Automotive Keynote | AI with Data to Boost Loyalty and Unlock Revenue | Dreamforce 2024

Please welcome GM and SVP manufacturing and automotive salesforce, Ashut Jaju and area Vice president, Automotive Salesforce, Brett Barringer.

How are you?

How are you?

Good.

Good afternoon automotive and trucking trailblazers. Welcome to the watch parties going on around the globe. Warren, Michigan, Detroit, Michigan, Dearborn, Michigan, London, throughout Asia. Welcome to opening day Ashut. You've had a jam packed year. Your team has delivered hundreds of innovations, hundreds of innovations out there. You've traveled the globe, you've been to Bangalore, you've been throughout Tokyo and world tours throughout Europe and of course with many of our US customers. How excited are you to be here today?

Well, Brett, first of all, what an amazing keynote by Mark this morning. He really laid out this vision for AgentForce that we have. I'm super excited about talking about Agent Force for Automotive, how we are going to bring this platform for you automotive customers. We've got music also for you. Yes.

We're kind of a DJ duo up here. So first I'm super pumped to say thank you. Thank you to our amazing customers who sometimes have to challenge us every day to be better. Thank you to our employees, our engineers, our technical architects, our customer service support teams. Thank you for all you do to ensure success. And of course, thank you to our partners who help deliver success every single day.

Well, I also want to thank all of you in the room. There you go. Thank you.

Yes.

And thanks to those of you on Salesforce watching this. We're super excited as we said. Well, Brett, you've been in automotive for a long time. First as is vehicle development and powertrain leader and the last 13 years at Salesforce. What are you hearing from our customers?

So should I have been in auto a long time now? And I remember the biggest change in automotive was when hydrogen engines were going to be finding their way in the cars. But today we have so many changes happening simultaneously, it's crazy. Every day there's a new change, but a lot of it is around data. And it's not just the data from our mainframe systems and our legacy systems. It's these connected assets that are coming at hyperscale. And these assets are very, very smart. They're very, very intelligent. So we're creating a tremendous amount of data that our customers are really trying to grapple with. And on top of that, if you step back and say like we've seen before consumer experiences and the apps that they use change our business apps. So things like Genai and ChatGPT, like quick show of hands, two years ago, how many people had ChatGPT on their phones. Today, probably everyone in the audience is going to have ChatGPT on their phones. Well, I'm trying to figure out my new revenue streams, my new support streams, but what do these things do to my business applications? This is what I'm hearing from our customers.

Well, I see this, I see this all the time. And not only that, for the last five years we have heard a lot of other things, which is like electric vehicles, software driven vehicles, and also many of you playing and grappling with these new retail models. Do we want to go to market with dealers, agencies or direct to consumer? There's a lot that's coming at this industry.

Yeah, absolutely. And just to build on that, every time I'm talking to customers now, it's not just AI, it's I've got a contact center advisor. How is your AI going to help that advisor? What is that little chunk of AI that they can use to improve their life? If, you know I'm a marketing analyst or a marketer, what is that little bit of AI to help me get that campaign launched to drive loyalty?

Well, Brett, what you're talking about is it's that time to take action. How do I really meet customers and dealers where they are? That's what many of our customers are asking about. Second, how do we continue to maintain loyalty and retention? How do we maintain customer retention? Third, the days of just single sale of a vehicle are over. How do we continue to get more value out of the vehicle as it becomes software driven? How do we sell more services and other things like that? Third, we talked about the retail models. What else, Brett?

Well, we're talking about these connected vehicles and these hyper intelligent vehicles. But our OEMs are already starting to struggle, right? They're spending more than a billion dollars per year already on the connected vehicle. We can't maintain this space. It's not sustainable.

Well, Brett, it's a huge challenge.

Yeah. So when we start to think about that connected vehicle and then pivoting to what our customers are going to need, they're already overwhelmed. Whether you're that contact center advisor, that marketer, that dealer salesperson, you know, we're not dealing with an issue of not having the data. We've got a ton of rich data. But what is it? It's trapped. It's trapped in legacy systems, it's trapped in that old collections mainframe application. It's even in the new data lakes that are out there. It's trapped. And you know, when I talk to a contact center advisor, they're not saying, hey, Brett, you know what? I logged into Snowflake, I had the insight from Snowflake and I solved a customer challenge. When I talk to a dealer salesperson, they don't say, hey, I was able to get my customer finance because I logged into databricks and I found that insight that could get them approved. So this is what we're dealing with.

