The Gist

• AI innovation. Salesforce introduces Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT.
• Boosting marketing, enhancing ecommerce. Salesforce unveils new AI tools to boost customer personalization and interaction and enhance personalized shopping experiences.
• Google partnership. Salesforce collaborates with Google Cloud to bolster AI tools.

During its annual Connections event yesterday, Salesforce unveiled a duo of new, innovative AI-powered tools designed with marketers in mind — Marketing GPT, which leverages generative AI to craft customized campaigns, and Commerce GPT, aimed at assisting brands in providing highly personalized shopping experiences.

“Businesses are looking to harness new AI advances and tap into vast troves of data to deliver personalized customer experiences across every interaction,” David Schmaier, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, said in a statement. “Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT — fueled by trusted and harmonized first-party data — will revolutionize how businesses interact with customers and at the same time dramatically improve employee productivity.” 

Marketing GPT Unleashes AI to Boost Engagement 

Backed by first-party data from Salesforce’s Data Cloud, company officials say Marketing GPT will provide an array of tools designed to streamline and enhance marketer’s work, including the ability to automatically generate personalized emails and create smarter audience segments making marketing journeys more targeted and effective. And by using natural language prompts and AI-driven recommendations, a feature called Segment Creation, is poised to generate audience segments and improve targeting.

Marketing GPT also comes equipped with Segment Intelligence for Data Cloud, to connect first-party data, revenue data and third-party paid media data, in an effort to provide a more comprehensive view of audience engagement. The platform also ensures accurate delivery of “the right message at the right time” with features like Rapid Identity Resolution and Segmentation and Engagement. To top it off, it integrates with Typeface’s generative AI content platform, enabling the creation of contextual visual assets for multi-channel campaigns that align with specific brand voice, style guides and messaging.

Related Article: Salesforce Brings Conversational AI to Work With Launch of Slack GPT

Ecommerce Gets a Facelift: Salesforce’s Commerce GPT Brings AI to the Forefront

Salesforce describes Commerce GPT as a tool designed to enhance commerce experiences by using real-time data from the Data Cloud to generate insights and recommendations automatically, allowing brands to customize each step of the buyer’s journey. One of the tool’s key features, Goals-Based Commerce, is intended to help businesses set and pursue targets while receiving actionable insights and proactive recommendations, effectively guiding them toward their desired outcomes. While another feature, Dynamic Product Descriptions, is designed to fill in missing catalog data automatically and generate product descriptions tailored to each buyer.

Further, Commerce Concierge provides a feature that aims to transform shopping and loyalty programs by facilitating personalized conversations and working to assist shoppers in discovering products through natural language interactions across various channels.

While Data Cloud for Commerce is available now, other features will enter into a testing phase over the summer and become generally available by Oct. 2023 — with the exception of the Email Content Creation and Goals-Based Commerce features, that are set for a public launch in February 2024.

Related Article: The Salesforce Data Fiasco: Some Public Sites Exposing Sensitive Information

Salesforce and Google Cloud Deepen Ties to Boost AI-Powered Marketing

Salesforce also announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud in order to leverage its capabilities within its new AI-powered tools and “reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of synchronizing data across platforms.”

First, Salesforce aims to streamline data access for users by integrating with Google’s BigQuery, a serverless enterprise data warehouse — in a move that it’s hoped will emulate the experience of having data in a single location across various platforms and clouds, and eliminating the need for data copying or extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) processes. It’s an approach that could potentially reduce costs, minimize complexity and enhance trust.

Additionally, a new integration linking Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI will enable customers to import their own Vertex models and deploy them across the Salesforce Platform. Company officials say this will allow businesses to target their unique needs, such as forecasting customer purchasing habits or predicting churn rates, using their Salesforce Customer 360 data. The company officials say the benefit of zero-copy data access during AI model training is twofold: It not only optimizes a company’s AI investment by enabling immediate access to unified customer data but also improves the model development process, ultimately enhancing the precision and effectiveness of AI-driven predictions and insights.

“AI and data are revolutionizing the way businesses operate and innovate, and together Salesforce and Google are empowering organizations to unlock the full potential of their trusted data, put AI insights into action, and personalize customer experiences like never before,” Schmaier said in a statement. “This partnership paves the way for unprecedented innovation and business value for our customers.”

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