Salesforce held its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, and to the surprise of no one, the Bay Area air was filled with news about AI.
With announcements covering the full range of the Salesforce universe, from Data Cloud to Service Cloud and everything in between, there was something for everyone in the revenue organization. But all the news makes it easy to lose track of what’s most important for marketers.
Three announcements in particular gave marketers a glimpse of what Salesforce sees as the future of marketing on its platform. If you’re a Salesforce customer, a potential customer, or if you want to keep tabs on whether your current tools and vendors are keeping pace with what Salesforce is up to, keep an eye on what’s next for these products.
Let’s start with Agentforce, the next generation of AI from Salesforce.
No. 1: Agentforce for Marketers
Salesforce refers to Agentforce collectively as “trusted AI agents” that unite generative and predictive AI. For marketers, Agentforce agents can analyze, generate, personalize and optimize campaigns based on defined business goals.
Agentforce for Marketing is the aptly named offering for marketers. Salesforce says it will save marketers time by making it easier to create end-to-end campaign experiences.
What, exactly, will Agentforce do for your marketing team?
Agentforce is not taking your job (not yet, anyway). It’s aiming to make your job easier. Those end-to-end campaign experiences are initiated by the marketer and carried out by the agent.
For example, the marketer will set predefined campaign goals and brand guidelines, then Agentforce Campaigns will help create an entire campaign, from generating a brief and identifying and developing target audience segments to generating the initial draft of emails and landing pages.
The AI agents can even build a customer journey in Salesforce Flow. And, of course, the AI will continuously analyze campaign performance and recommend optimizations based on KPIs.
Dig deeper: Salesforce launches new, ‘more trustworthy’ generation of AI bots
No. 2: Marketing Cloud Advanced
The second announcement sure to interest marketers is the news of Marketing Cloud Advanced, a new, as-yet-unreleased edition of Salesforce Marketing Cloud with advanced automation and AI capabilities. According to Salesforce, it will enable marketers to connect marketing journeys with sales, service and commerce workflows to personalize moments across the customer relationship.
Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition expands on the capabilities for SMBs that Salesforce included in Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. Compared to Growth Edition, Marketing Cloud Advanced includes (as the name implies) more advanced AI and automation capabilities.
Those advanced capabilities include personalizing campaigns across multiple languages with Agentforce, which will generate campaigns, briefs and emails in the customers’ preferred language.
Marketing Cloud Advanced will also allow marketers to automate tasks across teams with Flow. Marketing teams can collaborate with existing Flow automations, like sales lead routing or service requests, and test their journeys in real-time.
Finally, Marketing Cloud Advanced aims to improve customer relationships with unified conversations for SMS. Brands can bring together SMS conversations across Salesforce Marketing, Commerce and Service clouds, so customers can carry out two-way dialogue with a single SMS number.
Dig deeper: Salesforce rolls out new edition of Marketing Cloud for small businesses
No. 3: Einstein Marketing Intelligence
Before there was Agentforce, there was Einstein. While slightly overshadowed last week by all the Agentforce news, Salesforce continues to build more capabilities into Einstein.
Salesforce says Einstein Marketing Intelligence (EMI) gives marketers one place to manage and optimize cross-channel campaign performance with ready-to-use marketing insights and automated data harmonization, enrichment and visualization.
EMI helps marketers automate the often laborious task of data preparation, opening the door to faster decisions. It uses out-of-the-box, third-party connectors to ingest, transform and map first- and third-party data to improve data accuracy. It’s also capable of classifying new dimensions and identifying patterns, generating additional data for analysis.
EMI also plays a role in forecasting and optimizing campaign performance. It can forecast and track cross-channel campaign performance and ROI against goals like anonymous visits or closed revenue. It is capable of evaluating the health of marketing programs and adjusting spend in the moment to optimize performance with AI-generated campaign summaries, ready-to-use insights and out-of-the-box, marketing-specific Tableau analytics dashboards.
Takeaway: Salesforce wants marketers working with unified data
What lies beneath these three announcements is the need for accurate, timely customer data and metadata. For Salesforce, that’s the job of Data Cloud, which provides access to customer records across the business.
When the tech stack is poorly integrated and processes are lacking, it’s bad for marketers and customers. According to Salesforce’s own State of the Connected Customer report, 55% of customers feel like they generally engage with separate departments rather than one organization. The same report found only 57% of marketers can personalize content along the entire customer lifecycle — from awareness to onboarding to retention and ongoing support.
As with all the major platform vendors, Salesforce wants marketers to know all of this will come together nicely to deliver ROI and delight customers, especially if you’re all in on its platform.
If Salesforce can deliver on some of the promises above — like automating campaigns from creation to optimization — it will make a compelling case for marketers to do just that. But don’t expect the competition to sit still.
The AI arms race is intensifying.