Well, you're right. The stakeholders and customers here expect more. This is a very complex ecosystem. Automotive is very, very complex. Every one of these players who touch the customer have very different needs dealers expect. How did this lead come in? What online configurations did the customer work with? What financial offers can I put in front of them? Second is like these contact center agents, the sales service and marketing departments of the OEMs, they really want to reach directly to consumers where they are through WhatsApp or SMS or any other messaging platform. Third is captive finance companies here want to make sure that they can handle a customer all the way from a loan to servicing, to remarketing leads and remarketing. So how do we do that? Fourth, connected services teams the. They want to launch new products and services within the point of vehicle interaction so that they can keep those customers engaged. Really what we are talking about here is customers want, no matter where they are, a seamless, personalized engagement.

Exactly. And what we're finding is, you know, I think you've done a great job summarizing all those needs. Auto is really different. It's a very unique industry, the trucking industry, very, very unique. You know, as a consumer, I don't look at my dealer and the OEM is different.

Right.

If I'm a trucking oem, I have to deal with fleet operators and distribution in a whole new way. So I think you hit it on the head. We're really, really unique in our industry. Then we talked about all that data, how that data is growing. The only way we're going to make sense of it is to leverage AI in a whole new way to deliver that personalization. And then as you think about the new products and services that you describe, it's no longer good enough just to know who the consumer or the owner of the vehicle is. You have to know the whole household who's interacting with that vehicle. You don't just need to know about that vehicle as built, you need to know how it is driven. You need to know what it's interacting with. And then lastly, you need to know all about the financial information that's out there. So it sounds like what we're talking about is this common integrated customer operation platform. What are we talking about? When we think about the automotive landscape, are we gonna have to cobble together all this data, all this AI, all the CRM and business apps, dealer management stuff, how are we thinking about this?

Well, thankfully you guys all saw what we have done with Salesforce. We've innovated this company. You saw this morning, we talked about this for 25 years. We've built this into a customer operations platform. Now we have taken this platform, made it ready for AI. This is this low code, no code platform which really helps you get closer to the customers. Really what we wanna talk is, Brett, how we have taken this platform and made it for automotive. Every layer of this platform, we have turned it into automotive specific. So let me just unpack this. First of all, at the platform layer, right, we give you automation tools and integration tools so that you can bring in data and process the data at scale. Second, in data cloud, we have built very specific capabilities like vehicle, vehicle telemetry, financial account, all of this household data so that you can really bring in all of this information and do that personalization, one to one segmented personalization. Through the insights that you generate in data cloud, you've seen amazing things data cloud can do. We have made it specific for automotive. Third, we built this automotive cloud, the CRM, wherein you can maintain the customer, the vehicle, the fleet, the household, the dealer, financial, all these relationships and the processes that we build. And then finally, because this is all running on the same platform, same single metadata, single database, single low code, no code. Now we can run agents, we can run, let these agents go wild. And that's what is super exciting about this, how we are layering all of this thing into Salesforce platform for you, the audience in this room.

Wow. Like I started off, I've never been more excited to be part of the mission that we're on here. What you're describing here is the speed, the value that we can deliver by bringing in apps and processes that our customers use every single day. Right? You're bringing in a whole new suite of developer tools to help reduce the amount of technical debt, to reduce the amount of customizations our customers have to go through so they can really get that nirvana state of a lower total cost of ownership. And you got all that value in there today. But are you guys sitting around waiting? What are we doing next?

Well, that is what is exciting about this. We listen to you all. Many of you remember three years ago we announced Automotive Cloud. Since then, we have been on this journey. We listened to our early trailblazers who adopted this. We listened through product advisory councils, through the partners in this room and all of you and essentially have built this amazing platform and you can see we do the same three release roadmap and there's a ton of new stuff that we have built into this and really what we are excited about talking is what we are bringing to market this year. So we talked about software defined vehicles, we talked about connected vehicles. Well we are really excited about talking about this net new innovation that we are delivering which is where we bring vehicle data and customer data to life so that you can deliver these groundbreaking new experiences. Let's roll the video.

And now you can connect with every driver. The future of transportation is personalized in car interactions, real time vehicle diagnostics, over the air updates, brand new revenue. Say hello to the connected vehicle auto innovation fueled by Salesforce.

