New website helps identify use cases for Salesforce AI

According to Salesforce, there are three main adoption hurdles for AI in business: identifying a viable use case and having data to support it; addressing change within employee workflows and embracing new technology; and trusting whether the AI is correct and aligns with company values.

To address those issues, Salesforce recently launched Einstein's Guide to AI Use Cases, an interactive website aimed at helping organizations interested in Salesforce AI identify the use case that best fits a user's specific industry.

Users are asked what group best represents their departments, which key performance indicators (KPIs) matter most to their businesses, which use cases positively affect those KPIs and what other companies have been successful with that use case. Once a user has chosen a use case, the site provides a description and a "What You'll Need" section, which advertises the best Salesforce AI product for that use case. Users can also see an example of a customer using that technology. The site also has a "New to AI" feature that provides users with information on AI terminology and videos on AI use cases for sales, customer service and other industries.

Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said he suspects the site is an effort to bring more awareness to newer Einstein capabilities.

"Most of the customers using Einstein that I've talked to are using Einstein capabilities in the sales and marketing cloud," he said. "They were among the first Einstein capabilities to be introduced, so they're the most popular and familiar. Features such as Einstein Vision and Voice, among others, were introduced more recently, so I suspect these are examples of where the new website will help to raise awareness and illuminate potential use cases."

Henschen added that while the Salesforce AI team does not report Einstein-specific adoption numbers, the site is "clearly geared to increase adoption."

"In the case of optional Einstein features, increasing adoption would obviously mean more revenue for Salesforce," he said. "I know that certain capabilities, such as Einstein Lead and Opportunity Scoring, are quite popular, but I suspect that others suffer from low adoption. It's early days for Einstein and AI in general, and people just don't know what's available."

This is not the first site dedicated to helping users identify AI use cases. AppliedAI.com is a vendor-neutral website that lets users choose the industry they work in, with options such as marketing, sales, customer service, IT, operations, data, analytics, HR, finance technology, healthcare technology and self-driving cars.

After choosing an industry, the site shows a range of use cases, with a short description. There are then references that show organizations, their vendors and how their chosen tool has helped them. The site also provides an AI vendor database with 3,366 AI vendors, which can then be filtered out by use case.