The theme of the event was “Now everyone is an Einstein,” and that applied as much to Commerce Cloud as anything on display in San Francisco. Every session was rife with how AI and Einstein are set to revolutionize yesterday’s business operations and customer experiences.
Let’s break down the big AI and Commerce announcements from Dreamforce ‘23.
1. Einstein Copilot for Merchants
Einstein Copilot is the new AI-powered generative assistant for Salesforce users, and Commerce is getting its version of this powerful sidekick. The power of this feature lies in its simplicity: interact with Einstein Copilot just as you would a human, with natural language, and watch it power campaigns, site setup, and more with multi-step suggestions you can action or override.
Salesforce demonstrated this feature during its Commerce Keynote, showing how a merchant could interact with its Copilot via natural language, leading to promotions and feature enablement in seconds.
Salesforce is just scratching the surface with the potential use of this technology on its “Einstein 1” platform, an AI-flavored rebrand of the Salesforce.com platforms we’ve known for years.
So far it appears this will be available for B2B Commerce, D2C Commerce, and Order Management. We hope Salesforce will bring it to B2C Commerce in the future.
2. Commerce Concierge
Salesforce is bringing natural language shopping to customers with Commerce Concierge, empowering consumers to engage with merchants in new ways.
Shopping via chatbots is nothing new, but Salesforce’s spin on it powered by Einstein GPT is promising because this feature will be available for every customer-facing product: B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, and D2C Commerce.
“The Commerce Concierge is actually a set of components from the Customer 360,” said Michael Affronti, SVP and GM, Commerce Cloud, at Salesforce. “It’s actually the Commerce Cloud platform – things like our payments, our catalogs, our promotions – but it also uses the Digital Engagement Platform from Service Cloud to talk to WhatsApp. The GPT Layer is the Einstein Trust Layer running beneath everything. And Data Cloud stores my purchase history and my buying patterns.”
It’s not clear if customers need all of these licenses to unlock Commerce Concierge or if it will be available as a distinct SKU, but for those already investing in Commerce, Service and Data Cloud, we believe it should be a fast path to adoption.
3. Generative Product Descriptions
Most merchandisers would agree: writing product descriptions is a chore.
Generative AI to rescue. Now with a single click, product descriptions can be auto-populated, based on images, product names, and your brand’s voice.
We’re particularly delighted that this generative functionality works “in bulk”, for every Product assigned to your Store that is missing a description, with a single click. This should improve business team productivity immensely.
Perhaps the most exciting part of this feature is that it is available today. Brands on B2B and D2C Commerce can take advantage of Generative Product Descriptions to seriously improve efficiency and innovation for merchants.
4. Commerce Intelligence powered by Data Cloud
Data Cloud for free? Probably the biggest announcement at Dreamforce, generally, was the availability of this newest cloud for every Sales or Service Cloud customer on Enterprise or Unlimited licenses, up to 10,000 profiles, along with two Tableau creator licenses.
Digging in, 10,000 profiles is just scratching the surface for most enterprise retailers, but the availability of this cloud to everyone unlocks the potential to experiment with Data Cloud and begin modeling your data and transformations for future 100% scale.
5. Generative Page Designer
One of the best and customer-favorite evolutions of Salesforce B2C Commerce in the past few years has been Page Designer, which significantly improved the merchant authoring experience. Salesforce is taking that to the next level with Generative Page Designer, an AI assistant for creating rich, data-driven content-powered experiences on Commerce Cloud.
The feature promises to not only assist in creating content; it will create the JSON configurations needed for these experiences based on natural language requests.
The only downside to this feature is that it seems to be the furthest off, entering pilot only in Q4, meaning we can infer general availability some time much later in 2024.
Astound has been designing and building AI-powered customer experiences for years. Get in touch if your business seeks to take advantage of this cutting-edge technology.