Here at Dreamforce 2016, Salesforce is touting their new “Einstein” set of Artificial Intelligence tools.
At its heart, Salesforce Einstein has four tenets:
- Discover patterns in data
- Predict what these patterns mean
- Recommend actions based on the predictions
- Automate the execution of recommended actions
I just attended a short session with Salesforce where they displayed Einstein integrated with Service Cloud. When you think of customer service, AI is a great application for service. In the demo of Salesforce Einstein, they demonstrated how the Salesforce IoT Cloud gathers data from robots running inside a factory. Einstein analyzes the data coming in and discovers patterns in the machine’s behavior and performance.
In the demo, Einstein discovered that one of the robots was having some issues. Based on the discovered data Einstein predicted that the machine required maintenance, specifically bearing maintenance. Based on past data and machine learning built into Einstein, the system recommended two courses of action – one to deploy a maintenance agent to replace the bearing and one to log a ticket in the service system to have maintenance review the data. In addition to the recommendation, Einstein provided sample scores for each action, so the service person could evaluate which recommendation would produce better results.
In the example, our service tech picked the option to deploy the maintenance team directly. Using Salesforce Einstein, the maintenance tech was guided to the right robot and directed as to which bearing to replace. After the bearing was replaced, Einstein automatically closed the service ticket.
In all this was an impressive demonstration of how Salesforce Einstein can be integrated with the Service Cloud and provide real benefit to a customer service organization. While I’m sure some of the demo wasn’t live, it is a great vision of what we can see coming from Salesforce.
