Salesforce Inc. today announced one of its most comprehensive artificial intelligence updates to date with the launch of Industries AI, a new automation platform that can perform a variety of time-consuming tasks on behalf of human workers.
The company says Industries AI will be embedded into all 15 of its cloud platforms, such as Sales Cloud, Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud. What’s impressive is its scope. Salesforce says it can handle more than 100 common tasks, such as matching patients with clinical trials, providing maintenance alerts for vehicles and industrial machines, streamlining recruitment processes and improving government services.
Salesforce said it’s launching Industries AI as a response to the findings of its Trends in AI for CRM Report, which revealed that more than three-quarters of business leaders are worried that they’ll miss out on the AI revolution if they can’t deploy the technology soon. It said the urgency to implement AI in production has increased by 700% in the last six months, but the problem is most organizations lack the money and skills to build and train their own AI models.
The solution, Salesforce believes, is to automate the creation of AI agents by providing a ready-made framework that leverages each customers’ proprietary data within the Salesforce platform.
It explained that Industries AI will serve as the foundation for customers looking to create “industry-specific” autonomous agents grounded in organizations’ proprietary data, with the ability to get them up and running within just a few minutes.
To help customers get started in creating AI automations, Salesforce said, it has created dedicated use case libraries for each of its cloud platforms, encompassing more than 100 common capabilities at launch.
Those capabilities are spread across multiple industries. For instance, in the financial services sector, Industries AI enables customers to quickly create generative AI bots that can assist customer service agents at banks and other financial institutions in the complaint resolution process. With each call, they’ll transcribe the entire conversation and then provide a summary of the issue and recommend paths to resolution.
In the life sciences industry, Industries AI can handle tasks like auto-matching eligible patients with clinical studies. It can do this by screening patients based on factors such as the person’s diagnosis history, medication details and demographics.
In addition, it has multiple uses in healthcare scenarios, assisting clinicians with pre-visit recaps and helping care coordinators by summarizing patient’s histories, including their care plans, prescriptions and so on. It can also help with validating patients’ insurance coverage, determining their out-of-pocket costs and eligibility for financial assistance.
Other use cases include the automotive industry, where Industries AI can help create AI agents that monitor vehicle telematics data to summarize its overall performance and determine when it needs maintenance. And in the public sector, it can help to create agents that speed up the benefits application process, based on the applicants history and status changes.
The energy and utilities industries are another promising use case. Salesforce said utility companies can use Industries AI to create agents for customer service teams that speed up issue resolution by monitoring and analyzing customer’s bill fluctuations and energy usage over time, in order to highlight possible reasons why their costs may have changed.
In addition, Salesforce Industries AI can assist educational institutions with their recruitment processes, helping them better engage with prospective students, the company said. Instead of manually responding to every question students have, the platform leverages customizable prompt templates to automate these responses. Moreover, it can help by automatically assigning the right staff member to the right student, based on whether they have reached out, applied or already been accepted.
Salesforce said it will begin rolling out the Industries AI capabilities across its various cloud platforms in October, though some of the specific features won’t arrive until February next year. In addition, it said it will continue to update Industries AI on a regular basis, adding more capabilities over time as part of its annual Salesforce releases.
Jeff Amann, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Industries, said the company wants to put “powerful and practical AI” into the hands of every enterprise employee, so their organizations will see immediate and tangible results.
“Organizations of every size and every budget can now easily get started with AI capabilities that were purposefully designed to solve their specific challenges, whether it’s helping banks resolve transaction disputes faster, helping retailers better manage their inventories and more,” he said.