The IT Nerd

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.

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.