The IT Nerd

Here’s some Cyber Week Predictions from Salesforce about how AI is on track to influence up to 19% of Cyber Week orders and why retailers should leverage AI-powered customer service to beat their competition.

With AI expected to drive over $61B in sales, Salesforce’s data shows AI-powered agents have the potential to be the ultimate holiday helper, assisting customers to find exactly what they’re looking for and supporting retailers by offering personalized, fast, and efficient service.

AI is critical for retailers to drive conversion during this pivotal shopping season. The Salesforce Shopping Index indicates that retailers using generative AI and agents have increased their Average Order Value (AOV) by 7% compared to those not using it ($117 vs. $109).

Below is an overview of Salesforce’s Cyber Week 2024 predictions.

• Global sales to climb: Cyber Week sales are expected to reach $311B worldwide, accounting for 23% of all holiday purchases in 2024. 
• This year, Canada can anticipate 7% expected Cyber Week Growth.
• AI grows opportunity for greater wallet share: AI and agents will likely influence 19% of Cyber Week orders, accounting for $61B in global sales.

• AI has already contributed 17% of global purchases in the last seven weeks.
• Consumers embrace AI agents for faster customer service: Retailers who have invested in AI-powered service agents have seen growth in their customer service engagement double compared to those who have not invested in AI-powered agents.
• Discount rates are expected to be attractive: Average discounts will likely peak at 28% globally and 27% for Canada, fueling 5% YoY global sales growth. 
• Top discounts rates globally are expected in: Beauty & Makeup – 38% |  Skincare – 33% | General Apparel – 33%|
• Mobile takes over: Mobile orders will make up 70% of sales, driven by better on-the-go experiences in recent years, and presenting a new sales opportunity with AI agents on mobile messaging apps.

As well, in response to a critical skills gap in the workforce, Salesforce is launching a $50 million initiative to provide free AI training and certifications through its Trailhead platform – including pop-up AI centres for in-person community AI training – until the end of 2025.

Why This Matters:

Recent research from Slack reveals that the urgency for incorporating AI into business operations has surged 7x in the past six months, surpassing concerns about inflation and the broader economy. Yet, over two-thirds of workers still lack experience with AI technology, and only 15% feel adequately trained to use it effectively. Accessibility of impactful training is needed to ensure all workers are able to harness the power of AI.

Salesforce’s Response:

• Free AI Training: Salesforce is offering its premium AI courses and certifications at no cost to help bridge this skills gap.
• New Learning Centers: A pop-up AI Center will debut at Salesforce’s San Francisco headquarters, with additional centers planned for global cities including London, Chicago, Tokyo, and Sydney.
• Employee Upskilling: The company will also introduce global AI learning days and establish the AI Knowledge Center in San Francisco to enhance the skills of its 72,000 employees.

This initiative is designed to ensure that individuals and businesses are prepared for the rapidly evolving AI landscape. For more details please find the full announcement here.

Today at its annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce continued to roll out news about its revolutionary Agentforce platform – announced last week. It kicked off Day 1 with significant partnership announcements with Google and IBM to introduce its new Agentforce Partner Network and expand its partner ecosystem.

• Salesforce Agentforce Partner Network Launch: A global ecosystem allowing customers to enhance their AI agents with third-party actions and templates from major partners like AWS, Google Cloud, and IBM. This network enables easy installation of specialized agents and actions through Salesforce AppExchange, allowing customization and deployment for various industry-specific needs and complex tasks.

• Salesforce and Google Cloud Expansion: The partnership integrating Salesforce Customer 360 with Google Workspace apps. This will allow seamless deployment of autonomous agents capable of interacting across both platforms while ensuring strong privacy and data protection. These new features will be available later this year and include the ability for agents to act on data from Google BigQuery using Zero Copy technology.

• Salesforce and IBM Collaboration: Salesforce and IBM are expanding their partnership to focus on AI-driven sales and service transformations, especially for regulated industries. IBM will integrate its watsonx Orchestrate with Salesforce Agentforce, creating pre-built agents that leverage IBM’s Granite models. These agents will help automate various business processes and support Salesforce Data Cloud integration, offering new AI-driven solutions for sales, banking, manufacturing, and telecom sectors.

