London World Tour 2023 was all things Generative AI. Rebranded as AI Day at short notice, pretty much the entire keynote was dedicated to this rapidly evolving technology. Join me as I delve into the major insights and announcements from AI Day at London World Tour 2023.
A Billion-Dollar Investment in the UK
Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce CEO of UK&I, kicked us off with the announcement of a $4 billion investment from Salesforce into the UK business over the next 4 years. An announcement that was met with great enthusiasm from the UK Prime Minister!
Thrilled to see another huge vote of confidence in our tech industry. It’s right that we’re leading the way in AI investment – creating jobs and growing our economy. The possibilities in tech are extraordinary and we’re fast becoming the leader in the sector.
Rishi Sunak, UK Prime Minister
Thrilled to see another huge vote of confidence in our tech industry.
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) June 29, 2023
It’s right that we’re leading the way in AI investment – creating jobs and growing our economy.
The possibilities in tech are extraordinary and we’re fast becoming the leader in the sector. https://t.co/cos6QH6h1j
From Predictive to Generative AI
After this, it was down to the main business of the day, starting with a reminder that artificial intelligence isn’t new for Salesforce. They’ve been working in the field since 2014 and launched the first of the Einstein predictive AI product set in 2016. With over 300 AI patents and 227 research papers, their Einstein platform now produces over 1 trillion predictions every week! But there is one common factor for all these predictions. They are spotting patterns in historic data and making recommendations to achieve similar outcomes. Generative AI is a game changer. It can generate entirely new content based on existing data.
Trust in AI: The Einstein GPT Trust Layer
One of the major areas of focus for Salesforce is trust, especially in AI. To ensure trust, they have implemented the Einstein GPT Trust Layer. It includes secure data retrieval, data masking to protect sensitive information, and thorough auditing of actions taken. This last point is crucial – if we’re going to trust Salesforce, we need to know the fine-grained details of what actions have been carried out.
Patrick Stokes, EVP and GM Platform at Salesforce, gave us a technical view of some of the challenges around securing data in Large Language Models. He also explained how that is very different to the row and column database tables that we are used to. He drew an interesting comparison to human recognition – when we see an apple, we can recognise it as an apple immediately, but we can’t point to a section of our brains where the apple information is stored. Similarly, with Generative AI models, once data becomes part of the model it is no longer possible to identify where it is stored.
The Power of Prompt Studio
We also got to see the new Prompt Studio for the first time. We were treated to a demonstration of an admin creating a prompt template and making it available to users. This central repository of prompts ensures compliance with company policies and values, preventing users from creating their own templates on demand. If you’ve created email templates before, you’ll find the Prompt Studio interface very familiar.
Productivity Boost with Einstein GPT
We also received a whistle-stop collection of demos showing how Einstein GPT can be used to increase productivity in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Slack. Creating emails, summarising content, and suggesting actions are some of the impressive capabilities that we’ll explore further in our upcoming blog posts.
Celebrating the Community
Finally, it was great to see Todd Halfpenny recognised for all his ShirtForce* charity efforts and all the other work he does in the community. Congratulations for receiving this year’s Golden Hoodie award. Go Todd!
* shirtforce was created as a community project, supplying humorous t-Shirt designs for folk in the tech industry, primarily focused at those in the Salesforce ecosystem, and at the same time providing a way to donate money to good causes.
If this post has whetted your appetite, you can watch the keynote and selected other sessions on Salesforce+.
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