Thanks a lot Akshut and Brett for that insightful conversation. Quick introduction about myself. I'm Yjayant mk, part of Salesforce Industries Product Management Automotive Cloud. Our commitment to continuous innovation continues. Powered by data, AI, CRM and most importantly trust. Let me take this opportunity to introduce Connected Vehicle. Now imagine the world where the vehicle data, customer data that is driver data and everything else around automotive ecosystem are not residing in silos but all of them together can be ingested, monitored and act upon to take some actions. Powered by AI and that's connected Vehicle for you. Let me unravel some of the features what we are delivering in this Dreamforce. The first one is around Action Event framework. What does it mean now Obviously we wanted to decouple the noise and signals in the sense the telemetry data coming from the vehicle. We just wanted to take that events which are business oriented and then get into the Salesforce platform so that you can see RM actions can be taken for the proactive service maintenance as well as some of the cross sell and upsell. And this is where the actionable event framework will come in wherein declaratively you can define the events and then map it to the right CRM actions. The second one is around the real time vehicle status monitoring. Now this is important in multiple ways and I'm sure you know it better. Whether it is looking at the data around the vehicle and the driver, whether it is the battery consumption, the fuel status, temperature controls and more importantly any other key performance indicators. Now all these things can be now viewed and visualized in automotive cloud in real time embedded in the flow of the work, not just that the third one is the remote action framework. Now this is extremely critical. Just take an example. When there is a trouble code or a fault code coming from the vehicle, an unfortunate incident happens on the roadside events. Now isn't it important for the service executive to take some action right away? Let me take an example. The door lock and unlock or the temperature controls. So this is where the remote action framework comes in. Again a declarative no code, low code where you can define bidirectional where the telemetry data, the connected app in the car and the salesforce automotive cloud can talk to each other in a seamlessly. But at the most important thing is in a trusted and compliant environment. And finally the data visualization. It's extremely important in the sense all these about three together. But having the customer data and the vehicle data together and giving the holistic view in a way that the sales and service reps can take insightful actions Right within data cloud and Automotive cloud is where you will see this connected vehicle completely in action. Now we know that all of you have the telemetry data and most of you have probably are working on the platforms AWS and Qualcomm and others. So let me reiterate. While we can bring in the vehicle data from any platform from anywhere into Automotive cloud thanks to our strategic partnership with partners like AWS and Qualcomm, now we have made it simpler for you. So for those of you who are already on AWS and Qualcomm now it's seamlessly you can integrate the data into the automotive cloud and then take the right actions. Now our partners out here, AWS and Qualcomm, I'm sure they are there in this audience. I just wanted to ensure that. Thanks a lot for your collaboration. Our deepest gratitude. Big applause for them. It couldn't have been a complete application without your help. Now let's see the product in action. We'll see whatever I spoke about completely in action out there. And let me invite my colleagues Devon and Eric to showcase some of the amazing demos. Thank you.

