Top Four Tips For Einstein Success

I recently wrapped up a course for Pluralsight about “Salesforce Einstein: The Big Picture”. By the end of the course, I identified key areas where special attention could bring about success. Here are four specific tips and resources on preparing for your own success.

#1 – Get Your Data in Order

High quality data is crucial for the Einstein engine. Issues like missing records, duplicate entries, and inconsistent data standards can cause problems. It’s important to regularly review and update data to prevent inaccuracies. 

Identifying low quality data can be done using the free Data Quality Analysis Dashboards from Salesforce Labs.

This tool provides reports and dashboards to track data quality for various standard objects. Each dashboard includes a report that you can drill down into for further detail. You can also customize it to monitor additional custom objects.

# 2 -Consider Bias

In computer systems, bias can cause unfair outcomes, even if not on purpose. It’s important to identify and deal with bias to ensure fairness in models and data quality. Here are some types of bias to watch out for:

Measurement Bias: Occurs when data is oversimplified or mislabeled, leading to over or underrepresentation of certain groups. For example, using zip codes could unfairly include or exclude customers from certain areas.

Confirmation Bias: Happens when models reinforce existing belief systems. For instance, a recommendation system based solely on past purchases may limit options for customers.

Association Bias: Occurs when products are connected based on past assumptions, like assuming only girls play with dolls and boys with trucks.

To reduce bias, involve a diverse group in planning and design. Let everyone offer feedback freely and make sure they understand the importance of ethical design and bias detection. This group can also help review results and decide necessary changes.

When choosing training data, consider its source and potential biases. Removing biased data or fields from the dataset can prevent reinforcement of bias in AI systems.

By dealing with bias in the planning and design stages and including a diverse group of participants, we can move towards more fair and ethical AI systems. Check out this blog post for more on how AI can amplify biases.

# 3 -Go with the Flow

Models created with Prediction Builder or Recommendation Builder can produce a score that results in a recommendation. The recommendation is just a suggested action given either to an employee or a customer. For example, “Upsell this customer to the following package our company offers”.

Einstein Next Best Action is a tool used to create an “action strategy” based on that recommendation.

But what is an Action Strategy?

Quite simply it’s a flowchart that automatically executes business logic to generate some type of output. It could be an instruction given to an employee, a task assigned, an email sent, etc. The choices are endless.

For now, you can create strategies with Strategy builder or Flow builder, but be aware that Salesforce plans to retire Strategy Builder in the future, so I suggest only using Flow Builder. If you are not familiar with Flow Builder, now is the time to learn.

It is not difficult to use, but the flows you need to build may be quite complex, so the more comfortable you are using it, the better. I suggest you check out:

Building Flows With Flow Builder

Put Predictions Into Action Using Next Best Action

# 4 – Learn About Prompt Engineering

Are you familiar with ChatGPT? It’s quite the tool, capable of impressive feats. But let’s face it, sometimes it falls short of our expectations. The secret to unlocking its full potential, along with other GPT products from Salesforce, lies in the art of crafting the perfect prompt.

So, what’s a prompt? It’s simply the input you give to ChatGPT or any similar tool to get the desired output. But here’s the catch: getting the right answer often requires some trial and error. You ask a question, ChatGPT responds, and if it’s not quite what you need, you refine your prompt and try again. It’s a bit like a conversation where you keep tweaking your query until you hit the jackpot.

But who has the time to craft elaborate prompts every single time? Not your average Sales or Service rep, that’s for sure. That’s where prompt templates come into play. These are pre-made prompts tailored for specific scenarios. They’re like ready-made templates you can select whenever you need ChatGPT to do something for you.

But here’s the real magic: connecting these templates with your Salesforce data. This is where merge fields come in handy. They allow you to pull in information from Salesforce, making your prompts even more powerful.

Designing a prompt template, especially for something like crafting a customer email, requires careful planning. You need to consider who the email is for, what it aims to achieve, the context, any constraints, and more. It’s an iterative process that involves testing, reviewing, and refining until you get it just right.

Luckily, Salesforce provides tools like Prompt Builder to make this process easier. With Prompt Builder, you can not only include merge fields but also add logic to your templates. This opens up a world of possibilities for common business workflows like email generation or creating text for case summaries.

So, if you want to unlock the full potential of ChatGPT and take your business workflows to the next level, dive into prompt templates and Prompt Builder. And hey, if you need some tips, Salesforce has got you covered with their blog offering 7 tips for powerful prompt design. Happy prompting!

