Salesforce Announces New Data and AI Innovations for Retailers

The News: Salesforce announced new data and AI-powered tools targeted toward retail merchandisers and marketer that are designed to improve the shopping experience and support improvements for retail merchandisers and marketers. Built on the Einstein 1 Platform, the Einstein Copilot for Shoppers provides a generative AI-driven assistant that can be embedded with digital storefronts and messaging apps, making it easier for customers to find the products or services they desire.

On the operational side, retail merchandisers will have access to a generative AI-powered page designer to build e-commerce sites, as well as several generative AI-powered insights tools, focusing on returns, inventory, customers, and products. Marketers, meanwhile, are provided with a variety of generative AI tools designed to help them bring together customer marketing and promotions data with predictive insights, launch referral programs, improve targeting and personalization, and solve content bottlenecks in their campaign and personalization strategy.

Availability:

• Einstein Copilot for Shoppers is in pilot and will be generally available in summer 2024.
• Page Designer is currently in pilot.
• Return Insights in Order Management is generally available now.
• Customer and Product Insights Dashboard and Inventory Insights are in pilot and will be generally available in summer 2024.
• Global Promotion Management is in pilot and will be generally available in spring 2024.
• Referral Marketing is generally available now.
• Segment Creation is in pilot and will be generally available in spring 2024.
• Content Creation is generally available now.

You can read more about these announcements at Salesforce’s website.

Salesforce Announces New Data and AI Innovations for Retailers

Analyst Take: Salesforce made several announcements at the National Retail Federation’s 2024 Big Show in January, focused on the use of data and generative AI to improve efficiency for shoppers and retail merchandisers and marketers, while also helping to easily surface critical operational insights. Powered by Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, retail or shopper data is securely integrated with LLMs to deliver enhanced shopper, merchandiser, and retail marketer experiences.

Einstein Copilot for Shoppers is a new, consumer-facing extension of Einstein Copilot. The generative AI assistant is designed to help shoppers find products and make purchases faster using natural language interactions on retailers’ channels like digital storefronts and messaging apps. In addition to making it easier for customers to seek out the products they want using everyday language, instead of keywords or a series of tick boxes, Einstein Copilot for Shoppers utilizes existing customer data, such as the shopper’s location, preferences, and past purchases, to help generate recommendations that find appropriate products in the shopper’s desired color, size, or other preferred attributes. This improves the shopper’s experience while providing additional data back to the retailer for subsequent purchases.

Generative AI Tools for Retail Merchandisers

Retail merchandisers are also gaining a number of generative AI-powered tools. Page Designer uses generative AI-powered natural language prompts to design, build, and customize ecommerce sites and pages more quickly. Meanwhile, Return Insights in Order Management analyzes data, looks at patterns in returns activity, and uses AI to prompt retailers to make product display changes that minimize future returns. Salesforce also notes that it uses sentiment analysis to assess commentary on product reviews and return reason codes to then recommend actions that quickly address issues with specific products.

Similarly, Salesforce’s Inventory Insights are designed to provide digital retailers a clear view of available inventory so they can ensure products remain in stock whenever possible. When used in tandem with Customer and Product Insights, which pulls data from Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Data Cloud to help merchandisers better visualize trends, such as the top product bundles sold and the most engaged shopper demographics, retail merchandisers are able to build new targeted commerce experiences and better match demand to supply on a granular level.

Generative AI’s core benefits, at least in the near term, tend to revolve around reducing manual work, or making it easier to capture and combine data for analysis and action. In each of these use cases, Salesforce is leveraging generative AI to handle real-world tasks that are more complex than simple text-based summarization or content generation, and therefore should be able to generate a solid return on investment for retail merchandisers.

Retail Marketer Enhancements Powered by Generative AI

In addition to the generative AI tools being made available to retail merchandisers, Salesforce will be rolling out several generative AI tools to assist marketers. Global Promotion Management is designed to help retailers link customer marketing and promotions data with predictive insights to forecast potential promotion revenue, so retailers can easily coordinate pricing and rewards initiatives for both loyalty members and non-loyalty customers. Meanwhile, Salesforce’s Referral Marketing can be used to assist brands with launching referral programs and quickly improve conversions with pre-built templates and a built-in ‘Likely to Refer’ AI tool to identify customers with the highest likelihood of participating in referral programs.

To provide a more personalized outreach via marketing campaigns, Segment Creation is designed to aid retailers in targeting and personalization using generative AI prompts, leveraging their company’s trusted data held in Data Cloud. Further, by deploying Content Creation for Marketing Cloud Engagement, retail marketers can reduce or eliminate content bottlenecks in their campaign and personalization strategy by leveraging natural language prompts powered by generative AI to automatically create personalized on-brand visual content, email subject lines, and body copy at scale.

These tools incorporate generative AI prompts to make it easier to query and access relevant information, as well as handle the marketing tasks that are critical to creating personalized marketing and sales promotions. Because generative AI prompts are grounded in company data held within Data Cloud, the risk of hallucination is very low.

Salesforce Focused on Providing End-to-End Generative AI Support to Retailers

Salesforce is launching a variety of generative AI tools that are not just focused on customer-facing tools, which may have a relatively limited ROI. The numerous back-end generative AI-powered tools, which focus on improving task efficiency and helping merchandisers and marketers provide more personalized marketing and sales experiences, are likely to yield far greater business benefits over time, as they can be scaled and modified fairly easily.

However, it is incumbent upon retailers to ensure that any data that is used has been properly cleaned and vetted to ensure that toxicity or bias is mitigated or eliminated. For example, product data that is linked to certain personal attributes (e.g., race or gender) needs to be properly guard railed to ensure that product suggestions or recommendations – sent to customers or retail merchandisers and marketers – are not improperly associated or linked to protected class attributes.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.

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