The increasingly crowded artificial intelligence party welcomes yet another player: Salesforce. The software giant today (March 7) unveiled Einstein GPT, an A.I-powered chatbot designed to make its various products smarter and easier to use. Salesforce also announced a ChatGPT app for Slack, its workspace messaging software, that will offer new features such as conversation summaries, research tools and writing assistance.
Both Einstein GPT and the ChatGPT-enhanced Slack are part of Salesforce’s push into generative A.I., which describes large language model-based A.I. tools like chatbots and image generators.
A.I. is a key technology behind many of Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software products and the company has invested in its own A.I. research for years. In 2016, Salesforce introduced an A.I. robot named “Einstein” that can recommend actions in a sales process based on algorithms, surface correspondence lost in a cluttered email inbox, and even offer insights at company meetings.
Salesforce uses OpenAI’s help to enhance A.I. products
The new Einstein GPT is a collaboration with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and uses its advanced language models to create a smarter chatbot. For example, Einstein GPT can generate personalized sales pitches, answers to customer questions, targeted marketing content and codes for developers, according to a press release.
Salesforce has been working with OpenAI’s language models for more than a year, and the recent hype around ChatGPT sped up the timeline for rolling out Einstein GPT, Clara Shih, Salesforce’s general manager of Service Cloud, said at a press conference yesterday ahead of today’s reveal.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff teased Einstein GPT in a tweet in February, saying it can generate leads and close deals. During Salesforce’s latest quarterly earnings call on March 1, Benioff said Einstein GPT will integrate with all Salesforce Cloud products as well as its Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack subsidiaries.
“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative A.I.,” Benioff said in a statement today.
Collaborating with Salesforce will allow more people to benefit from generative A.I., said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a statement today. “And it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of A.I.,” Altman said.
However, neither Einstein GPT nor ChatGPT-enhanced Slack is available to the general public yet. Einstein GPT is currently available to selected customers in a pilot program. And to get access to the new Slack, users need to sign up to join a wait list.