Salesforce also announced that it has expanded its Data Cloud with new features, including processing of audio and video content, a standardized data model, enhanced search, real-time data activation, and improved security. These updates enhance Agentforce Agents and introduce the Datablazers Community for sharing data best practices.

To answer the need for a better, more efficient way for teams to work together, Slack is releasing new AI enhancements set to improve team collaboration and data integration.

These enhancements follow a recent report from Salesforce which highlighted that Slack AI integrations saved50,000 hours of work in just one quarter. With the innovations announced today, customers can centralize everything they need to get work done more efficiently.

Key innovations include:

• Agentforce in Slack: With a new user interface (UI) for agents, teams can now talk to their data, surface insights, and take action on tasks in Slack with Salesforce’s Agentforce Agents.
• Third-party AI agents: AI agents and assistants from partners like Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and more can be deployed in the same trusted, secure environment in Slack.
• Salesforce channels: A new type of channel that connects Salesforce CRM records to channel-based conversations in Slack gives teams a comprehensive space to collaborate on every account and opportunity, increasing alignment to move work forward. Coming soon, Salesforce channels will be embedded in the Salesforce user interface.

New enhancements in Slack also include purpose-built AI functionality across search and automation as well as new solutions-based templates to unlock productivity for every use case and line of business. 

• New Slack AI features: Enhanced capabilities like huddle notes, simplified automation, and improved search allow teams to work smarter, faster, and with greater focus.
• Slack templates: Collections of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows make work in any department and for any task faster and more productive.
• AI Workflow Builder: Generates workflows with simple conversational prompts so users can easily automate their tasks.

Availability: 

• Third-party agents are available now in the Slack Marketplace, with more coming soon.
• Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot) in Slack will be available in beta in October 2024.
• Slack AI is available now as a paid add-on for all paid Slack plans.
• Salesforce channels are available to Slack Sales Elevate customers now and will be included in Salesforce Starter Suite in the coming months.
• Slack templates will be available in October 2024.

Explore more:

• Read more about Slack product innovations at Dreamforce

Recently, Salesforce found an estimated 41% of employee time being spent on repetitive, low-impact work. 

To answer this, Salesforce has launched its new autonomous agent platform, Agentforce, providing relief to overstretched teams. 

In contrast to now-outdated copilots and chatbots that rely on human inputs and struggle with complex tasks, Agentforce offers a new level of sophistication by operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention. Like a self-driving car, Agentforce uses real-time data to adapt to changing conditions and operates independently within an organizations’ customized guardrails. 

Why Agentforce is a Game-Changer:

• Autonomous Operation: Unlike traditional tools, Agentforce’s AI agents work 24/7 with full autonomy, delivering precise and immediate responses without needing human input.
• User-Friendly Deployment: Deploy advanced AI agents swiftly with low-code functionality, using pre-built templates and natural language commands—no technical expertise required.
• Seamless Data Integration: Agentforce integrates smoothly with existing company and customer data, including systems like Workday, ensuring agents have the relevant information to drive success.
• Operational Scale: By blending AI, data, and action, Agentforce brings massive operational scale and transforms workflows across every industry, role, and department.

Agentforce for Service will be generally available on October 25, 2024. Some components of the Atlas Reasoning Engine launch in February 2025. Agentforce pricing starts at $2 per conversation; standard volume discounts apply.

Explore Agentforce.com here.

