How To Unify Your Enterprise Data To Empower AI Usage With Salesforce Data Cloud

If your data is locked up, the power of your data is also locked up. Don't worry though. We're here to help. Data is the core of all of our businesses. It's the building block of our AI future. But let's face it, AI only works for you if your data works for you. So today we're going to talk through the challenges you are probably facing and show you how to bring your data together with Salesforce Data Cloud from any source and use it to enhance every customer interaction. Now, now, let's get started.

AI without data doesn't mean anything.

Trust was the most important thing. I needed a trusted source to secure my data, and data cloud was the perfect product.

Data is really important to unlock AI.

Now we are able to connect all kinds of internal systems to the Einstein One platform.

Desiree, welcome.

Thank you.

It's so great to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

Of course. So it just seems like yesterday this whole conversation around generative AI just popped up on the scene.

Yes.

And everybody's been buzzing about it.

I know. I agree.

So I would love to learn what are the conversations that you're having with some of our customers and where are they in this journey?

I will never forget November 30, 2022. That was the day that ChatGPT came out.

Yes.

And the reason why is because it was the first time that all of us in the world could actually play with AI.

Yeah.

And since then, every business has been trying to figure out, okay, now that I have this technology, how can I bring this within my own organization? And so it really started out with a conversation of like, what if to now how do I bring this into my company? Right, sure. The one thing that's super important though, either it be predictive or generative AI, it's really around the data that you bring in. The quality of that data has to be really, really valuable for every company that you're out there today.

100%. Yep.

So what we've been seeing is this big transformation where they want to take advantage of the data, but more importantly, that they can actually do something with the data. That's the unlock right now.

Well, we've heard a lot about AI.

Yes.

We know that AI and data go together.

Yes.

Data is now becoming this very huge topic. It is this buzzword, and I think a lot of people are really excited about it, but they're also like, oh, shoot.

Yes, I know.

So what is the focus been for enterprise and how are companies thinking about data today? What challenges are they facing as it pertains to this big concept of data.

Yeah, a lot of enterprises right now, because there's so many different data sources, it's emerging on a constant basis. And so what they're really trying to figure out is like, how do they actually organize this? How do they actually do something with it? Right. There's an interesting stat from Salesforce. I think it's 51% of IT leaders don't have a unified data strategy.

That's scary.

That is very scary. So you can only imagine, like, this is just the beginning, and they want to figure out, okay, now that they've harnessed it within their view, what do they do with it? How do they actually take advantage of it? How can they trust it? How can they make sure they're taking action on that data? That's the next step for most enterprises.

Well, the topic of today is, is your data locked up? Like this notion of, like, locked up, is it trapped? Tell us more about this concept of trapped data and why we just need to be aware of this and how we get past it being locked and trapped.

Yeah, a lot of it's because a lot of data is in silos or different, like data lakes or warehouses. But it also ties to, like, governance concerns. Or it could be that they don't want to copy data from one place to another. So people are trying to figure out, okay, how do I have a centralized, unified view of all this data that in different places within my organization, but that they can actually do something with.

It and that it's secure, Right?

Yes. Security is a very important vector for all of us as well.

Of course.

Of course.

So how are companies coming to Salesforce for help? Do we have the answers?

We do have the answers.

Tell us more.

The big answer is around data cloud. And I think that's what's this lock with everybody today. So, number one, a lot of companies have already invested, as I said, in other systems. Data lakes, warehouses, telemetry data, website data, you name it. Basically the whole idea of it is that data cloud can now bring a unified view with your customer profile. And when you see that view, you can now do something with that information. So either you're saying, oh, I love the example, like, I'm a marketer, right? And I go to a website, I'm looking at, perusing a bunch of stuff, and then I also want to see what my history of what I purchased with before. Imagine that you can now send an automatic email saying, hey, here's a 10% coupon. I know you like makeup in this color or whatever it may be. Right, right.

It tells a story.

