The IT Nerd

85% of Canadian service professionals say they are facing a significant increase in customer expectations. To meet those demands, organizations are increasing their investment in AI and data integration and using this moment to tap into the emergence of “service as a revenue driver”, according to the latest State of Service report from Salesforce. 

Released this week, the sixth edition of its State of Service report reveals the latest trends in customer service based on a global survey of over 5,500 service professionals, including Canada. 

Key highlights of the report include:

• 83% of service organizations in Canada plan to increase AI investments this year

• 92% of Canadian service professionals at organizations with AI say the technology saves them time and reduces costs
• The top 3 service use cases for AI in Canada are Customer-facing intelligent assistants, Agent-facing intelligent assistants, and Intelligent offers and recommendations 
• 80% of organizations in Canada expect service to contribute more revenue this year
• 79% of service organizations in Canada expect more budget this year
• 85% of Canadian service professionals say customers are more demanding, and 81% of agents say customers expect a personal touch more than they used to
• Meanwhile, Service agents in Canada spend an average of just 43% of their time helping customers
• 91% of service professionals say better access to data from other teams would improve the support they provide to their customers
• 85% of service organizations are increasing investment in data integration next year

 Full details can be found here.

Today at TrailblazerDX, Salesforce’s developer conference, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) announced the availability of Einstein 1 Studio, a set of low-code tools that enables Salesforce admins and developers to customize Einstein Copilot — the conversational AI assistant for CRM — and seamlessly embed AI across any app for every customer and employee experience.   

Einstein 1 Studio includes Copilot Builder for creating custom AI actions to accomplish specific business tasks, Prompt Builder for building and activating custom prompts in the flow of work, and Model Builder, where users can build or import a variety of AI models. This enables businesses to deliver trusted AI experiences across Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform that are tailored to their customers’ needs.

Why it matters: Enterprises face critical challenges in unlocking the power of AI across their business, with 9 in 10 IT professionals saying generative AI has forced them to change the way new technology is implemented and used. They need intuitive user interfaces that make it easy to interact with AI in the flow of work; AI models to fit their use cases; and access to trusted customer and business data to ground the AI models and ensure accurate, relevant outputs.

Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform integrates the user interface, a variety of AI models, and data in a single metadata-driven platform. This is what powers Einstein 1 Studio’s tools, facilitating low-code and no-code customization of Einstein Copilot, as well as building and modifying embedded prompts and actions that seamlessly connect to AI models in the flow of work across every Salesforce app. Einstein 1 Studio is deeply integrated with Data Cloud, which safely unlocks and unifies trapped data and grounds AI models with a comprehensive understanding of customers’ data and metadata. 

every Salesforce app and workflow. This will help companies boost productivity, improve customer experiences, and increase margins. The tools include:

• Copilot Builder: Create AI actions to accomplish business tasks (beta) — Copilot Builder helps every company configure and customize Einstein Copilot for their business. Salesforce admins and developers can use tools they already have, like Apex, Flow, and MuleSoft APIs, and new generative AI components like prompts, to enable Einstein Copilot to complete tasks in the flow of work. Einstein Copilot can leverage these custom actions to complete tasks across any Salesforce application or external system.
• Prompt Builder: Craft custom and trusted AI prompts with ease (GA) — ‌Prompt Builder empowers admins and developers to create custom, reusable AI prompts without coding, simplifying complex processes and driving business innovation. This not only broadens the use of generative AI beyond conversational interfaces, but also allows customers to design and repurpose prompts for use across other experiences. For example, a custom prompt can be seamlessly embedded in a contact record as a button, enabling an agent in the contact center to get a snapshot of all escalated cases for a customer in one click.
• Model Builder: Choose an LLM or build an AI model based on the job to be done (GA) —Unlike other solutions that limit businesses to a single Large Language Model (LLM), Einstein 1 Studio provides the flexibility to connect to a variety of AI models. Additionally, Model Builder is a no-code, low-code, and pro-code way for companies to build their own predictive AI models, trained on their Data Cloud data. For generative AI, Model Builder allows customers to select from LLMs managed by Salesforce, or bring their own models. Businesses can use predictive and generative AI models and services from Salesforce partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) via Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Cohere, Databricks, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and OpenAI, and train or fine-tune select models on Data Cloud data without moving or copying data.

