San Francisco, USA: Salesforce announced new data and AI-powered tools to transform shopping experience. With generative AI built into Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud, retail merchandisers and marketers can tap into generative tools with a real-time understanding of customer behaviour and preferences. It will help to optimise every customer interaction — increasing loyalty, driving revenue, and boosting employee productivity.

Salesforce launches new commerce and marketing AI tools

Salesforce has powered its new commerce and marketing AI tools for retail using the Einstein 1 Platform. It connects seamlessly with retail or shopper data, securely integrating with large language models (LLMs) to ensure real-time context, brand voice consistency, data governance, and security. This delivers entirely new shopper, merchandiser, and retail marketer experiences with connected data and AI-powered apps.

“Companies that leverage their customer’s data effectively to build trusted, connected commerce experiences will see stronger customer loyalty and profitability,” said Jujhar Singh, EVP and GM of Salesforce Customer 360 Applications and Industries.

“Every business must focus on driving efficiency and growth with new integrated and AI-powered innovations that enable a faster path to purchase and greater customer satisfaction,” added Singh.

For shoppers:

Einstein Copilot for Shoppers, a new extension of Einstein Copilot, is a consumer-facing version of the generative AI assistant that powers personalised conversations with shoppers. Customers can find products and make purchases faster using natural language interactions on retailers’ channels like digital storefronts and messaging apps.

Based on existing customer data, such as the shopper’s location, preferences, and past purchases, Einstein Copilot for Shoppers can recommend the products as per their preference along with a link for immediate checkout.

For retail merchandisers:

Page Designer uses generative AI-powered natural language prompts to design, build, and customise e-commerce sites and pages more quickly.

Return Insights in Order Management analyzes data, looks at patterns in returns activity, and uses AI to prompt retailers to make product display changes that minimise future returns. It also uses sentiment analysis to assess commentary on product reviews and return reason codes to then recommend actions that quickly address issues with specific products.

Inventory Insights gives digital retailers a clear view of available inventory so they can ensure products remain in stock whenever possible. With near real-time access to inventory data and insights, retailers can easily manage inventory reservations and product holds, anticipate new inventory demand, and give customer service reps product recommendations that they can add to a cart for their customers.

Customer and Product Insights uses data from Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Data Cloud to help merchandisers better visualise trends, such as the top product bundles sold and the most engaged shopper demographics, to build new targeted commerce experiences.

For retail marketers:

Global Promotion Management helps retailers bring together customer marketing and promotions data with predictive insights to forecast potential promotion revenue, so retailers can easily coordinate pricing and rewards initiatives for both loyalty members and non-loyalty customers.

Referral Marketing helps brands launch referral programs and quickly improve conversion with pre-built templates and a built-in ‘Likely to Refer’ AI tool to identify customers with the highest likelihood of participating in referral programs.

Segment Creation helps retailers improve targeting and personalization using generative AI prompts, with trusted data from Data Cloud.

Content Creation for Marketing Cloud Engagement helps retail marketers solve content bottlenecks in their campaign and personalisation strategy. Using natural language prompts powered by generative AI — grounded by first-party data within the Einstein Trust Layer — marketers can automatically create personalized on-brand visual content, email subject lines, and body copy at scale to improve customer satisfaction and conversion.

Einstein Copilot for Shoppers and Customer and Product Insights Dashboard and Inventory Insights are in pilot and will be generally available in the summer of 2024. Page Designer is currently in pilot. Return Insights in Order Management is generally available today. Global Promotion Management and Segment Creation are in pilot and will be generally available in spring 2024. Referral Marketing and Content Creation are generally available today.