Salesforce unveils AI-driven Data Cloud innovations to boost CX

Salesforce has announced new innovations in its Data Cloud, aiming to enhance organisations' capabilities in transforming customer experiences through data and artificial intelligence (AI). Highlighting the advancements, Salesforce also introduced the Datablazers Community, a platform designed to connect IT leaders, developers, and Data Cloud enthusiasts to share insights on data best practices, trends, and tools.

Data Cloud has reported a significant growth of 130% year-over-year in paid customers, processing more than 2 quadrillion records per quarter. Notably, it now supports the extraction of insights from unstructured audio and video content, which aims to make Salesforce's Agentforce more contextually aware, knowledgeable, and adaptable to customer needs. Enhancements in policy-based governance, AI tagging, and classification to categorise data have also been emphasised.

Rahul Auradkar, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Data Cloud at Salesforce, stated, "In this new era of AI and Agents, customer data and metadata are the new gold for the enterprise. Every day, more companies are using Data Cloud to unify all their data — from customer interactions and product usage to IoT and social media data — to gain deeper customer insights across all touchpoints and channels. Because Data Cloud is the foundation of Salesforce, companies can act on data to create the most personalised and meaningful customer experiences."

Among the organisations relying on Data Cloud are The Adecco Group, Air India, Aston Martin, FedEx, Kawasaki Motors, and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Air India, for instance, has unified its data across loyalty, reservations, and flight systems to handle over 550,000 service cases each month effectively.

The new capabilities within Data Cloud include support for unstructured audio and video content, allowing businesses to analyse and extract customer data from sources like customer calls and webinars. This feature aims to enrich customer profiles, reveal deeper intent behind customer behaviours, and improve Agentforce's accuracy. Additionally, new pre-built connectors for applications like Square, Stripe, Meta, and Splunk have been incorporated, broadening the connectivity ecosystem of Data Cloud.

Support for real-time data ingestion, unification, analysis, and action across Salesforce platforms has also been bolstered. This includes sub-second real-time data processing to foster faster decision-making and instant personalisation across customer touchpoints. A new policy-based governance framework has been introduced to better manage data security and access control.

Organisations can also leverage new AI tagging and classification to automate the labelling and organisation of unstructured data, making governance easier and ensuring that data can be easily searched and analysed. The introduction of customer-managed keys for encryption purposes further enhances data security, ensuring that data remains protected across various usage scenarios.

The addition of Tableau Semantics standardises the data model across the entire organisation, ensuring consistent data usage and interpretation. Hybrid search functionality has been added to combine the semantic capabilities of vector search with traditional keyword search, making information retrieval faster and more accurate.

Matthew Randall, Head of Software and Integration at Aston Martin, commented, "Salesforce allows us to fuse together our trusted data from across our business to deliver tailored quality experiences to every current and future Aston Martin customer while creating the personalised, VIP experience they expect, as we look to grow and succeed in the AI era."

Caroline Basyn, Chief Digital and IT Officer at The Adecco Group, added, "As a professional recruiting, staffing, and consulting business we match talent to the most exciting companies and opportunities around the world. On any given day, we connect 700,000 people with fulfilling opportunities to match their skills. We are redefining the future of work by enabling augmented recruiter experiences thanks to AI, connecting employees to the right data at the right time. Today, Data Cloud gives 27,000 employee users seamless access to key information to match skills to specific roles."

The new Data Cloud innovations are projected to be available in various stages, including pilot, beta, or general availability across the following months.