It does tell a story. And so the whole idea of this is that it does this with a very seamless way of doing it without having to go look at all these different databases for this information to bring it all together.

Well, we've heard so much about data. We know that Salesforce is not the first company to ever talk about data. But I'm curious to know, as it pertains to Data Cloud in particular, how is it different from other approaches that are out there in the market?

The thing that I think is one of the smartest things that Salesforce did from like 25 years ago when they first started the company, they invested in metadata. And people go, what is metadata?

I know we've heard so much about metadata. Tap into that.

Yes, it's data on data. I know that sounds like a crazy concept, but the idea of it is that, let's say contacts as an example. Right. There's different layers of contacts. It's the name, it's the last name, it's the address, it's your email, whatever it may be. Right. And so it's just making sure that everyone has an understanding of what that layers are, but so that you can actually pull it when you're actually asking questions or that it has context to the information that you're basically looking for.

Right. And really tells again, that whole story of who the customer is.

That's right.

Well, this has been such a great conversation, Desiree, thank you so much for joining us. And you're not going anywhere.

No, I'm not going anywhere.

You have to stick around because we have a live Q and A coming up very soon.

Definitely.

Well, next up, let's see Data Cloud in action with a demo led by my colleague Stefan Chandler Garcia, who has some really exciting features to share with us.

Thank you, Shaleya. I'm Stefan Chandler Garcia, the Director of Strategic content for Audience Relations here at Salesforce. I'd like to double click on some of the amazing innovation that's possible thanks to Data Cloud. We're going to start out here within Salesforce. This contact record has lots of rich information about a customer, as well as all of the CRM related data, like their activities, cases and opportunities. While this is very powerful for interacting and tracking engagements with your customers, this isn't truly a complete view of a customer. Most businesses have vast amounts of trapped data throughout their application landscape, and I want you to think about how that trapped data could help you close cases faster and create a Better experience for your customers. With Data Cloud, you can integrate and harmonize data from all over your enterprise. You can create data streams that are used to connect data from anywhere, whether that be Salesforce applications like Marketing Cloud and Commerce, many other data sources like aws, Adobe, Amazon and Snowflake, or using one of our hundreds of connectors with MuleSoft. All of this data can be used throughout Einstein One and powered by the metadata framework that you know and love. So let's check out that contact record after you use Data Cloud. What you're seeing here is the full picture of your customers interactions all within the Salesforce ui. This is possible thanks to our robust metadata framework that powers your customer experiences. CRM Enrichment allows you to copy fields directly from your insights in Data Cloud. And the new Data Cloud related lists enable you to bring all of this data right into the flow of work. So check out this list of reservation data. This data is coming through directly from Snowflake. You can bring your own lake to Data Cloud from Snowflake through our Xerocopy connector. Now over in Snowflake, you can see the reservations here in the worksheet. We can query them and we can even modify them. Now when we go back over to Salesforce, we can hit refresh on the component and look our changes were updated in real time. This means that you can take action immediately as your customers need it. Okay, one more thing. Take a look at this prediction here. With Data Cloud, we're able to create predictive insights about our customers. In this case, we want to predict what the propensity to buy is for this customer. You can create these valuable insights in no time with Model Builder. So here inside of Model Builder, you can bring your own predictive or even generative AI models directly into Data Cloud. So let's create a new model Here you can connect an existing model from one of our partners using Amazon, Sagemaker, Google Cloud, Vertex or Databricks. But even cooler, you can now build your own with the low code Model Builder. This means that you can create predictive AI models on any of the data that you have in Data Cloud. Here is that Propensity to buy model that we showed a moment ago. You can see that this model has a 91% accuracy rate for predicting the booking outcome. It uses data about the customer's engagements to show us how. You can see here that when a customer is traveling with their family, they are much more likely to book. This is all great data to present and analyze, but I want to show you how you can activate it. So let's head over to Flow. Data Cloud is integrated with Einstein1. This means that you can use a prediction to trigger a flow. This flow even uses AI to help us generate a personalized sms. Let's check it out. We've been able to just trigger this sms. We just saw what happens when you bring data together with predictive AI to help us connect with our customers at the right time and with hyper personalized content. All thanks to the power of Data Cloud and Einstein one. You just saw how Data Cloud starts out by connecting data from anywhere into your CRM apps, your data lakes, your warehouses. All of that data is then harmonized and mapped to a common data model that creates a single view of the customer. You can treat this unified profile like any other Salesforce object with a vector database built in. You can also bring in unstructured data to Data Cloud. Think emails, social media replies, knowledge articles, cases. These can all be indexed and searched so that you have an even richer view of your customer. Once all of that data is ingested, you can activate that data across any CRM app. This means real time insights, real time actions, real time automations and even real time personalization. Now you can see why our customers are so excited about Data Cloud and the Einstein One platform. Our product and engineering teams have been hard at work to bring this to life, so let me walk you through some of our latest innovations. Dataspaces is now GA With Dataspaces, customers can logically segregate data metadata and processes for departmental regulatory and compliance needs. Model Builder is now ga. Customers can choose an LLM or build an AI model based on the job to be done. Model Builder is a no code, low code and pro code way for companies to build their own predictive AI models trained on their data Cloud Data for Generative AI Model Builder allows customers to select from LLMs managed by Salesforce or bring their own models. Businesses can also use predictive and generative AI models from Salesforce Partners including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, Google Cloud's Vertex AI and OpenAI and even trains select predictive models on Data Cloud data without moving or copying data. With Data Cloud triggered flows, customers can automate business processes based on a change in a data point from all across Data Cloud data sources or when calculated insights conditions have been met. Now users can test and troubleshoot their flows before activating the Snowflake connector for Data Cloud is now ga. With Snowflake we can now connect directly to our data streams within Data Cloud this allows us to take all of the data within our Snowflake data warehouse and visualize it inside of Data Cloud with our zero copy zero ETL connector here. You can use and modify this data anywhere in your tech landscape and all of the changes are replicated right inside of Salesforce and Data Cloud. And don't just take our word for it. Let's hear from Heathrow Airport's platform architect, Spiro Blasiplus. He sat down with Salesforce's AVP of Data Cloud, James Bishop, to share how Data Cloud has revolutionized their business.

