Category: AI

Generative AI and Salesforce

~ Sara Morgan ~ Leave a comment
My rendered version of a friendly AI Bot

My rendered version of a friendly AI Bot

Generative AI. ChatGPT. Large Language Models.

Heard of them?

Unless you have been living in a cave the past 6 months, you likely have. But, what does all that mean for Salesforce?

OpenAI released two API’s earlier this year. Since then, there has been an explosion in new products that can create new data or content based on patterns from existing data. To begin with, Salesforce has a research division centered around AI. And like many tech companies they announced a partnership with OpenAI.

The result?

Einstein GPT

Einstein GPT was released in March 2023. Users can use simple sentences to create content using Salesforce CRM. This is helpful because it can change quickly when customer information and needs change. Salesforce also offers other AI-powered features, like Einstein GPT, that can help with sales, service, marketing, Slack Customer 360 apps, and Developers. These features can automatically create tasks, articles, personalized content, and even help with chats. The goal is to make customers happy and help businesses be more productive.

As with all GPT products, the user just types in what they need and the system generates it. But, it is based on Salesforce data, which is NOT available to products like ChatGPT. And, if you do not like the first response, you just type in a follow-up question or response to get something else. Kind of like having a personal assistant that has access to Salesforce data.

Slack GPT

Built by OpenAI and currently in Beta, this will let you do the same things as Einstein GPT is looks like, but directly from Slack. However, it will allow integration with models used by ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Anthropic is a rival startup (funded by Salesforce Ventures) and founded by former OpenAI founders. It currently can digest a larger quantity of text that ChatGPT and looks to be more accurate that GPT-4.

Conclusion

This is all great, but how much does it cost and will it be safe? Two very good questions. The answers are changing on an almost daily basis as the AI wars continue.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI appeared yesterday in congress begging lawmakers to regulate the industry. That has got to be a first.

I will be following all this closely and will post more in this blog as I learn about things (especially those involving Salesforce). Stay tuned.

Does someone mentioning Artificial Intelligence make your pulse race?

~ Sara Morgan ~ Leave a comment

It’s ok if it does. Most people – even the ones that “know” a thing or two about artificial intelligence are a bit nervous about it right now. Not only is there a lot of uncertainty, but there is just an over abundance of information out there. And not all of it is accurate.

So, if the subject makes your head spin and you would like to know the answer to these questions:

“What exactly is Artificial Intelligence?”

“Why is it such a big deal now?”

“How will it make my life better?”

“Where can I learn more about it?”

Come check out one of my two Dreamforce sessions titled, “How to Embrace Artificial Intelligence”

Wednesday, September 26th at 5:30 pm

And

Thursday, September 27th at 1:00 pm

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The Next Generation of Programmers, Listen Up!

~ Sara Morgan ~ Leave a comment

Want to know what you need to know to be ahead of the curve in the world of Software Development?

Look no further than the following YouTube video, which was recorded during last years Dreamforce. It was a talk about “Modern Architectures: Above the Platform, Beyond the App” and it details all the things YOU (the next generation of programmer) needs to know to be successful in the new generation of app development.

Unfortunately, as of today, it has only been viewed 145 times and yet should have been PeterCoffeeSalesforceDotCom_sq300-269x200viewed 145 million times. In this video, Peter Coffee, the VP of Strategic Research at Salesforce is going to give you a message that you really need to hear.

I hope you take the time out of your day to hear his message. It is a VERY important one. Make sure you make it to the 26 minute mark when he says that, “We need to go further and provide an experience y recomposing what we used to call apps. We need to write code that intuits desire from behaviour, learns history and applies it predictively…”

 

 

 

What Ever Happened to Enhanced Computing?

~ Sara Morgan ~ 1 Comment

FirstBookIt is hard to believe, but it has been 11 years since my first book,Building Intelligent .NET Applications: Agents, Data Mining, Rule-Based Systems, and Speech Processing was released.

In that book I introduced the term “Enhanced Computing”, to identify software programs that utilize AI-based technologies to improve and extend traditional line of business applications. This was actually the whole premise of my book. Unfortunately, the term Enhanced Computing never really caught on, but a lot of the technologies I wrote about in that book have continued to advance and show great potential to dominate the technological landscape of tomorrow.

One thing I found interesting is that in my book I also wrote about something called the “AI Effect“, in which people observed that once a technology becomes widely accepted it is no longer associated with AI. Most recently there has been an explosion in the media concerning IOT (Internet of Things) and machine learning. Both of these concepts are firmly grounded in AI, yet you rarely see AI mentioned when referencing them. AI Effect? Must be, I think.

I was very excited to see this article about What’s Next in Computing?, in which the author goes into great detail about how we are poised for another technological revolution in which he predicts that we may have finally entered the golden age of AI.At the forefront of that is machine learning (or Data Mining as I refered to it 11 years ago).

Machine Learning and the use of Neural Networks has long been of great interest to me so I was particularly pleased to see this recent article, The cloud is finally making machine learning practical. Even though the article focused on machine learning using Amazon Web Services algorithm’s and Microsoft’s Azure machine-learning service, I see no reason why the same things could not happen on the Salesforce platform.

After all, with the recent release from Yahoo of their News Feed dataset, which is a sample of anonymized user interactions in the news feeds and is over 1.5 TB (that’s right, Terabytes) in size, all sorts of things may be possible for researchers independently exploring deep learning techniques. Especially those fueled by the cloud (hint, hint, wink, wink).

There have also been many advances in image recognition, due to other advances in deep learning, which have suddenly thrust AI more into the mainstream. In this recent article on Why 2015 was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence, a Google researcher states, “Computers used to not be able to see very well, and now they’re starting to open their eyes.”

In fact, just this week Mastercard announced it is offering a new security app that allows people to take a selfie in order to confirm their identity. It is called, “Selfie Pay”. Way Cool!!! I am pretty sure that one is going to take off soon.

EDIT on 2/29/16: And then, there was this announcement several days after I wrote this post that Salesforce acquires Machine-learning Startup PredictionIO. I am sure they just read my post and the hint, hint, wink, wink part and that is why they purchased them (LOL) Just Kidding, but talk about timing, eh?

So, here’s to the future of <whatever it might be called next>!!!