Salesforce launches its first AI centre and accelerates with Aston Martin

Salesforce kicked off the UK leg of its annual tour yesterday with its UKI CEO Zahra Bahrololoumi revealing its first AI Centre in London would be used for customer and partner innovations and “critical upskilling opportunities.”

Last year, the US CRM giant – set to deliver $38bn worth of revenue this year – signalled its intention to invest $4bn in the UK to fuel AI innovation over the next five years.

With the UK AI market predicted to reach over $1 trillion by 2035, the firm said that the Salesforce’s AI Centre – which will be based at the Bluefin building near London’s Waterloo – has been designed to “foster collaboration by bringing together industry experts alongside providing critical upskilling opportunities.”

At a subsequent press conference, Bahrololoumi revealed that the 40,000 sq. ft space, which has eight collaboration rooms and the capacity to house 300 people, was a pilot that the company hopes to replicate in other territories.

“It will be a collaborative space to enable customers and partners to innovate…we do that anyway in our offices, but to have that dedicated space to talk AI and work on AI challenges and business challenges that we solve will be pivotal to our growth,” she added.

According to the CEO the centre, which is due to hold its first event on June 18,  would also be key to its upskilling opportunities.

“We made a commitment to skill 100,000 developers globally – for us to be able to launch that, and dedicated training and learning for 100 plus developers on day one, means that we’ll be able to start as we mean to go on.”

At this year’s UK tour, held at London’s Excel, more than 17,500 attendees gathered to learn about new Salesforce features and customer testimonies from the likes of Aston Martin and delivery service DPD.

According to the Salesforce senior VP UK Industries Justin Wilson, the firm’s research has found that over 80% of IT leaders said that one of their main AI pain points are data silos that hinder digital transformation.

Many of the firm’s announcements, therefore, were around deploying the kinds of tasks that enterprise AI has proven proficient at.

These include the sorting and contextualising of structured and unstructured data; creating a “single source of truth” and ensuring that different teams within the same organisation are unifying their data and operating under “a single pane of glass.”

What’s new?

New Salesforce products announced at the show include Data Cloud Vector Database, which claims to help businesses unify and unlock the power of the 90% of customer data that is trapped in PDFs, emails, transcripts, and other unstructured formats.

There was also a new product from Slack, the productivity platform that Salesforce acquired in 2021.

Slack Lists claims to enable users to eliminate context switching between apps so that teams can collaborate and stay aligned on cross-functional projects, requests, approvals.

Summaries and search have also now been supercharged with AI on Slack, making it easier for leaders to look at channel summaries and search for updates on projects via Slack channels.

Driving data insights

Trailblazing customer testimonials came from British car maker Aston Martin, which is using Salesforce’s revamped AI product, Einstein1, its analytics product Tableau and Slack for a data reunification project to transform its marketing and sales operations.

Aston Martin said that it could now visualise customer insights in one place, enabling employees to offer personalised support and experiences.

An opening keynote demo given by Salesforce architect at Aston Martin Kent Packman showed how the car firm is pulling in data from various sources including vehicle telematics and the customer’s social media feeds or preferred modes of communications, to formulate a better picture of their customers’ needs.

Predictive analytics powered by Salesforce’s Data Cloud, suggest the next step sales staff need to take in terms of engagement.

This data can also potentially be shared externally with dealerships to help tailor communications and offers to individual customers based on preferences and purchase history.