The ChatGPT revolution is drawing many big players. For instance, Salesforce has roared in, launching Einstein GPT, a generative AI tool for CRM that it claims can generate:
- Personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers
- Specific responses for customer service professionals
- Targeted content for
marketers
- Auto-generated code for developers.
To achieve all this, Salesforce is integrating OpenAI’s enterprise-grade ChatGPT technology with its
own AI models.
What’s more, Salesforce Ventures has launched a $250 million Generative AI Fund that will invest in high-potential startups in this field.
In
theory, marketing teams should be worried about these developments, although it would be hard for AI to replace the human-to-human communications live email copywriters can provide.
Many
people are worried, judging by a survey of 3,000 U.S. workers by FreelanceWritingJobs.com. Of the media employees polled, 52% are concerned that AI will make their profession redundant. In
general, 35% of all Americans have the same concern.
But the highest fear level is seen in the technology industry, where 63% fear replacement. The possible reason? Tech workers
already know more than anyone about the potential of AI to conduct tasks that were previously performed by humans.
And they have had front-row seats for the automation of jobs in such
areas as customer service and data analysis.
Don’t believe it? Salesforce itself announced a layoff of 10% of its workforce earlier this year, maybe 8,000 people.
But back to
Einstein GPT. According to Salesforce, it provides such sub-tools as:
- Einstein GPT for Sales — This can auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails and scheduling
meetings
- Einstein GPT for Service — This allows to auto-generate personalized agent chat replies.
- Einstein GPT for Marketing — Users can
dynamically generate personalized content across email, mobile, web and advertising.
- Einstein GPT for Developers — Firms can improve developer productivity, using an
AI chat assistant to generate code and ask questions for languages like Apex.
- Einstein GPT for Slack Customer 360 apps — This can deliver AI-powered customer insights in
Slack, including summaries of sales opportunities and surface end users actions like updating knowledge articles.
“Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and
integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at
launch,” says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.
Maybe so. But linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky argues that the new dawn is not yet breaking, “contrary to what can be
read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments.”
Chomsky continues, “However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in
computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason
and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.”
Just another point of view.