Einstein Trust Layer: Deploy AI you can trust, on your terms: Designed for enterprise AI, the Einstein Trust Layer is a collection of features that help companies benefit from generative AI without compromising security or safety standards. New to the Einstein Trust Layer is customer-configured data masking, enabling admins to select the fields they want to mask, providing greater control. Additionally, the audit trail and feedback data collected from AI prompts and responses is now stored in Data Cloud, where it can be easily reported on or used for automated alerts through Flow and other Einstein 1 Platform tools.

Pricing:

• Customers can access Einstein 1 Studio by purchasing Einstein 1 Editions or by adding it on to Enterprise or Unlimited Editions. Detailed pricing information is available here.

Global availability:

• Prompt Builder and Model Builder are now generally available globally. Copilot Builder is available in beta globally. 
• Einstein 1 Studio currently supports data residency in the United States and the English language.
• Model Builder support for fine-tuning LLMs on Data Cloud data will be available later this year, starting with Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and OpenAI LLMs.

Salesforce today announced the rollout of Slack AI, a trusted and intuitive generative AI experience available natively in Slack, where work happens. Customers can easily tap into the collective knowledge shared in Slack through guided experiences for AI-powered search, channel recaps, thread summaries, and soon, a digests feature. These capabilities will enable customers to find answers, distill knowledge, and spark ideas faster.

Why it matters: Nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to efficiently do their jobs, according to Gartner. This, paired with an increasing number of tools and ways to exchange ideas, adds to workers’ cognitive load and makes it difficult to catch up quickly and feel on top of the work day. AI holds enormous potential to make internal knowledge more contextual, relevant, and easier to find and prioritize.

Innovation in action: Starting today, Slack AI’s search and summarization capabilities can help customers easily find and consume large volumes of information quickly. These features are trustworthy, easy to use, and require no training. Users initiate them through guided, contextual interactions, ensuring they don’t have to learn brand new skills to enjoy the benefits. And each output is secure, cited, and personalized to the user. With Slack AI, customers can access:

• AI-powered search that delivers personalized, intelligent responses to any question: Users can ask a question conversationally and get a concise answer based on relevant Slack messages. Users can find what they need faster, whether they want to learn about a new marketing campaign, get up to speed on company policies, glean insights about past decisions from historical context, or define unfamiliar acronyms.

• Channel recaps that generate key highlights from accessible channels: Users can catch up on unread messages, summarize the last seven days, or set a custom date range to summarize. Users can quickly catch up after time away from work, get up to speed on a new project, or jump in quickly to help resolve time-sensitive issues.
• Thread summaries that catch users up on long conversations: Users can get the gist of a long conversation in one click, and clear sources are included in each summary, allowing users to dive deeper into a highlight. Users can instantly summarize key decisions and next steps from a thread with a lot of back and forth, get up to speed on a customer support ticket, or catch up on a team stand-up to get a bird’s eye view of priorities.

Sales spotlight: Sales teams are under pressure to streamline their operations and maximize team effectiveness. With Slack AI, sales reps can:

• Easily identify and bring in the right subject matter expert when a customer has a specific question or concern during a deal cycle.
• Summarize an account channel and get the context they need to prepare for a customer meeting more effectively.
• Generate key takeaways from a long discussion about deal progress to help keep the team on track.

• Slack Taps Partner Ecosystem to Expand Time-Saving Automation Capabilities
• The Surprising Connection Between After-Hours Work and Decreased Productivity
• Williams-Sonoma, Inc. and Salesforce Team Up to Serve Customers at Home

Engineering spotlight: The incident management process can be time-consuming and complex. With Slack AI, engineering teams can:

• Find answers in past incident channels to uncover potential solutions and apply learnings.
• Get the right information they need so they can quickly get situated and jump in to help find a resolution.
• Recap an incident channel and use it as a starting point to draft a root-cause analysis faster.

Slack’s trusted and secure AI experience: Trust is the number one value at Salesforce, and Slack is committed to building AI products safely, responsibly, and ethically. 

• Slack AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure and upholds the same security practices and compliance standards that customers expect.
• Slack AI’s large language models (LLMs) are hosted directly within Slack, ensuring customer data remains in-house and exclusively for that organization’s use. Customer data remains siloed and will not be used to serve other clients, directly or indirectly.
• Slack AI does not use customer data for LLM training purposes.

The future of native generative AI in Slack: More features that help users summarize and prioritize information are on the horizon. Soon, Slack AI will create digests summarizing key highlights from channels that users want to stay informed on but may not require immediate attention, enabling them to stay up to speed on what they could otherwise miss while focusing on their top priorities. Additionally, Slack is building a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM, that will provide answers to questions directly in Slack that are grounded in trusted customer data.

