Salesforce London World Tour 2024

It’s been a few weeks since World Tour London and our Happy Hour drinks where we caught up with some of our customers and partners to get their thoughts on the event and what it meant for them.

Three themes emerged which we will explore over three blogs which will aim to give our view on what came out of World Tour as well as discussions with our customers:

• Data Cloud and AI – Getting ready for AI
• Improving Customer Experience
• Comparing marketing performance with the customer examples showcased at World Tour 

The first overall observation that was hard to get away from was the sheer size of World Tour London. It was extremely well attended and reflects the real investment and energy that Salesforce is bringing to the UK. Salesforce recently chose London as the location for its first ever AI centre and previously announced plans to invest $4 billion in AI innovation and growth in the UK over 5 years. So London is a good place to be for companies like Nebula working on the World’s number 1 CRM platform.

Is Ai the future?

The next key revelation for us is that AI is not the future anymore… That made you sit up. No, AI is not just the future, it’s actually here and it’s now, but only for some organisations who are starting to gain competitive advantage from it. Salesforce is keen to highlight how they are in a perfect position to help support this revolution. But why is utilising AI so important?

Well, for those that can harness it effectively, there are a number of benefits. First and foremost, it can drive competitive advantage over their peers. There are so many other opportunities which are probably not yet understood, but in short, companies who use AI can; 

• Innovate and go to market more quickly and more effectively by spotting and exploiting niches with highly targeted, speedy and persuasive marketing. 
• Improve customer experience, driving greater loyalty and customer lifetime value. 
• Increase efficiency through greater productivity by automating tasks, leaving humans more time to work on the complex high-value stuff.   

Of course, for those that don’t use AI effectively, the reverse is also true in that they will be at a disadvantage compared to their peers. How great this effect is remains to be seen, but World Tour London allowed those at the forefront to showcase what is now becoming possible. 

With so much at stake, a 2024 Lenovo survey of CIO’s found that AI/ML is IT’s top priority. This is alongside greater pressure to deliver real impact from their function rather than operational maintenance. 

So what’s stopping them?

Some of the key areas that Salesforce highlighted in World Tour London as barriers, or at least the first stage in the journey of implementation, are around unlocking enterprise Data, and tackling concerns around Security.

Both of these are met head on with the big push on Data Cloud and AI. 

Data

One of the fundamental reasons for the huge growth in AI is the abundance of data and the ability to use it effectively. But it’s absolutely critical that data is of high enough quality or the AI may not be effective or, even worse, misleading. So what do we do in a world where organisations are becoming increasingly complex with multiple silos all collecting their own data in different ways? It’s no wonder that many, if not all, CIO’s are wrestling with the question of data quality.

Salesforce is making a big play here and showcasing how Data Cloud is the solution to enabling AI in a number of ways. The most obvious one is by leveraging all that lovely data properly. Firstly it unifies all those silos, data lakes and various clouds of structured data. But it can also bring the unstructured data together in one place on a secure platform. The leveraging of this unstructured data is an important point, as this makes up the majority of Enterprise data for most organisations. The general availability of Vector Database was announced at World Tour, although it has been around since last year this has now been added to the Einstein 1 platform. By increasing the data sets that the models can use, AI can drive deeper and more meaningful insight and more effective and reliable outcomes. Bringing all this together in a true 360 view of the customer is key to get the best out of AI. Alongside this, the announcement of 200+ connectors brings data from so many different sources all together. 

Security

The next big concern from CIOs is trust, compliance and security. With so much happening to customer data, how can we be certain it’s secure? Well, the answer here from Salesforce is that, from the 31st of July, Data Cloud will be available on Hyperforce, which is built on the public cloud in the UK. It has enhanced standards for security and compliance, which should help to alleviate concerns in this area. It’s also agile and scalable to improve function and performance.

Lastly, Salesforce talked alot about how Data Cloud is deeply embedded into the Einstein 1 platform. As such, this creates a seamless experience supercharging the practical application of AI. But this is just the first step. Salesforce outlined 5 steps in the AI journey:

1: Unifying apps and Data: Getting your data strategy in place first, the bedrock in your AI journey.

2: Discovery AI Insights: Using AI to integrate data and quickly explore new undiscovered insights

3: Collaborate with AI: Use natural language platforms such as Einstein Copilot for ongoing collaboration with AI.

4: Give AI new skills: Companies and individuals will need to understand what skills are needed to not just to use, but exploit AI to its full potential.

5: Equip AI to act: Automating repetitive, time intensive processes to free up time. 

Salesforce believes it has spent the last 25 years building up to this moment and is perfectly placed to help companies take advantage of the AI revolution. So is AI really here now? Well, World Tour showed that, for some, they are well into their journey already. There are organisations that give us ideas and inspirations of what could be and they showcased examples of how they are achieving this. 

What next?

Our view at Nebula is, first and foremost, what does this mean for our customers? We recognise the huge opportunity AI presents for our customers and their business performance if we get it right together. But, also the potential hazards of not harnessing this new technology effectively. Those 5 steps outlined by Salesforce represent quite some journey which will take a lot of work. But the first and fundamental step around data strategy is key. We will therefore be creating a module specifically looking at data readiness for AI and running webinars on this subject to help our customer on their journey. 

Watch this space…