Einstein’s transformation to AI continued Thursday: Salesforce Inc. unveiled two new fully autonomous sales agents, Einstein Sales Development Rep (SDR) Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent, that it claims will accelerate sales team results.
The sales agents, due in October, are built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform.
Einstein SDR Agent is designed to make decisions and prioritize actions that align with desired outcomes, unlike chatbots that can only answer specific programmed questions. Deploying retrieval augmented generation (RAG), it analyzes a prospect’s question to autonomously determine what to do next, Ketan Karkhanis, executive vice president and general manager of sales cloud at Salesforce, said in a briefing with a handful of reporters on Wednesday.
Einstein Sales Coach Agent coaches sellers by autonomously facilitating life-like role-plays for each deal, offering personalized and objective feedback. Einstein simulates a buyer, using GenAI to convert text into speech. It also uses RAG to emulate how a buyer might respond, based on information surrounding the deal, account, and previous correspondence with that particular customer.
Both agents leverage the Einstein Trust Layer for security, according to Karkhanis.
The enhancements are the latest technical bells and whistles for Einstein.
In December, the San Francisco-based company introduced significant upgrades to Einstein 1 Platform like Data Cloud Vector Database and Einstein Copilot Search. A year ago, it launched Einstein GPT, which added ChatGPT-like features across the Einstein platform.
The new sales agent extensions highlight how Einstein is “putting targeted AI inside an app that is enhanced for the types of use cases the app is made for,” longtime tech analyst Jack Gold said in an email message.
“General AI are fine but often have a lesser knowledge of what I need, given my experiences and app interactions,” Gold wrote. “While Einstein may not be perfect, integration with Salesforce has the potential to be trained more about me and what I need information-wise, and to provide better outcomes for my queries with more relevant models.”
Gold added: “Its potential to learn from the array of Salesforce users makes it more targeted than general purpose AI systems that are learning much more broadly, and perhaps running more efficiently as well since the parameters may be less.”
After a slow start, Einstein is “gaining momentum in the marketplace” as technology platform capabilities transform to business use cases and value, said Manvir Sandhu, chief innovation officer at Zennify.
“Business use case-driven Salesforce AI projects are driving proof of value and confidence, which will lead to more mainstream utilization and scale, overcoming the negative media and perceptions that have delayed adoption,” Sandhu said in an email message. “You can only hold innovation down for so long.”