Welcome to Spiro from Heathrow Airport. We're really grateful you've taken the time to join us today. Spiro, straight from volunteering. Thank you so much for joining us. Joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us a little bit about, about, about Heathrow and about your team and the way in which you operate.

So I sit within commercial and digital team within Heathrow. I'm the architect for that team. As you can imagine, Heathrow is very wide and varied business. We have 80 million passengers a year. On average. 70,000 people come to work at Heathrow every single day. So my team is responsible for the commercial revenue and a lot of the passenger facing digital activity at Heathrow.

80 million passengers. Wow. So as a longtime marketing cloud customer and we've done a lot of business together in the past, you'd originally invested in the marketing cloud and then moved on to make an additional investment with Salesforce's new data cloud products. I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the reasons behind that investment and the problems that you were trying to solve.

Of course, I think with our marketing cloud implementation, with the data cloud now big investment in Salesforce, we saw a massive success of 30% increase in digital revenue through personalization. And with the data cloud enhancements for real time, we really wanted to take it to the next level. So building on top of the data that we'd already collected in the classical marketing from our e commerce channels, our award channels and our wi fi logins, we've seen a 30% uplift using personalization with that data to add digital revenue. So what the data cloud will enable us to do, what we're so excited about it is to bring in all of our real time streaming operational data to further personalize people's interaction with Heathrow. So if you think about buying some of our reserve and collect service, currently we only know the data from your reservation and so we know what time your flight is going to be with the data Cloud, we can bring in our operational data, we'll know if your flight has been delayed, if your flight has been canceled, what the flight status is of your of the latest version and then we can enhance the messaging. We can say to you, oh don't worry, we know that your flight's been delayed, your package will still be waiting for you or we can see your flight's been cancelled, would you like to reschedule? So it's building on top of standard marketing capability that we already have and getting good success from to further enhance customers experience with Heathrow.

