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Dreamforce 2017: Intelligence is the Next Industrial Revolution
Posted by Ron Snyder in Salesforce Dreamforce | 1 comments
Intelligence, the Next Industrial Revolution
The central theme of the conference was that
Intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution. One of the
things that Salesforce is so good at is leveraging and even
driving key trends. Staying on top of the trends will help
you drive growth in your organization. This is a trend you
want to take advantage of because it can help you and your
team do your jobs better, faster and easier. To put this in
perspective, here is an overview of the evolution of the
technological revolutions:
The central theme of the conference was that
Intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution. One of the
things that Salesforce is so good at is leveraging and even
driving key trends. Staying on top of the trends will help
you drive growth in your organization. This is a trend you
want to take advantage of because it can help you and your
team do your jobs better, faster and easier. To put this in
perspective, here is an overview of the evolution of the
technological revolutions:
- Steam: a much better way of propelling vehicles and harnessing energy.
- The automobile: mass production of the automobile, then trucks- with the creation of good roads- made transportation of people and goods generally available. (I added this one.)
- Electricity: a much better way of powering things and transmitting energy.
- Computing: harnessing machines to do tasks more consistently and faster. (I added this one.)
- The Internet: making information and computing available in a virtually ubiquitous manner. (They called this computing, but the date they gave, 1995, coincides with the advent of the first internet browser.)
- Mobile Devices: making it easy to access the internet and services virtually anywhere. (I added this one.)
- Intelligence: taking data and turning it into insights that enable jobs to be done more efficiently- or do jobs that couldn’t have been done before due to the complexity or response time needed.
To clarify, the trend is called
“artificial intelligence” (AI). It is
not new and the intelligence is not
artificial. It is real intelligence
programmed by people into software that
runs on computers. The first group to
dive into this was a group in the MIT
labs in the mid to late 1970’s. From
this, they created LISP Machines Inc.
This brought the first artificial
intelligence language/software to
market. I had the opportunity to
interact with them. What they were doing
was fascinating.
Today, we are building on top of that
and a lot of work that has been done
since. This technology is built into so
many things we see today, for example:
the recommendation engine in Amazon
("people who bought this also bought…"),
Google Adwords, Facebook and Pandora and
all software that learns what a user
wants based on what they do… Google’s
search engine, which is continuously
learning/updating what to present to the
user… Apple’s Siri… Facebook’s facial
recognition… and the list goes on.
The AI theme was quite visible in
Salesforce’s keynotes and presentations.
Salesforce showed Einstein, the AI
engine they bought, and how it could
impact many functions across a company.
In sales, for example, it can analyze
your pipeline and return insight into
what is going on, explain why, recommend
how to improve it and predict the
outcome if you take the recommendation.
On the Cloud Expo floor, there were many
apps touting AI capabilities; enabling
natural language interfaces, AI-driven
analytics and recommendation engines to
name three. The applications included
enabling users to input data via voice,
training and development environments
for sales teams and analytics engines
that do analysis that could not be done
before and provide new insights.
This is a great example of how trends
take a while to develop, then they
emerge and “all of a sudden” are a big
deal. This exponential development of AI
tools has been enabled by the fact that
today’s developer can assemble the
building blocks that have been developed
before and add their innovation on top
of it.
What can you do about
it?
- See how you can utilize Salesforce’s Einstein. It can help you do a better job of finding the best leads and opportunities to work on and help you identify deals that need to be worked on to make your forecast.
- Use some of the other tools in the AppExchange to improve your team’s effectiveness and efficiency. For example, there are offerings that enable you to record and serve up video for training and vetting of sales reps. One of these uses IBM’s Watson to review presentations that sales reps record and submit. The program grades how well a customer will receive a presentation from an emotional perspective and provides a translation of the script for the evaluator to read. The manager or assigned person then reviews the presentation- accessing it through the system- and provides feedback. You can also place the presentations on a leader board so that team members learn from each other.
