Salesforce and AWS Announce Expansion of Strategic Partnership

Sept. 20, 2022 — Salesforce and AWS today announced new integrations between the Salesforce Platform and Amazon SageMaker. The integrations will enable customers to use Amazon SageMaker, AWS’s machine learning (ML) modeling service, alongside Einstein, Salesforce’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology, to build new AI models tailored to the unique needs of their business — and use them in real time across the Customer 360.

Now data scientists and developers will have seamless access to real-time, unified and cleansed customer data – alongside other data from their AWS data lake or data warehouse – for building and training ML models in Amazon SageMaker using their framework or tools of choice. These custom-built models can be used across the Salesforce Platform to power predictions and insights for customers. This drastically shortens time-to-value for custom AI investments by simplifying the process of training and deploying ML models for production use.

Salesforce Genie enables these integrations. Announced today, Genie is a real-time customer data platform that powers the Salesforce Customer 360. This new real-time customer data platform unlocks the ability to grant Amazon SageMaker with secure, native data access for model training, and also enables real-time inference calls to Amazon SageMaker to power AI predictions anywhere across the Salesforce Platform.

“Customer experience is most impactful when it happens in the moment that matters to the customer, when it’s personalized, and when it’s comprehensive,” said Liz Miller of Constellation Research. “That requires a massive amount of real-time data, automation, and intelligence to train AI models to understand a brand’s customer AND a brand’s business. By empowering organizations to bring their own AI models, Salesforce and AWS are enabling teams to bring AI…and the customer data now available across the enterprise with CDP…out of the silos for the benefit of everyone,”

The Next Chapter in Salesforce’s AI Strategy 

These new integrations represent a shift to an open AI platform strategy for Salesforce, enabling customers with new options to meet the unique needs of their business. Customers can choose the purpose-built models or point-and-click model builders powered by Einstein, or leverage pre-trained or custom-built models trained and deployed with Amazon SageMaker, to power predictions across the Salesforce Customer 360.

Amazon SageMaker complements existing Einstein AI capabilities by solving for the needs of data scientists and developers who want to use their preferred tools and ML frameworks within Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy AI models that drive predictions across the Salesforce Platform.

Einstein generates over 175 billion predictions per day – powering predictions across all Salesforce products for sales, service, marketing, and commerce, and across every industry. Einstein includes an integrated set of AI technologies that makes the Customer 360 smarter. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed end-to-end machine learning service that allows data scientists, developers, and business analysts to quickly and easily build and train machine learning models, and then directly deploy them into production.

How the New Integration Works

Salesforce Genie ingests, harmonizes, and stores real-time data streams and transactional data at massive scale, and transforms it into a single, unified customer profile, or customer graph. This customer graph can now be accessed in real time from within Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler alongside other data stored in AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Redshift. This drastically simplifies the process of accessing the right customer data for the ML model and provides customers with a low-code data preparation experience to accelerate their ML workflow. This makes it easier to train custom models for tasks like predicting a customer’s propensity to churn or their potential lifetime value.

Once custom AI models are trained and deployed on Amazon SageMaker, they can be registered for use across the Salesforce Platform, enabling business users, including sales, service, marketing, commerce, and information technology (IT) professionals to generate predictions or scores in real time, powered by Genie, to drive more personalized engagements and experiences for their customers.

A Partnership Dedicated to Customer Growth

Salesforce and AWS have built and deployed out-of-the-box applications that bring voice, video, and productivity to sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams — all infused with AI and real-time interactions. The partnership has also unified developer experiences, providing a suite of products and tools that enable developers to quickly build and deploy scalable business applications that accelerate their digital transformation. See what’s currently available from Salesforce and AWS here.

Source: Salesforce