These new search and summarization features are just the beginning of how Slack will enable people to work smarter and faster. In the future, Slack will be the command center for work and the conversational interface for generative AI.

Slack’s AI-ready platform: In addition to these native AI capabilities, partners are bringing additional AI functionality into their Slack apps. Available today, upgraded AI-powered apps from Slack’s partner ecosystem allow users to ask PagerDuty Copilot for help resolving incidents, automatically summarize Notion documents in link previews, and more. And coming soon, a brand new AI integration with Perplexity will allow users to subscribe to AI-powered insights and pipe them into Slack.

Pricing and availability:

• Slack AI is available now as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise plans.
• Slack AI is available now in U.S. and UK English only.
• Additional Slack plans and language support are coming soon.
• AI-powered partner apps are available now in the Slack App Directory.

Learn more:

• Get access to Slack AI
• Learn more about Slack AI
• Explore AI-powered partner apps in Slack
• Read about Slack’s 10th birthday

With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching next week, Salesforce released data on intriguing Canadian consumer insights. The data reveals a diverse range of ways that Canadians are spending, gifting and celebrating the big day of love this year. For example:

• The majority of Canadians (55%) are looking to celebrate over a romantic dinner at a restaurant, despite economic factors such as the price of food (41%) and dining (40%) weighing on respondents’ minds.
• In contrast, nearly one-third (29%) of the respondents want a quiet evening at home enjoying a more relaxed atmosphere. 

• 13% per cent want to spend Valentines Day with family, whereas 14% turn to friends for friendship and camaraderie
• Self-care also takes priority this Valentines Day with 13% wanting to indulge in self care services and 11% are celebrating by treating themselves. 
• With a vision to create lasting memories with loved ones, 10% of Canadians are looking forward to travel this Valentines Day
• Almost three-quarters of Canadians (74%) plan to buy a gift this year, with flowers (42%) and an evening out (40%) being the most gifted items planned for this year.

You can also access all the data here.

As we enter the final countdown to the festive period, Salesforce has shared a snapshot of post-Cyber Cyber Week momentum (Nov 29 – Dec 18) through data across commerce, marketing, and service from over 1.5 billion consumers shopping on retail sites:

• Canadian sales continue to grow YoY: Over this period, Canada bucked the trend and saw 5% YoY growth in online sales
  • Meanwhile, global online sales remained flat year-over-year.
• Retailers in for a ‘Return Tsunami’: The post-Cyber Week period saw a ‘returns tsunami’ globally. The percentage of returns more than doubled during the week following Cyber Week and has remained high since. 
  • As consumers become more discerning about discretionary spending, this increase in returns indicates the consumers may be thinking twice about their purchases and returning those that don’t provide the value they’re looking for.
  • Salesforce now predicts over US$131 billion in orders purchased this holiday season will be returned in the new year.
• BOPIS on the rise for last-minute shoppers: In addition, shoppers are turning to the benefits of Buy Online and Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) for convenience as they look to avoid in-store lines and shipping deadlines ahead of peak holidays. BOPIS accounted for 25% of online orders during the first three weeks of December.

Please find the full mid-December moment newsroom post that provides more details here.

Salesforce recently released the next iteration of its Generative AI Snapshot Research Series, The Promises and Pitfalls of AI at Work, surveying 14,000 global workers, including 1,020 in Canada, revealing that despite the promises generative AI holds, a lack of defined policies around its use may be putting Canadian businesses at risk.  

Key highlights from the research:

AI tools are penetrating the workplace without oversight 

• Over a quarter (25%) of Canadian professionals are currently using generative AI at work, and over half (58%) of these professionals are using AI without the approval of employers. 

Users are engaging in ethically questionable activities with AI due to ambiguous or non-existent workplace policies

• Over half of Canadians (54%) have passed off AI-generated content as their own, and another third (31%) would consider inflating AI skills to land a role. 
• However, the onus isn’t entirely on employees — just under a quarter of Canadian professionals (24%) have never completed or received training on how to safely and ethically use AI at work. 
• Certain industries lag behind more than others — for example, 83% of Canadian employees in the professional or business services industry claim their company lacks clear policies.
• In fact, over half (54%) Canadian professionals say their employer has little to no defined AI-use policies in the workplace.

Some Canadian data highlights are below, and more thorough Canadian and global insights at this link.