Slack’s new Workforce Lab research explores what motivates workers to use AI and how they feel about using it at work. Through in-depth interviews and a survey of 5,000 full-time desk workers, the research uncovered five distinct AI personas that employers need to understand as they implement AI and bring workers onboard “The AI Team” — a workplace where humans and AI agents work successfully side-by-side:

• 🥰 The Maximalist (30%): Maximalists are using AI multiple times a week to improve their work and are shouting from the rooftops about it.
• 🤫 The Underground (20%): Undergrounds are Maximalists in disguise, using AI often but hesitant to share with their colleagues that they are doing so.
• 😎 The Rebel (19%): Rebels don’t subscribe to the AI hype. They avoid using AI and consider it unfair when coworkers engage with these tools.
• 🤩 The Superfan (16%): Superfans are excited and admire the advances made in AI, but aren’t yet making the most use out of it at work.
• 🧐 The Observer (16%): Observers have yet to integrate AI into their work. They are watching with interest and caution.

Last week Salesforce also announced Career Connect it’s  new internal talent marketplace that helps employees gain new experiences and skills, encourage internal mobility, and retain top talent. The marketplace is powered by AI and helps employees create tailor-made career paths customized to their skills and aspirations. 

Nobody chooses a career in sales because they love paperwork, however, recent Salesforce research found that Canadian reps spend 70% of their time on administrative tasks vs. only 29% of their time actually selling. Even more discouraging is that  67% of Canadian reps don’t expect to meet their sales quota this year, and 84% missed it last year. 

In industries where the productivity imperative is high. Ensuring reps are freed up to secure leads, deepen customer relationships and help clients with their needs is critical to the individual rep and company success.

The good news is that autonomous AI agents are poised to help solve these issues – and according to Salesforce’s Sales Cloud EVP + GM, Ketan Karkhanis, even “unleash a productivity supercycle” when used to augment human thinking.

This week Salesforce launched two new fully autonomous AI Agents -to help sales teams accelerate growth:  

• Einstein SDR Agent: autonomously engages with inbound prospects to nurture pipeline 24/7 and unlike regular chatbots that can only answer specific programmed questions, analyzes a prospect’s question to autonomously determine what to do next (i.e. handling objections). 
• Einstein Coach Agent: coaches sellers by autonomously facilitating role-plays, tailored to each deal, providing personalized and objective feedback afterward.

More details can be found in the newsroom post here.

Amazon reported its biggest sales this year via Prime Day. Here’s some key Canadian and global data which provides a snapshot based on the activity of 1.5 billion shoppers globally across Commerce Cloud and other Salesforce products.

Canadian data shows:

• Discount rates (averaging at 27% off) were much more enticing this year compared to last year’s Prime Day with Canadian retailers increasing discount usage by 11%
• Sales for non-Amazon retailers in Canada grew by 8% YoY
• Canadian retailers witnessed consumers buying more units per transaction YOY (4.7% compared to 4.2 in 2023)
• Canadian web traffic grew by 5% YoY (compared to +2% globally), while order growth shows an increase of 6% (higher than the flat 0% growth globally) 
• Add to cart value (19%), conversion rate (2.5%) and cart abandonment rate (87%) for Canada remains stable YOY
• Social traffic grew by 1% YOY (11% compared to 10% in 2023)

Global data shows: 

• Global web traffic has grown +2% YoY
• Top performing verticals (for sales growth) are:
• Health & Beauty including makeup, skincare and haircare (+16%)

• Makeup +30%
• Skincare +14%
• other health & beauty +14%

• Active Footwear (+12%)
• General Footwear (+8%)
• Highest discounted categories for Prime Day 1+2 combined globally are:

• General Apparel 28% 
• Beauty, Makeup 28% (a jump of 7% from last year)
• Beauty, Skincare 22%
• Home, Furniture 22%

This data was provided by Salesforce.

The 2024 Q1 Shopping Index by Salesforce analyzes the activity and online shopping statistics of more than 1.5 billion unique global shoppers from more than 67 countries.

On the heels of rising inflation numbers in Canada, the index found that consumers remain cautious and are pulling back on spending. While digital commerce overall grew 2%, Salesforce data shows a decline in per-visit average spend of $2.02 (down from $2.40 in the last quarter), and a drop-in conversion rate to 1.8% (down from 2.3% last quarter).

Here’s the link to the full Q1 Shopping Index along with a blog post with additional insights. 

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.