Thank you, Vijay. And thank you also to our demo driver, Eric and to our entire automotive engineering team for bringing this solution to life. I'm particularly excited to talk to you all today because this is the year that I finally joined the connected car club. I finally upgraded my car to something with an actual tablet driver assist and a backup cam. It's made my driving experience so much better. And who doesn't want a better driving experience? Now it's estimated that by the year 2030 95% of vehicles on the road will be connected and every single one of those vehicles will be producing 25 gigabytes of data per hour. That's like if every car on the road was creating 75 hours of Netflix content every hour. It's a lot of data. And that's the challenge. In the past, it's been incredibly hard to bring that kind of information into your Salesforce platform, your single source of truth for customer data. But not anymore. With Automotive Cloud, you can create a driver 360 that unifies customer data with vehicle data. That's why we created vehicle insights that can be viewed directly within Salesforce. With vehicle data visualizations, you have the visibility around vehicle performance, health and performance. And that's in the same place that you manage the rest of your customer activities. This means that this is handy for customer facing teams, empowering them to make more compelling offers and serve customers more effectively during troubleshooting sessions. For example, now that I have odometer data in Salesforce, I can see a recommendation that is looking at that odometer reading and making a suggestion that I offer this customer coverages for higher mileage driving. And you have so much flexibility about how you get this kind of data into Salesforce. You can use data cloud, you can use our zero copy partner network, you can use a data lake of your choice. It's up to you. We can bring in that data from anywhere. And you want to have this data in Salesforce because when you do, it powers marketing and segmentation efforts. Using our automotive data kits, you can create customer segments based off of this vehicle data. So you'd be able to take all of your customers that are approaching 100,000 miles in driving and offer them recommendations for service and drive them to authorized service centers. These are the types of capabilities that automotive companies need to drive additional revenue through cross selling and offering proactive monitoring services. And speaking of proactive monitoring services, at the same time that we're able to visualize insights, we can take action on them as well. We're able to look at this thing like an alert that's coming in from this vehicle. And I'm seeing this alert because I'm receiving a reading from telemetry that is outside of the parameters as what has been defined as normal for this vehicle. Using our actionable event framework, we're able to listen to diagnostic data and we're able to coordinate the right service actions downstream. We can create work, we can assign work, and we can even trigger messages to customers. Let's take a Look at what's happening behind the scenes. For this alert, using our events framework, we can listen to telemetry readings and we can use our criteria that lets us know when we want to take action and formulate a response. And using our pre built integrations that are powered by MuleSoft and leveraging our partnerships with Qualcomm and AWS, you can get started leveraging the benefits of a connected vehicle and even quicker. And you don't even have to bring in all that data to Salesforce. You can simply listen and take action on the most important items. With actionable event responses, we're able to improve your orchestration around customer issues, allowing you to get started on solving a problem before a customer even realizes that it's happening. So not only are we able to listen to these events and take action and visualize the data, we're also able to perform actions on vehicles remotely. So if I am a service rep that wants to help push out a resolution for this fault code, I can simply issue an upgrade right from the desktop. This is going to improve case resolution, time decrease asset downtime and overall improve customer satisfaction. As we all know, all this data is ripe for summarization and prediction. So what we're able to do when we use connected data with your customer applications, it's going to increase your ability to automate, query and analyze this type of information. Using our embedded agent, I can create a briefing so that teams can get up to speed quickly on what's going on with this vehicle. I can even surface this summarization in a customer facing experience, giving customers insights into how their vehicles are performing. And that's how we can create connected data using automotive cloud that unifies customer experience with vehicle data. Empowering better experiences online and in the car. Over to you Ashut.

Fantastic demo. Well, we've been seeing this amazing innovation. Before we get into the next set of innovations, I wanted to invite one of our trailblazer customers from all the way from India, Bhuvan Loda. Bhuvan, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. First of all, many in the audience would not know who Mahindra Group is. Why don't you just walk us through the group and then also your role there.

Absolutely. So Mahindra Group is one of the largest business houses headquartered in India, present in over 100 countries. We operate across a diverse set of businesses including automotive of course. We are one of the largest SUV players in India. We also have tractor business, agriculture, rural financing, timeshare holidays. We have largest 3 PL logistics provider in India. We also have franchisees for pre owned showrooms and so on. So a large and very diverse set of businesses that we run in the Mahindra Group. The Mahindra Group also apart from all the businesses, stands for our motto which we call together, we rise. And there are three pillars for rise as we call it. One, Rise to be future ready. Two, rise to create an equal environment and three, rise to create value. So this means we do good, we do well and we become future ready. So we continue to do good and do well.

Great. That aligns very well with Salesforce's value. As I'm listening to you but what specifically do you do there? Bhuan?

So until about two weeks back I was heading up all digital and technology initiatives for our automotive business. And as of this month I have taken up a new role which is to lead all the AI work for the entire group. So there is a new setup that we've created to consolidate all the AI work that happens across our businesses and create value as well as new experiences for our customers for our products and services across the group. So I'm moving in as the CEO of the business.

Awesome. Congratulations on that. We'll talk about that. We're going to first talk about your journey with Salesforce. You've been a customer for six, seven years. You use a lot of like Salesforce platform that we just talked about. Why don't you share with the audience like your journey, what all you've done, how you've gotten closer to your customers and dealers.

