M+E Daily

Salesforce Exec: We’re at an ‘Inflection Point’ for Einstein Adoption

Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence technology continues to make major strides, Salesforce executives said Feb. 25 during an earnings call for the company’s fourth quarter (ended Jan. 31).

During the webcast, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also expressed optimism about the company’s new Salesforce Hyperforce platform architecture, announced Dec. 2, and the addition of the Slack enterprise communications platform through Salesforce’s planned acquisition of Slack Technologies, announced Dec. 1.

“I definitely view this year and this new pandemic world as an inflection point for the adoption of Einstein,” Bret Taylor, Salesforce president and COO, told analysts.

Broadly, I think we’re seeing just incredible secular trends towards digital,” Taylor said, noting he “heard a lot of CEOs just talk about” how the industry, during the pandemic, was  able to do in a year “what might have taken a decade before in terms of adoption of digital technology.”

And “when all of your customer and your partner and your employee interactions are digital, artificial intelligence and Einstein can make every single one of those engagements more personal,” Taylor noted.

Einstein is “now delivering more than 93 billion… AI-powered predictions every single day,” Benioff pointed out.

Benioff continued to be “excited with how Einstein has been received by our customers and also how we have deeply integrated it into all of our clouds,” he said. “It’s definitely a critical-enabling technology that has made everybody just a lot more productive,” he noted.

What’s more, “I’ve been surprised [that], while other companies have divested some aspects of artificial intelligence, we continue to see Einstein become the critical enabling capability and differentiation that we can offer key clouds,” Benioff said.

Hyperforce

The pandemic has “shifted us all into this work from anywhere world, but it’s just the beginning of a whole new era,” according to Benioff.

“And that’s why we’re so excited about what we have done and how we have transformed our own organization and our technology with Hyperforce,” he told analysts.

Calling Hyperforce a “fundamental new architecture” for Salesforce, he explained: “It lets us run on any hyperscaler. Hyperforce allows us to run anywhere, and that allows our customers to choose where they want to manage their data. That’s allowed us to open incredible new data centers in India and Germany, and we’re planning to support another 10 new additional countries this year… all built on this incredible new architecture. And it’s 100 percent compatible with all our previous implementations.”

Slack

Salesforce is already using Service Cloud with Slack to improve performance, Benioff pointed out. As a result, “we’ve seen a 26 percent improvement in case times and close rates and 19 percent improvement in same-day resolution,” he said.

That represents an example “where our acquisition of Slack has made so much sense,” he said, explaining: “We’ve seen the combination of products like Service Cloud and Slack together just make it so much better for us as a company or for our customers and we’re looking forward to doing so much more of that. Slack can be the central nervous system for any company connecting its people and data across systems apps and devices from anywhere. It’s really an enabler of success from anywhere.”

Once Salesforce’s purchase of Slack is approved, “we’re going to build Slack into more of these products that we have used today and conceptualize and make our customers even more productive,” Benioff said, adding: “We’re going to create the most open and interoperable ecosystem of apps and workflow and enterprise software.”

Q4 Results

Total Salesforce Q4 revenue grew 20% from a year earlier to $5.82 billion. Subscription and support revenue grew 20% to $5.48 billion, while professional services and other revenue grew 18% to $341 million.

The company also reported that it swung to a $267 million profit (28 cents a share).