How to Dive into Salesforce Einstein: Your Starting Point!

It’s understandable if you feel overwhelmed by all the AI information hitting you right now. Even though Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016, the attention towards it lately has increased exponentially. And since 2016, Einstein has evolved and added a lot more products.

You might be feeling anxious about catching up?!?

Don’t worry. If you’re ready to dive into Einstein, but not sure where to start, I released a course on Pluralsight called, “Salesforce Einstein: The Big Picture“.  This course will look at all the AI-based products Salesforce provides and offer tips for success.

The majority of products are considered out-of-the-box applications. They are embedded directly inside of CRM applications you use every day. They each serve a very specific function and are easy to use and setup.

There is also the Einstein Platform, which provides powerful tools that allow Admins and Developers to build their own customized AI-based solutions. They use multiple tools to create custom AI assistants that perform a combination of intelligent functions.

The majority of products are considered out-of-the-box applications. They are embedded directly inside of CRM applications you use every day.

Salesforce Einstein Basics

Einstein Product Bundles

Salesforce intends to embed Einstein into all clouds. But for now, it is limited to a few. It’s offered in bundles and add-ons that include:

Einstein for Sales – Designed to help sales reps close deals faster by automating busy work, offering customer insights , analytics, and generating content, like customer emails. Lead and Opportunity scoring use predictive models for lead conversion and opportunity closure.

Einstein for Service – Improves customer service by offering recommendations, routing cases effectively, generating content like emails or service replies, and offering chatbots for customers 24/7. Additionally, Service Analytics offers pre-built dashboards displaying key performance indicators derived from service data.

Einstein for Marketing – Provides scoring tools for predicting customer engagement and optimal send times, along with Messaging Insights to monitor email activities. Copy insights aid in generating effective subject lines and content, while content tools facilitate testing to identify top-performing versions. Additionally, it offers email and web recommendations for personalized experiences and expands audiences through lookalike identification.

Einstein for Commerce – Personalizes the shopper experience with product and search recommendations, which can be displayed in designated slots on a commerce site. Additionally, it provides insights to merchandisers for optimizing storefronts.

Einstein for Analytics – Utilizes assets such as datasets, lenses, dashboards, and apps, which can be built and viewed using Analytics Studio. This enables the creation of rich interactive visualizations, while Einstein Discovery offers advanced analytics, including predictive models, to deliver insights and recommendations based on CRM data.

Einstein for Admins and Developers – Offers improved global search and generating code using natural language. Additionally, includes Vision and Language products for creating AI assistants, along with Prediction Builder for developing predictive models, such as predicting late payments from invoices and displaying results in list views and record pages.

Salesforce Einstein Pricing and Readiness Guide

Core Features

Most of the products included in the bundles are built using the following core features:

Prediction Models – Prediction models utilize machine learning to allow orgs to use data from the past to predict the future. Using a probability score value, these models can predict things like how likely it is that an invoice will be paid on time.

Recommendation Models – Machine learning is also used to recommend anything to employees and customers by connecting two Salesforce objects together. Recommendation models can then turn that recommendation into an action.

Natural Language Processing – Works by assigning labels to text. A machine learning model then learns the mapping between input and labels to predict the intent and sentiment of the input.

Chatbots – When created for customers, they can not only read the text input customers provide, but map this to a specific customer need, perform some action and return what the customer needs.

Classification –  Is an AI tool that is good for assigning labels to data. Einstein uses deep learning to predict what labels need to be assigned and can consume unstructured data, like a Case description or subject field.

Generative AI – Using many of the other core features and combined with a Large Language Model (LLM), Generative AI can respond to natural language questions or requests with responses resembling what a knowledgeable human would provide.

Trailhead on Getting Started with Artificial Intelligence

I will be adding more posts with information from the course, but if you want to check out the Pluralsight course and do not have a subscription, you can always sign up for a 10 day free trial.

Tips for passing Salesforce AI Associate exam

I just passed the Salesforce Certified AI Associate exam. The exam is only 40 questions and costs only $75 US Dollars, so why not?

Of all the Salesforce certification tests I have taken, this was honestly the easiest. But, you should still prepare. As long as you use this Trailhead Trailmix, you should be fine.

I went through the majority of the trailmix. The Modules are good, but I suggest studying these docs specifically:

Good luck as your prepare for the exam, but don’t think you need a data science degree or math training to do it. You don’t.

Generative AI and Salesforce

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?

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!

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?

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>!!!