Thank you Archit. We've been on the Salesforce platform. I think we actually started the journey about six years back like you said. And we started small. We started by seeing what's possible, what works, what doesn't work. We had to take a few pivots but as we speak right now we are wall to wall Salesforce at least on the customer experience side of things. And now we're evaluating how we can get on the automotive cloud as well on the customer side of things. We started of course with the platform and the sales cloud, marketing cloud. Now we have service cloud as well, we have data cloud and of course interaction Studio and commerce is now powering all of our web channels, et cetera. So there is a single pane of glass that we've built to create a single view and a golden record for every customer that comes across all of our channels. All the way from being a lead to an inquiry to taking a test drive, making a booking or then driving the car. And coming back to our dealerships for repairs and services. So that's been a journey and a big shout out to the Salesforce team that's been helping us doing that. My team back in India, Vikas Santi Gauri and team Bhavind, et cetera and we've come a long way now we are looking at what's possible and I'm so glad I'm here in my new role seeing this. Dreamforce is all about AI and how agents are going to create the next wave of what's possible for our customers to experience, our employees to experience and so on. A lot of use cases come to mind.

Well that's where as you see this, we talked about software defined vehicles and AI. What gets you excited about your new role and the the things that we are doing here at Salesforce and the partnership.

So Achit, AI is going to take center stage. I think it's that moment where the hype cycle is curving towards the plateau of productivity and we are now going to see real AI deployments at scale. Over the last couple of years, like everybody else, we've been doing a bunch of experiments. We've summarized emails, we've summarized our call center calls, we used LLMs to give follow up summaries and all sorts of things. Right. We've done a lot of experiments but now the time has come to use AI where we can make needle moving impact at scale which actually matters to our business and to our customers with the agent force that we saw in the morning. Beautiful and amazing keynote by the way, in the morning and I'm looking forward to visiting one of the booths to see how I can build an agent by end of the day. But with agents there's so much that comes to mind which can be done now. Achit, imagine how we deliver service experience to our customers. Imagine an agent calling a customer or chatting with a customer. Understanding what the customer preferences are from our data cloud 360 and figuring out when the customer should be called. Talking to another agent which is churning all the connected car data and predicting when the car could be due for service. Making another agent go and book a service for the customer based on the time when the customer wants the service to be done all day. Another agent could actually be looking at the status of how the car is being driven, what parts might be required when the car actually comes to the service and actually ordering the part informing the dealer to make sure that happens. And a fifth agent might be just following up with the customer to make sure that the customer actually shows up for the service. All this can now be done in an orchestrated way where agents can talk to each other and get this done for customers without three or four people talking to customers and trying to weave an experience which we used to unlimited possibilities.

I'm still thinking, yeah, you've got a great vision. Hopefully we can partner together on this vision and bring this together and you can share this audience next year or in another year or so.

Looking forward.

Appreciate it. Thanks Bhuvan for the time.

Thank you.

Amazing, Bhuvan. Well, that's, that's where I want to go next. Invite Vijay back and really talk about these AI innovations that we are delivering in the market.