People may be a little bit surprised here that you don't have access to all of the data that those passengers before they join the airport. So data I think is probably going to be particularly important to you in the commercial operations at Heathrow.

100%. So as you say, I think a lot of people are surprised that we don't have access to that customer data. Actually the customers are the customers, the airlines predominantly. So we really have to work very hard to have value add propositions in order to have an exchange with customers. They're willing to give us our data. So with our loyalty programs, our wi fi parking, the e commerce platforms, this is how we interact with our customers, how we get information about our customers when they're coming to the airport and that enables us, we bring all that data together in cdp, bring the connections from outside of Salesforce as well to form that customer360 and create personalized experiences next best offers and really create an engaging experience for, for the people who are coming to the airport.

And when you talk about enhancing their journey through the airport, does that mean effectively because it's a very short window of time that they're in the airport. Is it spending less time on some of the more routine activities and trying to help them understand where they've got to be, how they can improve the shopping experience, spend more time in the shops, the restaurants, whatever it may be. Is that the plan?

That's the plan. So as I said, to bring the operational data in so the airport can be a confusing place. There's lots of information people are interested on where do I go to check in, where's the security? What the security queue times are. The more information that we can give to passengers to help them in this value exchange. You give us your flight information, we can help curate your journey through the airport. It will allow the customer to have more time to engage with our other experiences at the airport, whether that be dining or in retail.

What does that actually mean in the end for the business in terms of the core KPIs for you?

Well, we've obviously it will bring. The more people have dwell time is what we call it in the retail space, the more we can engage with them and give the customers curated offers, hopefully they'll spend more money with us.

Yeah.

So yeah, we very much see data cloud and the personalization and the real time capabilities as the key to being able to unlock that engagement with the passenger.

Yeah. And do you track the sort of the Net Promoter score type element of their experience in. Obviously there's a commercial element to potentially spending more in the dining and the retail experiences. But do you track the Net Promoter score that they overall experience in the airport?

Yes, we do. And actually one of the big benefits of our digital program is that we find that if a customer is interacting with us on a digital basis and they have a much better customer satisfaction score than if they don't interact with the physical elements of the airport, if you will. So I'd say that our digital experience really does improve the customers experiences at Heathrow.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's fascinating. And in terms of what's next and what you're planning and how you can maybe exploit more of the technology and the capability, what's on the roadmap.

So the new exciting thing on the motor, as everybody probably knows, is around AI. So what opportunities do we have to exploit AI and bring efficiencies both to the operation but also better experience for our customers. So we are very shortly going to be introducing service GPT but that will help our contact center agents.

Really.

We have the chat box, we have these interaction channels and so in phase one we'll be using the AI to understand what the customer's asking for and prompt responses initially back to a service agent and then back to the customer. So based on the knowledge, based on the data we have in Salesforce and Data Cloud to power those AI responses back to the customers.

Well, just want to thank you once again for joining us, Vera. Thanks for giving us your time this afternoon and we look forward to doing more together with Data Cloud.

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Looking forward to it.

Cheers.

Thank you.

Our many thanks to Spiro for sharing Heathrow's story. 30% increase in first party data capture, how impressive is that? Are you ready to get started with Data Cloud? Our professional services team is here to help you. With more than 1000 certified data cloud consultants globally in over 200 implementations worldwide. They can help you with everything from developing a strategy and roadmap to deploying the full power of Data cloud across your entire business. Visit the link on your screen to learn more. And now it's time to hear from you, the moment we've been waiting for. We're here live in studio to answer all of your Data Cloud questions and our moderators are standing by in the chat. So let's dive in. This is great, Denz, let's get to this.

