component of this metadata, and unique to Einstein Copilot, are Copilot Actions — pre-programmed capabilities that enable Einstein Copilot to not only answer questions using business data, but also string together workflows to get things done on behalf of users. In fact, in the recent “Your Data, Your AI” survey, more than half of workers said AI grounded on private company data builds their trust in the tool.

Today, Salesforce is increasing its library of actions with new capabilities where sellers can benefit from conversational AI directly in Sales Cloud. Instead of navigating to a bespoke AI tool disconnected from their CRM, sales reps can simply open up Einstein Copilot and ask for a personalized close plan, insights on why an opportunity may not close in the month, or check if pricing was discussed on a recent call – which means more time focused on the customer and less time sifting through data and screens. Einstein Copilot includes a reasoning engine that can interpret user requests and dynamically automate tasks from a library of actions, ensuring every new action expands the breadth of use cases it can support — and it does so without the need to train or fine-tune a large language model (LLM).

Dive deeper into what’s new

Einstein Copilot now includes new sales actions for boosting seller productivity across an array of cross-functional use cases:

• Close Plans: To accelerate time to close, sales reps and managers can have Einstein Copilot create a grounded, personalized close plan for an opportunity with step-by-step tactics based on historical opportunity and account data as well as recommended dates of action.
• Forecast Guidance: Sales managers can understand and de-risk forecasts through Einstein Copilot. They can ask questions such as “what deals are at risk?” and receive a summarized list of deals that could explain why a member of their team might not hit their quota.
• Call Explorer: Using retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which enables companies to use their structured and unstructured proprietary data to make AI more trusted and relevant, sales reps can query prior call transcripts captured in Einstein Conversation Insights, asking questions such as “what was the customer sentiment on this call?” and receiving a semantically relevant answer scoped to that call to avoid hallucinations.
• Follow-Up Emails: To facilitate deal progression, sales reps can have Einstein Copilot craft customized follow-up emails based on prior calls, helping move deals along. 
• Einstein Copilot in Sales Cloud Everywhere: Customers can take Einstein Copilot everywhere they work. They can research prospects, get up-to-speed on deals, and draft outreach from any webpage with Sales Cloud Everywhere.

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In addition to these new capabilities for sellers, Einstein Copilot is introducing platform enhancements that make every conversational AI experience better:

• Copilot Analytics: Admins can visualize usage of Einstein Copilot through a pre-configured analytics dashboard, enabling them to understand and accelerate Einstein Copilot adoption by dissecting key metrics such as actions used, average interactions per user, and success rates to help businesses drive and measure ROI from AI.
• Recommended Actions: Teams are now empowered to quickly complete any task with recommended actions in the flow of work. Instead of typing in a request, Einstein Copilot surfaces single-click standard actions specific to the page a user is on, such as “summarize opportunity” on the opportunity page or “draft an email” on the contact page.
• Einstein Copilot on the Salesforce Mobile App: For AI-powered productivity in the flow of work, including on-the go, Einstein Copilot is now live on the Salesforce mobile app, with voice-to-text functionality for mobile users that enables them to simply talk with their data and workflows.

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A unified AI assistant powered by trusted data and metadata

Einstein Copilot stands out from other AI assistants and chat solutions because it is a unified conversational AI assistant built on the Einstein 1 Platform, grounded in company-specific data stored within Data Cloud, and connected to Salesforce metadata — the data that describes a customer’s unique business configurations.

With this metadata framework, a sales rep can ask Einstein Copilot questions like “Can you create an email for my top open deal this week?” A typical LLM can’t find the relevant output just from the data. It has to know what a deal means and where to locate the relevant data to answer the question. Unlike data, which refers to ‌records within Salesforce (such as accounts, contact details, and sales opportunities), metadata describes the layout, behavior, and relationships of the data. Einstein Copilot can use this metadata to interpret the user’s prompt with complete context, working with the LLM to choose the relevant fields – in this case, for the top open deals related to the particular user — then create a personalized email for the salesperson.

All of these interactions with Einstein Copilot are securely mediated by the Einstein Trust Layer, which employs security and privacy measures including data masking, a zero-retention architecture to ensure data is never stored outside Salesforce, toxicity detection to safeguard responses, and a customer-owned audit trail to enable AI-driven productivity without compromising on trust.

What’s next: Salesforce is investing in a deep library of persona- and industry-specific actions that expand the range of tasks Einstein Copilot can perform. In addition to today’s news around sales actions and banking actions, as well as previously released health actions and service actions, such as AI-generated replies grounded in a customer’s knowledge base, Salesforce is developing new marketing actions that accelerate campaign creation, commerce actions that assist shoppers, as well as the ability to turn MuleSoft APIs into custom actions that enable Einstein Copilot to cascade work across multiple systems.

The customer perspective: Customers like ADP are leveraging Einstein Copilot and the Einstein 1 Platform to drive greater productivity and enhance the human capital management client experience. 

• “We are incredibly excited to continue exploring new ways to optimize our client interactions, from understanding their unique needs to providing tailored solutions and support,” said Max Li, Global Chief Information Officer, ADP. “Leveraging Salesforce’s generative AI capabilities with the power of our data and expertise, we are empowering our service associates with the insights they need to deliver an exceptional client experience.” 

The Salesforce perspective: “As we continue the rapid pace of innovation, this is an exciting step forward in conversational AI for enterprises,” said Adam Evans, SVP Product, Salesforce AI Platform. “With this release, every organization can now deploy a trusted AI assistant grounded in their unique business data and metadata that can assist users with a multitude of actions, automating complex processes and improving productivity.”

With this release, every organization can now deploy a trusted AI assistant grounded in their unique business data and metadata that can assist users with a multitude of actions, automating complex processes and improving productivity.

Adam Evans, SVP Product, Salesforce AI Platform

How customers can purchase Einstein Copilot

Einstein 1 Editions provide organizations in every industry access to the best of Salesforce technology — including CRM, Einstein Copilot, Data Cloud, Slack, and Tableau — in a single offering, helping them transform their business and deliver stronger customer experiences. Customers can additionally access Einstein Copilot through Einstein add-on offerings to Enterprise and Unlimited Editions. 

Customers looking to scale Einstein Copilot can also invest in the new AI Implementation Bundle, which includes discounted sandbox environments and reduced-cost licenses for customizing and deploying conversational AI.

Availability: Einstein Copilot Sales actions, Service actions, and Copilot Analytics are generally available today.

Learn more:

• Learn more about Einstein Copilot 
• Learn what makes Salesforce the #1 AI CRM
• See how you can adapt Einstein Copilot to your business
• Learn more about how Data Cloud unlocks data with zero copies here
• Learn how to sell faster with Sales AI
• Join the largest, most successful sales professional community