Vijay, loving it. Bhuvan. Big round of applause for Bhuvan for inspiring us trailblazers like Mahindra creating AI centers of excellence. AI is real, transformational and infectious and one of the examples is out here we are not behind as well where we are delivering the embedded AI for automotive. So I'm thrilled to announce in the flow of the work. Now you will have the summary which can bring out the recommendations and you have seen in the demo and insights across the breadth of vehicle and customer data. Whether it is the telemetry data, the service data which is open cases, warranty, entitlements, work orders, you name it, everything out here coming out in this particular summarization format at the moments that matter. It's not about opening up at the places where it doesn't need to be, but depending on the Persona, depending on the flow of the work, the moments that matter, you get to see and capture the sales and service client engagement interactions as well and obviously delight the customers. What it means, yes, while we are coming out with our industry specific agents, as Mark today spoke about, I urge and all of us in this Dreamforce, why don't you go into the agent force booth. As Bhuvan said, please start building your own customer custom agents so that we both collaboratively together redefine the shape of this industry. Well, the AI. There is no relevant AI without relevant data, isn't it? Now in the last Dreamforce we did announce data cloud for automotive and we heard you in the sense wherein now we are actually pushing it with a lot of further innovations and deeper innovations powered by our Automotive Data Kit. Now, Automotive Data Kit is nothing but an installable package within the data cloud with a very specific industry lens. It talks and it has the data model objects of the automotive industry ranging from vehicles, dealers, customers, households, you name it, finance and everything else. Now having said that without the calculated insights, there is a lot of guesswork that's being done. So what we have done is we do have the data kit, so why don't we kind of deliver out of the box calculated insights? Let me take some examples which are very critical key performance indicators in your industry, whether it is vehicle lifetime value, customer lifetime value, service revenue, repair orders, warranty, you name it. So there is a bunch of calculated insights libraries being delivered. You can use it as a reference templates and build more use cases like that. Having said that, in the last Dreamforce we did mention around the vehicle customer, dealer, household and everything part of our automotive data kit and data cloud for automotive, we have extended this to model the EV ecosystem as well. Now you do have the capability to model the EV charging stations, battery consumption status, pretty much everything. Now with that power you can actually effectively monitor your entire electric vehicle charging ecosystem as well and take some actions. While I talk about data and AI, our commitment to continuous innovation to Automotive Cloud foundation hasn't gone away and we will only put more and more investment. And this is partly because thanks to your feedback as well, there are quite a few impactful release announcements. But having said that, in the want of time, I'll talk about four key impactful announcements. The first one is bolstering the service automation. Now we are releasing the capabilities around product service campaign so that your returns and recalls can be seamless. The service experience library wherein you have the pre built service processes powered by our service process studio wherein you can build in your own low code, no code automated service processes very efficiently. And the third thing is we have extended the warranty lifecycle management with supplier recovery claims. Now what it means is now your parts claims and pretty much everything which is dependent on the suppliers, you can actually recover it and reduce and optimize the warranty cost. The second one is now Automotive Cloud has the product catalog management. Now what it means is you can now flexibly define your vehicles with different specifications and attributes. Not just about that, you can also include the accessories and services in a very flexible manner and then have the qualification rules so that you can use it in the downstream processes. The third one is around the trade in and appraisals. Now you have the capability wherein you have the vehicle inspection and appraisal data combined with the rich set of data in the CRM so that you can define the end to end trade in processes. And finally we are bringing in the unified vehicle parts and inventory search which is extremely important to have the holistic view across the automotive value Chain of the inventory data, whether it is on the OEMs, importers, dealers, agents, you name it. So now you have the vehicle and parts inventory across the ecosystem. So these are the automotive cloud enhancements, what we have spoken about with this. I would like to take this opportunity to invite one of the most important trailblazer, Mr. Ram Mahabir. In fact, they were part of our automotive journey from the last two years. Thanks for all the trust and for the partnership. He's a national sales manager, Enterprise Business Solutions, Toyota Canada and Achut. Please come over and talk about your journey. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks Ram for joining. Well, Vijay did the introductions. Why don't you add more context?

So just by way of, first of all, thank you. Thank you to Salesforce for having me and giving me the opportunity to come and speak is if I understand correctly, we're one of the first auto cloud users. I am the national manager of Enterprise Business Solutions for Toyota Canada. We are the sales and distribution arm for Toyota in Canada for both Lexus and Toyota vehicles. It's been quite the journey and a lot of what I've heard here today is in alignment with why we made the decision to go with auto cloud.

Well, just walk us through that because I know, I remember three years ago when you were evaluating Salesforce for all of your customer facing applications and you were going down the path and then somewhere in between you pivoted. And that pivot moment actually happened here at this Dreamforce.

Oh, it certainly did. And it was quite the journey. In typical Toyota fashion, we knew that we had some disparate solutions that we had to replace and we embarked on a study. And the study wasn't about why Salesforce, it was why not Salesforce. And in doing so, and I think she's out there in the audience, Erin Morrison from Salesforce, she brought a lot of the team together to explain to us where the opportunities were with service cloud and how we could leverage that to replace our aging solutions. And we also were looking at CDP which is transitioned into data cloud but for customer360. So we brought the team together to conduct that study and we felt that the capabilities that were available to us at the time were a perfect fit until we started to hear that this industry cloud, auto cloud was coming forward. Aaron quickly assembled a team for us to debrief us prior to coming to Dreamforce so that we can understand should this be the opportunity that we take advantage of should we become the trailblazers to leverage auto cloud for our use case. So we had those sessions Back in Toronto. And then we came to Dreamforce that year and working with Ashut and Regini and the team, we made our decision when we left. That auto cloud was the way to go. It was going to give us the opportunities.

Well, thank you for being that trailblazer number one customer. Always happy. Right. But it always takes time getting from point of decision to getting it live in the hands of your users. Just for the audience here. Walk us through the journey, but then also any learnings.