I’ve gotten a couple of phone calls from clients today who were and still are having issues getting to Salesforce. After a Quick Look at Down Detector, it seems that Salesforce has fallen down and can’t get up:

It appears that the issues started just before 8AM an are still ongoing. A trip to their status page seems to confirm that they have issues:

According to them, these issues have been ongoing for a couple of hours. And there is no ETA for resolution at this point. Seeing how pervasive Salesforce is within businesses big and small, let’s hope that this gets resolved quickly as any sort of Salesforce outage will result in a very bad day for many.

Salesforce’s annual Cyber Week Recap Report going live later this evening which analyzes shopping data from over one and a half billion shoppers globally.

Canadians played a game of ‘discount chicken’, patiently waiting for the best deals of the week – retailers experienced the biggest surge Saturday and Sunday as sales jumped 11% YoY. While Cyber Monday sales grew 4% YoY, as of 4 pm ET sales were still only showing 1% growth indicating last minute shopping into the evening hours.

Global online Cyber Week sales totalled US$298 billion, up 6% YoY from ($281 billion in 2022). Growth was driven primarily by order volume, rather than inflation, signaling increased consumer demand for the first time in over five quarters. 

Canadian Cyber Week Data (by day): 

• Friday: +2% YoY sales growth / 25% average discount
• Saturday + Sunday: +11% YoY sales growth / 26% average discount
• Monday (as of 4 p.m EST): +4% YoY sales growth / 25% average discount
• Cyber Week (Friday-Monday): +5% sales growth YoY

Global Cyber Week Insights: 

• AI wins over shoppers: AI influenced US$51 billion in online sales in areas including targeted offers, product recommendations, and generative AI-powered chat services.
• Consumers shopped mostly on mobile: Mobile phones accounted for a record-breaking 80% of Cyber Week ecommerce traffic, up from 76% in 2022. Given this, social traffic on mobile was a critical acquisition channel – representing 10% of all referrals to retailer websites.
• Discounts rose to meet pent-up demand: After lackluster deals earlier in the holiday season, discount rates rose to 27% globally on average throughout Cyber Week — representing the best deals of the holiday season. Verticals with the highest global discount rates were:
  • Makeup (38%)
  • General Apparel (33%)
  • Skincare (33%)
  • Active Apparel (32%)

You can view full global data available here. 

Here’s some Canadian Black Friday shopping results that came in just moments ago based on Salesforce’s global shopping data from more than 1.5 billion consumers, as well as a link to their holiday insights hub.

Canadian Black Friday Findings (as of 2 p.m. ET):

• Online sales are up 7% YoY globally but down 1% YoY in Canada.
  • In an interesting contrast, the US saw sales jump 16% driven primarily by order volume, rather than inflation, signaling increased consumer demand south of the border.
• Average order value declined YoY to $101.5 (down from $104.4 in 2022) and SKU count declined by 5% YoY as well. 
• Black Friday discounts remained flat YoY at 25%. 

Full Black Friday results will be shared this coming Monday morning, along with Cyber Monday predictions.

As we lead up to Cyber Week 2023, Salesforce has released its latest digital commerce data and predictions for the period.

Here are some of the headlines:

• According to Salesforce ecommerce data, early (Oct. 1–Nov.14) online holiday sales are up 2% year over year (YoY) in Canada. After a couple of years of experiencing inflation and other trends, consumers are shopping cautiously and making their own price comparisons.
• Canadian online traffic declines ahead of Cyber Week: Traffic dipped 3%, potentially due to shoppers waiting to maximize discounts or feeling the pinch of inflation, compared to the 5% growth seen globally YoY..
• Holiday shoppers walk before they run: Consumers browsed but held off on buying in the early holiday season. Product views grew by 1% in Canada compared to last year, but the low increase in sales growth (2%) indicates that consumers are waiting for the biggest and best deals of the season.

As a result, Salesforce predicts that:

• A slow start to holiday shopping will drive a high-volume Cyber Week: Similar to 2022, Cyber Week is anticipated to account for over 25% of all holiday purchases this year. While holiday shopping was spread out through all of November in 2020 and 2021, this year’s more price-conscious consumers are waiting to see what deals come their way on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Discount rates are expected to be attractive: As consumers wait for the biggest and best deals of the season, global discounts are likely to reach 29% globally. This is on par with pre-pandemic discount levels.
• Returns are likely to be low during Cyber Week and pick up in December: Only 7% of purchases are expected to be returned during Cyber Week, with thepeak of returns falling during Christmas and the days following (15%) as consumers race to return gifts they did not like before the return windows close.

For more data and predictions have a look at the holiday hub, which will be updated daily over Cyber Week.