Salesforce unveils its 'biggest innovation in 20 years'

Dreamforce 2022
(Image credit: Future)

Salesforce has detailed what it describes as the "biggest innovation" to come to its CRM and sales enablement platform in the last two decades.

The new addition, Salesforce Genie, is a service designed to unify customer data that is typically siloed in different channels and applications into a single multi-use profile.

At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce explained the objective is to help customers enable a personalized experience for their clients, informed by the most complete and up-to-date set of information on previous interactions.

Salesforce

(Image credit: Salesforce)

Salesforce Genie

Historically, businesses have struggled to harness the full potential of their customer data as a consequence of their complex and disorganized IT estates, which leave data stranded in isolated pockets.

According to Salesforce, the average businesses leans on almost 1,000 distinct applications to sustain their operations, "which fragments customer data and digital experiences".

Salesforce Genie works to resolve this problem by ingesting and "harmonizing" the various disparate sources of data, creating a comprehensive customer graph that can be used to inform sales efforts and personalize the customer experience.

The company's other software properties stand to benefit too, although the details are a little vague for now. Genie for Tableau will supposedly enable automated workflows based on customer data, MuleSoft users will be able to "build connected, intelligent experiences" and Slack Genie will help bring "AI-driven insights into the flow of work".

Salesforce also expects Genie to enhance its existing Einstein AI and Flow automation facilities, which will be fed on a more well-rounded set of data. Specifically, the former is expected to generate more accurate and well-tailored predictions to help steer decision making and the latter will benefit from a new level of dynamism made possible by the centralized source of real-time data.

 “We’ve completely reimagined our CRM from the ground up to enable applications that simply weren’t possible before,” said Bret Taylor, Salesforce co-CEO, during the opening keynote.

“With Genie, we’ve added a foundational new feature: a real-time hyperscale data platform. It’s all about the data; you can inject real-time and historical data to create a single source of truth. This changes the game for CRM.”

TOPICS
Joel Khalili
News and Features Editor

Joel Khalili is the News and Features Editor at TechRadar Pro, covering cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud, AI, blockchain, internet infrastructure, 5G, data storage and computing. He's responsible for curating our news content, as well as commissioning and producing features on the technologies that are transforming the way the world does business.