So our journey a little complex because of course we have legacy solutions like PeopleSoft and Lotus Notes. Yes, PeopleSoft and Lotus Notes Mainframe as well in our world. And we had to replace those. It was a huge step. Organizational change. Management is not an easy thing to get dealers to get your internal call centers to understand. We are, you know, the solutions that they've been using for all these years that have served them well. There's better opportunities out there and there's new capabilities that we can bring forward. So the partnership with Salesforce to influence where they were taking the product was huge as well. We wanted to understand, and I know Rajani, I pushed her a little bit because there was some capability that we were looking for and they were able to plan to get into the roadmap to support our implementation. We went live in February of last year. We had IBM as our partner. I know Kiran is in the audience as well. It was an amazing launch. Our business users are, are so ecstatic for using the platform. We're serving them the content, the relevant content they need through Auto Cloud. Our case reduction times have significantly decreased and our dealers are overwhelmed by the capability that they're seeing in the platform.

Well, Amazing, amazing story. PeopleSoft mainframes, Brett, there you go. Your collections. Mainframe conversation. It's real and it's alive. I can't even imagine where do you go next? Where are you going?

So everything I've heard here, I had a whole talk track, but everything I've heard here is where we want to go. Organizationally, it requires a lot of change. It requires a lot of investment and commitment. But we're looking at things like the extension of our customer360. What more information do we want to put in that data store so that we can create that personalized experience? We started this journey many years ago, three years ago, thinking about how we create a connected experience for our consumers and, and data is going to power that, AI is going to power that. And we're exploring how do we extend the use of what the platform can do for Us, how do we bring about capability to engage with the consumers? How do we stand up a consumer engagement layer that now can be personalized? So those are the areas of focus for us.

So data AI, CRM Trust for automotive.

Yes, yes, really appreciate it.

Thanks. Thanks Ram. Thanks for being a trailblazer. Thank you. Well, I think it's an immense pleasure when really like I remember two, three years ago, we just talked about this new product. There were a lot of questions. Many of you actually in the audience asked a whole bunch of questions. Why should we do this? Why should we move? There's still many more questions. RAM just is a testament for all of those things and how we essentially kind of have really promised on delivering this innovation and really we are not done yet. You must be thinking, oh my God, there's so much stuff. ACHIT is going to keep going and yes we are keep going. We have got to go. So here last year we talked about captive finance, we talked about this financial account360. This year we're going to go deep in captive finance. So a lot of those service, process automation capabilities, customer service capabilities, so people when they call into your call center for address change, payoff request and all of this, we'll give you this process automation. But the beauty of this is now that agent can work on these processes and they can actually respond to the customer's needs because it's all built on the same platform. So as you think about deflecting your calls for basic needs, you can actually deflect it not to self service channels, actually to agents. That's where this can go. Second, we are going deep in loan origination and credit decisioning processes because we know you need better tools. We talked to many of you in this audience around captive finance and what we found out is this is a brittle, multi screen complicated loss of productivity environment for a lot of your underwriters. And this the name of the game here is how do you win more? How do you really capture that wallet share, which is fair that you should get access to? So we're launching this new product around loan origination, credit decisioning and underwriting. Really, really deep applications. And then the third thing that we are bringing to market is, or the last thing that we are bringing to market is collections. So collections is going to go pilot in this release, in the October release with a GA for spring. Obviously things go wrong. People stop paying, they get delayed. People like me forget when to pay. I get calls, no one responds to calls anymore. They want agents telling them hey man, you forgot I want to click a button. All that stuff will be now possible. I'm really super excited about these captive innovations. I want to bring Devon and Eric back so that they can actually show you this product in action.

