Salesforce AI Products: A Practical Guide for Business Users

Alice M.

Hawk-eye editor with a passion for trailblazing Salesforce experiences

Updated: Jan 9th, 2025

Welcome! If you are reading this article, then chances are you are interested in Salesforce’s transformation into the #1 AI CRM. While Salesforce has been working on its AI capabilities for at least a decade now, and Einstein was first released in 2016, it is only in 2022/2023 that the CRM launched a wide range of AI products accessible to regular users. If you have been in the ecosystem for a while, you will know that new Salesforce products are launched regularly, while existing products are constantly being updated as well as renamed.

The world of Salesforce AI is no different!

What was once known as AI Cloud and then Salesforce Einstein GPT is currently called Einstein (for now, at the time of writing this article in August 2024). Einstein 1 Platform is not itself a product but an umbrella for Salesforce’s turbocharged offering of CRM + AI + Data + Trust, and it encompasses all Salesforce products. In this sense, every single Salesforce product is an AI product infused with AI technology and protected by the Einstein Trust Layer.

No one article could hope to cover all this, but here we offer a short and practical guide to the most impactful AI products from Salesforce and how they can improve your business. If this sounds exciting, then read on.

Salesforce AI Tools

As mentioned, Salesforce and AI have been developing together for a while now. And there are several offerings under the Salesforce Einstein AI umbrella; some stand out more than others!

Data Cloud

With all the excitement over AI, it is important to remember that this technology has more than its fair share of skeptics. Some of the biggest concerns are over whether the data underpinning AI can be trusted. And we have all heard it said by now: AI is only as good as its data source. This is where Salesforce Data Cloud comes into the picture. As Salesforce’s fastest-growing product ever, it’s safe to say that Data Cloud has been a runaway hit. Data Cloud sits within the Einstein 1 Platform and is the source of truth behind all of Salesforce’s predictive and generative AI capabilities. Data Cloud is a CDP (Customer Data Platform) and it links together all customer data (structured and unstructured) across your entire organization. Here are some of Data Cloud’s strongest points and what sets it apart as a CDP:

• Pre-configured links to Salesforce objects.
• Protected by Einstein’s Trust Layer which aims to ensure that all data used by AI models is fully accurate, reliable, and free of malicious content.
  Data Cloud has industry-customized Data Models that cater to the needs of specific industry clouds and verticals.
• Speeds up the connection between all Salesforce industry clouds and makes sure that all customer data is fully harmonized.
• Salesforce AI capabilities like Einstein Copilot and Einstein Studio can seamlessly leverage Data Cloud to engineer the most accurate and personalized prompts and AI-driven apps.
  

So far, Data Cloud has ingested more than 7 trillion records and made over $400 million in ARR, which is a testament to its power and popularity. If there is a drawback to this product, it is certainly its expense.

Data Cloud Pricing Options

• Freemium edition, which comes with limitations such as lack of access to certain Data Services, Segmentation, Activation, or robust Data Storage.
• Data Cloud Starter for Marketing: You can purchase some of the missing features of the Freemium (SKU Edition) for roughly $1K—$2K each. With all the features included, this would be about $118,000 per Org per year.
• Einstein 1 Sales is $500 per user per month.
• If you want to purchase Data Cloud for your whole organization, it’s a whopping $10k a month!

Note: You can purchase different versions of Data Cloud per Industry; the above are just some pricing examples. Data Cloud pricing still lacks some transparency, but it is clear that this is not yet a cost-effective option for many organizations.

Salesforce Einstein Copilot

Salesforce Einstein Copilot is another exciting offering from Salesforce. It is your nifty AI assistant who can chat with you in human language to assist with all your Sales, Service, and marketing needs. Copilot can be embedded in any app of your choice and used by any of your employees to get personalized insight into customers, as well as quick responses, and answers to FAQs in the blink of an eye.

Think of Copilot as your very own Chat GPT, leveraging LLMs (Large Language Models) to meet business needs. Einstein Copilot can be implemented to create your own versions of “Marketing GPT”, “Slack GPT”, “Sales GPT”, “Tableau GPT”, and much more to speed up business processes across any app and vertical.

Einstein 1 Studio

A tool that complements Einstein Copilot is Einstein 1 Studio. Einstein Studio is a low-code option that empowers your developers to customize your Copilot using clicks and minimal code. Like Copilot, Einstein 1 Studio is tightly integrated with Data Cloud for fully personalized and comprehensive data of every single customer. Einstein 1 Studio has three main capabilities for Salesforce Admins and Developers:

• Copilot Builder is a low-code solution for customizing your copilot and creating custom AI actions for your business.
• Prompt builder, which enables you to create business-specific prompts.
• Model builder, which gives you the ability to import AI models into your Salesforce and leverage them for business needs.

Einstein Copilot and Einstein 1 Studio Pricing

You can purchase Einstein Copilot and Einstein Studio for Sales and Service as “Einstein 1 Editions” for $500 per user per month.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Einstein Analytics for Salesforce draws on the power of the #1 CRM for the most reliable insight into customer behavior and patterns. The most intuitive data insights in Salesforce now come via Tableau, which was acquired by Salesforce for billions back in 2019. A data visualization software, Tableau, now teams up with Einstein to provide robust, customized, and easy-to-understand analytics. Leveraging Einstein and Tableau, Salesforce has created Einstein Discovery, which offers advanced capabilities to expose relevant data findings and help you connect dots in your data for accurate predictive analytics. Operated by machine learning, Einstein Discovery can explain your data to you and help you ask the right questions to guide business decisions.

Implement Salesforce AI in Business

We hope to see you soon!

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.