All right.

All right, so we have our first question that's come in and this is a good one. I think this is a question that a lot of our viewers will want the answer to. What's the fastest way to get Data Cloud activated in my account?

Great. For existing customers, if you go to salesforce.com data there's actually like a button that says how to get started right away, which is awesome.

We make it easy.

We make it super easy. And not only that, but we actually give you some credits to kind of get started. We'll get you through the process, which is awesome. Now, for Net new customers, you can click on Ask the Expert on the website as well too, and we'll contact you and get you started.

Perfect. I love that. Okay, so we have more questions that are coming in. Here's our next one. Is there a limit to how much historical data I can apply to Data Cloud? Which I think is a great question.

Yeah, that is a great question. No, I mean, if you think about all the customers that we have, I mean, from financial services to manufacturing, everyone has a ton of data. So no, there's no limit here. I think the big thing we want to make sure of is that you want to start with a small project and then start to implement even bigger ones as you go along. Absolutely, yeah. No, we absolutely have no limit.

Okay, I love that. So it's easy to get started.

Easy to get started.

And there's no limit.

No limit.

Okay. We love it. We love it. Okay, so let's talk about how long it's going to take to get Data Cloud implemented. We actually have a couple of questions that are duplicates of this, so a lot of folks want to know.

Yeah, I would say it really depends on what you're trying to do. We have things from small projects where you're just trying to get web engagement data into your customer profile, or you can have something that's like complete data transformations where you're really trying to enable AI across your entire organization. My biggest thing is we have, as you mentioned earlier, professional services that can really help you get started. We even have packages that are just like the getting started packages to the more comprehensive stuff. So it really just depends on what you're trying to do.

Okay, so depends on what you're trying to do. Depends on how much data you have.

That's right.

Where it's at.

Yes.

How early you are in your data process. Yes, lots of things. Exactly. So here's another question from one of our viewers. We have an existing Snowflake deployment. It houses a lot of our data currently. Do I need to copy all of that data to Salesforce?

This is the best part. Snowflake databricks, the list goes on. We have lots of partners. We are partners with these folks. So no. We have something called Zero Copy. This is really where you get to virtualize that data so you're not copying data from one place to another. A lot of IT folks really like this because it makes the implementation really easy. So. No, absolutely not. This makes it really simple.

Okay.

Yeah, that's great.

Okay. So it sounds like we have a lot of solutions that are already teed up. It's just a matter of getting started. And I think most important we talked about this earlier is seeing the value of why data is so important now and what opportunities we have ahead as we think about AI.

Yeah. And I think the biggest thing is Back to the 0 copy part of it is that once it's now in your full view within Salesforce, you can take action on that data. Even though you've invested with Databricks or with Snowflake or any of the other data lakes out there now, you can actually do something within the Salesforce environment.

100%. Okay. We have one more question that's come in. This is a good one because I think oftentimes whenever we think about innovation, technology, implementation, we think about resources.

Yes.

How much is it going to cost me and how many people do I need to put on staff? So this question is, how many people do I need to have on staff to implement Data Cloud?

You know, it's interesting. Well, first of all, we have such amazing resources at our disposal with Trailhead. And if anyone has not taken advantage of this, please do. It's one of the best resources I've seen out there. And you can get really started with Data Cloud ASAP and learn how it all works. But for all of our existing admins and developers, they can actually go in there and learn how it. Because it's already native onto the Einstein one platform, they can get access to this and learn how it works for them. So that's like the number one thing, I would say.

So it's becoming a trailblazer. Yeah, right. Becoming a trailblazer. Learning, getting educated. And I think it really does tie back to how much data are we talking.

That's right.

What's the scope of the project? Are we trying to bite off more, More than we can chew, or are we really going to phase this out and really utilizing many of the free and available resources that Salesforce has so that trailblazers can get to work to solve for the solutions?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To learn more about Data Cloud, click the link on screen. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.