Thanks, Ashut. Now There are over 5 million auto loans issued every year. And the goal for most captives is that each of those applications are processed in 15 minutes or less. That's why we created better onboarding experiences for captive organizations so that they can acquire and onboard new customers more effectively. Now here we have an embeddable and headless intake experience for loan origination. In this scenario, I am a retail finance customer looking for auto financing for my new vehicle purchase. When I apply, I'm simply able to walk through the steps through a guided process and I can provide all the information that is needed, like required documentation. For credit decisioning you need a lot of supporting documentation like proof of identification, proof of income, proof of address, and oftentimes the credit analysts have a lot of back and forth in tracking that documentation down. When we make it required up front, it can save time on the back end. So I'm simply able to provide all the information that is needed as part of this verification process. In the next step, I have some self service around my financing options and I can select a scenario that is most preferable for me and my finances. I have information here about monthly payment amounts, term length, APR rate, and I can have my options about my preferences. I can even change my down payment amount and get a recalculation on my offer. This is powered by our product catalog and some of our pricing matrixes on the back end. This allows your customers to self serve, save time and request new scenarios from credit analysts. Now I simply move forward with the application and I can see on my last step an example of everything that I provided and make sure that everything is correct before I go ahead and submit and voila. It's as easy as that to onboard and acquire new customers to your captive organizations. Now let's take a look at the other end. Now I'm signed in as a credit analyst at a captive organization. The goal for captives is that for every application, let's try to automate decisioning around at least 70% of inbound applications. And we can do that with our business rules engine behind the scenes. For every application, we're able to run our business rules and look for factors that might meet eligibility for automatic decisioning. We can look at factors like credit score or debt to income ratios and ultimately save time. For those credit analysts, this is key in high volume organizations. And what this allows your credit analyst to do is manage by exception, focusing only on the work that needs intervention. So for all things that cannot be auto decisioned, I have a work queue to go through my new loans. Let's go ahead and take a look at this one. On my application I can see all the same information and the same metrics that can be used for automated decisioning. We can see debt to income ratio, credit score, and those are the same metrics that we can use to drive predictions about this applicants likelihood for approval. Using past data about past approvals. On my applicant profile I see all of the information that has been provided during the intake process. But we can even integrate on the back end with agencies like credit bureaus to bring in that credit score further saving time for that credit analyst and powering the business rules engine. On the proposal screen I can see the selections that have been made by my customer and I can choose to optimize or I can choose to override that with a new decision and send that offer back to the customer. And for those documents that we uploaded in the prior process, I can go through my checklist of all the documents that need verification and I get a side by side comparison so that I can compare what was actually provided in the application with the documentation that they sent through. This is on a single screen and there's no swivel chairing, just a seamless experience for the credit analyst to go through through those documents that are needed. And now that we're in the final stages of processing this application, there sometimes might need to get involvement from other stakeholders to close out this process. So for cases, for dealer rehashing, we can take all the information here and use our flows and our collaborative frameworks to send them the same information. And we can track any items that are needed for follow up upon review. This allows you to make sure that you're all good to go. For all of these applications. Now we're ready to move forward. And any new loan account that we set up as part of this process, we can roll back up to our single source of truth for our customers. We can even track the financial accounts and all of the information and activity out of those accounts, like payment information, due dates and balances, and in the case of past due balances, we have a collections framework. Using our productivity console, we allow your collections team to quickly go through all of the customers that are overdue on their payments. And using these capabilities we can ensure that your collections team has the ability to manage portfolio health and reduce past due balances by getting promises to pay or confirm payments. And that's how we're serving our automotive customers with better financing experiences. Back to you Ashut.

Well thank you. It was like an amazing demo. Superb. Devon and Eric. Well, we started with this promise. We want to deliver processes, deep processes out of the box so that we can get you faster time to value. You just heard that second, we want to make sure you reduce tech debt, platform customization. You can actually see how much we have built from an automotive perspective. Different parts of your organizations can run this. Obviously this all means your cost of ownership goes down. And really we are excited about all of this embedded AI work that we are doing so that you can really get this agents going, LLMs going and really get into that super exciting journey of getting AI to go to work for you all. This is our promise to you. We're going to do this three times a year, every year so that you can come here and enjoy the fruits of the labor of our team and then go back and implement these things. Because we think we can transform together the automotive ecosystem. There's a lot that's here at Salesforce around automotive. Take a picture, download the QR code, there's a lot like I said. But do not miss out on the hands on workshop so that you can actually get to know a lot of these things. We are going to actually talk to you about how do you set up a recall campaign, a service campaign within automotive really key functional capability that Vijay was talking about. There's an automotive roadmap. We just touched upon what we are doing but there's deep roadmap sessions, there's so much more. There's Captive finance specific breakout wherein actually we'll go in more detail around all of the things that we are doing around Captive. Similarly there is a deep workshop around Connected Car and our partners, both AWS and Qualcomm have very specific dedicated areas where they're gonna talk about how their platforms talk to automotive cloud and the value that we are delivering. So this is what we had planned for you all. We really appreciate you all spending the time today with us the last 50 minutes or so. Hopefully you enjoyed this session. Hopefully you're excited as we are with all the innovation that we are bringing to market and hopefully we can all transform this industry together. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.