Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Monday, October 7, 2024

Salesforce Unveils Industries AI to Accelerate Industry-Specific AI Deployment at Scale 

Sept. 9, 2024 -- Salesforce today announced Industries AI, a set of foundational, pre-built, and customizable AI capabilities that tackle industry-specific needs and challenges to help customers start delivering value quickly. Industries AI is now embedded in each of Salesforce’s 15 industry clouds so customers can deploy ready-to-use AI to help automate time-consuming tasks like matching the right patients to clinical trials, providing proactive maintenance alerts for vehicles and industrial machinery, streamlining inventory management, and improving services for citizens and program beneficiaries.

To help customers get started today, Salesforce created the AI Use Case Library, which features more than 100 Industries AI capabilities and dedicated use case libraries with resources on how to get started for every industry cloud. The AI Use Case Library will be regularly updated with new capabilities, including those announced today for each cloud, such as Complaint Summaries, Patient Services & Benefits Verification, and Vehicle Telemetry Summary.

Industries AI will also serve as the foundation for creating industry-specific Agentforce agents that will transform the way work gets done across every role and workflow, at massive operational scale. Coming soon to every industry cloud, they can be set up in minutes, work around the clock, and autonomously perform industry-specific business tasks and actions. Grounded in an organization’s CRM data, external data, and metadata with clear privacy and security guidelines, agents can also seamlessly hand off complex cases to humans with relevant context and information.

More than three-quarters of business leaders worry they’ll miss out on the AI revolution if they don’t deploy AI soon. In fact, the urgency to put AI to use has increased by 700% over the past six months. However, most organizations don’t have the time or money to build and train their own AI models — especially with training a model alone sometimes costing upward of $100 million. And, every industry varies significantly regarding the types of tasks, challenges, and goals they need AI to help address. To deliver value from AI, organizations need AI capabilities that are specifically built to address their unique needs and challenges.

Industries AI combines the best of an enterprise-grade platform with the precision of Salesforce’s deep industry expertise. And because it’s built on the Salesforce platform, which is underpinned by Data Cloud and supported by the Einstein Trust Layer, organizations can feel confident using AI without worrying about compromising safety or security standards. Customers can leverage pre-built prompts and power every AI capability with industry-specific data models and their own data and metadata – such as health records, donor databases, or telematics systems — to ensure relevant and contextual results and insight.

New capabilities announced today are embedded into Salesforce’s industry clouds and include AI tools for:

  • Financial Services: Complaint Summaries helps customer service agents at banks speed up the complaint resolution process by using generative AI to transcribe individual customer interactions and automatically generate a case summary, allowing them to quickly examine the root cause of the issue and possible paths to resolution. For example, if a customer issues a complaint about an incorrect fee on their credit card, a customer service agent can quickly access a summary of the customer’s case history from unstructured and structured data like call logs and emails to help speed up complaint processing and resolution.
  • Life Sciences: Candidate Auto-Matching helps speed up identification of eligible participants for relevant clinical studies, allowing researchers and site personnel to review and match patients to trials — pulling from both structured and unstructured data like diagnosis codes, medication details, and demographics — thereby reducing assessment time. For example, pharmaceutical and medtech sponsors can help their site coordinators and investigators select inclusion-exclusion criteria to obtain a targeted shortlist of clinical trial candidates for further screening.
  • Healthcare: Patient Services & Benefits Verification helps accelerate time to care with pre-visit recaps and benefits summaries to reduce switching between platforms and secure faster approvals. For example, care coordinators can get a comprehensive summary of a patient or member including care plans, prescriptions, clinical encounters, prior authorizations, preferences, and more prior to a telehealth appointment. And verification agents can easily validate insurance coverage, determine out-of-pocket costs, and financial assistance eligibility in bulk with the click of a button and quickly identify missing information to collect.
  • Automotive: Vehicle Telemetry Summary uses AI to monitor comprehensive vehicle telematics data and generate a summary of vehicle performance so customer service agents can more quickly understand the condition of a vehicle to help identify maintenance opportunities and improve vehicle safety and condition. For example, a customer service agent can remotely see there is an issue with a customer’s engine performance, alert the customer about the issue, and recommend they schedule a service appointment, helping to prevent a potential breakdown.
  • Public Sector: Application History uses generative AI to provide a comprehensive overview of an applicant’s request for benefits, including their history, status changes, eligibility determinations, and past outcomes across programs, to help simplify case management and speed up decision-making. Version Comparison makes it easy for caseworkers to understand and explain changes that might affect a person’s eligibility by creating AI-generated summaries that identify differences between current and past applications.
  • Consumer Goods: Inventory Check gives delivery supervisors the ability to create a contextualized summary of truck inventory deviations and helps identify the key reasons behind them. For example, a soft drinks delivery supervisor can ask AI for a truck inventory assessment update at the start of the day. Inventory Check might report excess inventory from yesterday and note that faulty packaging and damaged inventory are likely the primary reasons for why retailers did not purchase units of soda. The delivery supervisor can now take remedial action by implementing new quality control checks focused on packaging integrity before goods are loaded onto the truck.
  • Energy & Utilities: Bill History, Rate, and Usage Insights will help customer service teams at energy and utility providers speed up issue resolution by monitoring and analyzing customer bill fluctuations and usage over time. Bill History Insights will help identify and surface any changes to a customer’s bill as well as the potential reasons why their costs have changed – such as seasonal variations or changes in energy usage. Rate and Usage Insights assists customer service teams by quickly comparing energy usage and costs to help ensure their customers are on the right rate plan. It can also help customer service teams optimize energy consumption and reduce costs for their customers by providing data-driven advice on energy efficiency programs and household behavior changes.
  • Manufacturing: Asset Service Summary uses asset data – such as age, location, status, and warranty coverage — to provide manufacturing service agents with an overview of alerts, open cases, work orders, and warranty status. This enables manufacturers to provide faster, informed customer support and identify revenue opportunities like proactive maintenance and extended warranties. For example, service teams can see key details regarding a customer’s industrial machinery equipment, including how old it is, if there have been prior repairs, and if it’s still under warranty. Using this data, service teams can proactively recommend maintenance and identify opportunities to offer extended warranties or new equipment to customers.
  • Education: Recruitment Inquiry & Opportunity Management helps recruitment teams at colleges and universities streamline the recruitment process and better engage prospective students. Now, instead of manually responding to every incoming question about majors or application deadlines, institutions can use AI to quickly address inquiries with customizable prompt templates. They can also better manage the recruiting experience across the entire institution by automatically assigning staff to prospective students and segmenting based on whether a student has reached out, applied, or been accepted.
  • Nonprofit: Program Participant Notes Summaries helps nonprofit case and program managers provide more individualized care to program participants with the click of a button. Instead of having to read through pages of notes and records to understand a person’s unique needs and case history, case workers can use AI to gain an immediate overview of their program participants’ cases, helping nonprofits better understand and support the people who rely on them.
  • Net Zero: ESG Disclosure Report Generation uses generative AI to suggest responses based on prompts that are in line with specific reporting framework criteria to help sustainability program managers streamline ESG reporting. And now, ESG Report Accuracy Assessment helps evaluate the tone, phrasing, and overall quality of each response. The feature can also help teams better understand which answers need improvement and can revise those responses with rephrasing recommendations, ultimately allowing them to spend significantly less time refining disclosure reports.
  • Communications: Quick Quote helps streamline the complex process of generating multi-site budgetary quotes, enabling sales representatives at communications service providers (CSPs) to boost efficiency and offer a personalized customer experience. With Quick Quote, sales reps can use generative AI to recommend relevant products tailored to specific customer insights, such as number of employees, intended usage, and staffing capabilities. Additionally, sales reps can further customize and negotiate the terms of the quote based on the recommendations and configurations provided by Quick Quote.
  • Media and Entertainment: RFP Management leverages generative AI to streamline the request for proposal (RFP) process for media and entertainment sales teams so they can more quickly respond to proposal requests. RFP Management automatically creates an opportunity under the appropriate account and identifies important information like budget, timeline, and target audience and highlights it directly within the proposal, so sales teams no longer need to manually sift through complex RFP documents.

“Our mission is to put powerful and practical AI in the hands of every worker in every industry so every organization can start seeing tangible value from AI right now,” said Jeff Amann, EVP & GM, Salesforce Industries. “With Salesforce, organizations of every size and every budget can now easily get started with AI capabilities that were purposefully designed to solve their specific challenges — whether it’s helping banks resolve transaction disputes faster, care providers automatically summarize clinical notes, retail brands better manage their inventories, and much more.”

Every Industries AI capabilities will be available in their respective industry clouds, with a majority of the features generally available by October 2024 and February 2025. More capabilities will continue to be added as part of the three annual Salesforce releases.

  • Generally available today:
    • ESG Disclosure Report Generation and ESG Report Accuracy Assessment for Net Zero Cloud
  • Generally available in October 2024:
    • Complaint Summaries for Financial Services Cloud
    • Patient Services & Benefits Verification for Health Cloud
    • Candidate Auto-Matching for Life Sciences Cloud
    • Recruitment Inquiry and Opportunity Management for Education Cloud
    • Quote Generation for Communications Cloud
    • RFP Management for Media & Entertainment Cloud
    • Bill History Insights and Rate and Usage Insights for Energy & Utilities Cloud
    • Application History and Version Comparison for Public Sector Solutions
  • Available in beta in October 2024:
    • Program Participant Notes Summaries for Nonprofit Cloud
  • Generally available in February 2025:
    • Vehicle Telemetry Summary for Automotive Cloud
    • Assets Service Summary for Manufacturing Cloud
    • Inventory Check for Consumer Goods Cloud

Pricing: Industry AI capabilities are scheduled to be available via Salesforce’s industry clouds, with pricing varying based on specific implementations. More information on Salesforce pricing by cloud here.

About Salesforce

Salesforce empowers companies of every size and industry to connect with their customers through the power of data + AI + CRM + trust. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.


Source: Salesforce

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