Practical applications for generative AI

Marketers, for example, are already using generative AI to transform how they connect with their customers by powering more automated and personalised campaigns — quickly and at scale. In addition to basic content creation and writing copy, they’re transforming the way marketers analyse data and personalise messaging content.

Sales teams are consolidating their organisations’ data on a single platform and auto-crafting personalised emails tailored to their customers’ needs, making how they work faster, smarter, and more efficient. Personalisation is informed by CRM data, freeing sales reps to focus on building customer relationships, closing new business, and driving revenue.

Customer service teams are using generative AI to increase their productivity by providing suggested replies to customer enquiries and by automatically summarising the customer conversation once complete.

This additional human capacity can then be redirected towards other revenue-generating areas of the business, increasing staff engagement and retention and increasing business performance.

The real power of this technology is that AI can analyse and act on the most valuable data from a company’s most trusted resource, helping teams work smarter and make informed decisions faster. Slack’s State of Work research shows workers adopting AI are 90 per cent to report higher productivity levels. Yet, just 27 per cent of companies currently use AI tools to help increase efficiency.

The role of data: avoiding garbage in, garbage out

The next wave of AI innovation is only as good as its data. While leaders understand the importance of data, many struggle to harness its power for better outcomes and decision-making. For many, it’s too complex, not accessible enough and often, they’re unable to generate impactful insights across their organisations.

Generative AI will make it exponentially more accessible for everyone to tap into immense troves of trusted data to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.

Integrating AI, real-time data, and CRM allows for personalised content generation and tailored experiences across sales, service, marketing, commerce and IT. This enables businesses to anticipate customer needs, engage prospects, and optimise their operations, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Take, for instance, a sales leader who can generate visualisations based on natural language prompts that display real-time progress against their quota, along with recommendations for helping them meet goals. Such insights, based on patterns and trends in data that might be too vast or complex for humans to analyse manually, will give employees invaluable time back to focus on getting the job done.

We believe the right data strategy will lead to better decision-making, empower greater creativity and boost productivity.

The role of trust in the AI revolution

There is a real risk for generative AI, if used improperly, to do harm. To limit the potential for bias, hallucinations, and toxic outputs - generated content must be pulled from relevant, representative, and complete sources.

It’s crucial to keep a human in the loop on all customer interactions to validate outputs and recommendations before being used. Training workers to take full advantage of the technology and instilling an ethics-first approach is essential for companies wanting to use generative AI to deliver against growing customer expectations.

To help other companies with these considerations, Salesforce has released updated guidelines for how to approach responsible generative AI product development. As we have integrated generative AI into our products, these principles have been at the heart of our decision-making.

The cost of inertia is rising for companies slow to adopt generative AI. Leaders need to act now to balance risk and innovation. With the right strategy and governance, CEOs can reduce risk, increase their pace of innovation and embrace the advantages of this revolutionary technology.

Frank Fillmann is country leader at Salesforce Australia