Displaying items by tag: Salesforce

GUEST RESEARCH: New Salesforce research reveals generative AI is among the top three business priorities for 81 per cent of Australian C-suite executives.

According to the Salesforce report nearly 300 leaders from large businesses across the country, 50 per cent said their organisation currently had a clear and defined generative AI strategy, while a further 42 per cent said they had started working on a generative AI strategy for their business.

Why it matters: Today, every company wants to be an AI company.

Research suggests, companies that haven’t already implemented AI risk losing significant ground to competitors, and this could happen more quickly than anticipated, as we move from chatbots to copilots to autonomous AI agents. This next great leap forward will feature agentic systems, which can be thought of as trusted digital colleagues as opposed to digital assistants.

C-suite executives said the key motivations driving generative AI adoption were:

• Enhanced productivity (43%)
• Innovative customer and employee experiences (42%)
• Obtaining a competitive edge in a dynamic market (41%).

Go deeper: Aussie C-suite executives are bullish on generative AI integration and are taking decisive action to ensure its success. The CEO is seen as being the most responsible for ensuring generative AI is successfully integrated (40%) and teams enabled, followed by the CIO/CTO (29%), and department heads (17%).

When asked where generative AI would have the biggest positive business impact, C-suite executives identified information technology (41%), operations (35%), customer service (31%) and marketing (29%).

Despite being widely used, however, over 92 per cent of C-suite executives said they believed there were still barriers to adoption of generative AI in their business today. Data factors were high on the list of barriers, including:

• Accessibility and inclusivity (31%)
• Generative AI producing inaccurate outputs (31%)
• The use of incomplete customer/company data to train AI models (30%)
• Lack of data privacy and security (28%)
• The use of out-of-date public data to train generative AI models (25%).

Customer perspective: “One of the reasons we recently expanded our agreement with Salesforce to include Einstein 1 was to use it to unlock the potential of generative AI across our business. But we wanted to do it in a deliberate way, so it's easy to build, grow and evolve as the business does,” said Jeremy Burton, CTO, hipages Group. “With Einstein’s generative AI, we’re excited about how it will help us create a better experience for our contact centre team, especially with how they engage the most important stakeholders on our platform: our tradies.
“If we can create a better experience for these customer-facing teams, we’ll be creating real value for our business with improved efficiency across these functions.”

The Salesforce perspective: The race is on to embrace generative AI and do it well, and that is nowhere more clearly felt than among business leaders.

That’s why we’re delivering the generative AI that gives customers the higher productivity, value customer relationships and margins they expect. Innovations include Einstein Service Agent and Einstein Sales Agents, built on the Einstein 1 Platform and powered by Data Cloud.

Customers need the confidence that their data is secure and trustworthy. That’s why we developed the Einstein Trust Layer which lets customers get the benefit of generative AI without compromising their data security and privacy controls.

“I’ve seen firsthand the pressure CEOs and other leaders are under to get this right, and quickly, to both deliver measurable value and remain competitive. We’ve made significant progress in a short time, but we’re still just scratching the surface when it comes to how generative AI can unlock the trapped value in many businesses,” said Frank Fillmann, General Manager ANZ, Salesforce.

“This is why we are laser focused on being trusted AI advisors to our customers, helping them with the roadmap to responsible innovation to support their customers and employees. Every AI conversation is a ROI conversation as we help more Australian businesses augment their teams with AI to improve productivity and accelerate growth.”

Methodology: Salesforce commissioned YouGov to conduct a double-anonymous online survey of C-suite leaders of large businesses in Australia. The research was conducted from 16th-23rd July 2024 and yielded responses from 288 C-suite executives across a variety of departments at companies with 250 or more employees.

COMPANY NEWS: Many of the world’s largest organisations rely on Salesforce to power their business operations and drive revenue faster. As the single source of truth for many downstream financial applications, Salesforce users cannot risk costly downtime caused by accidental errors or cyber events that can trigger a cascading effect across their interconnected systems.

COMPANY NEWS: GBST, a leading global provider of technology solutions for wealth management and financial advice, has been selected by Invest Blue for its WealthConnect product, a comprehensive advice solution built on Salesforce. The solution will provide Invest Blue with the tools to enhance administration, operations, and marketing efficiency, while also bolstering practice management, client engagement, and workflow capability.

Payments provider Tyro Payments has partnered with StoreConnect, enabling integrated payments for the “first ever point-of-sale (POS)” built on Salesforce for small to medium size businesses.

Digital marketing and automation platform Constant Contact has appointed Gerard Smith as its new Asia Pacific (APAC) head of partnerships.

iTWireTV: Rimini Street global head of Salesforce practice Jack Wagnon joins us to explain how Rimini Street shakes up the traditional Salesforce partner approach with its pragmatic approach and disciplined background.

COMPANY NEWS: Boomi, the intelligent integration and automation leader, today announced that Gartner has positioned Boomi as a Leader and placed the company highest for Ability to Execute in its Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). This will be the tenth consecutive time Boomi has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPaaS. Gartner evaluated 17 iPaaS providers on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.

Cloudwerx, an APAC Salesforce Summit partner, today announced the acquisition of Lightfold, a top-tier data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) consultancy.

GUEST INTERVIEW: iTWire caught up with Jussi Wäre who runs Salesforce cloud protection for WithSecure. He told us about the company's heritage, its new, Australian-based security cloud and the state of the industry.

GUEST RESEARCH: Rimini Street, a global provider of end-to-end enterprise software support, products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software, and a Salesforce and AWS partner, today announced findings of the Tech Research Asia Survey Report, Operational Excellence is a Key Part of System Modernisation, examining the challenges, opportunities, and priorities of CIOs and CTOs in their modernisation journey. The Rimini Street-sponsored research was conducted among more than 300 CxOs across Australia and New Zealand from retail, manufacturing, construction, banking, travel and hospitality, telecommunications, and utilities industries.

Auckland-based internet service provider Devoli is now offering its clients the ability to provision and manage internet and voice services for their customers in ANZ, expanding the reach of its Vumeda unified software platform.

Cloud cybersecurity company Cloudflare has appointed 25-year industry veteran Steve Bray as Head of Australia & New Zealand.

COMPANY NEWS: As organisations continue to migrate data to the cloud, where and how data is handled is becoming an important consideration. In response to growing demand, WithSecure (formerly F-Secure Business) is introducing the option for its Cloud Protection for Salesforce customers in Australia and Singapore to select where their data is processed. The trusted, natively integrated solution prevents attacks via files and URLs uploaded to Salesforce Clouds.

COMPANY NEWS: Peak Insight is an award-winning Cisco collaboration, contact centre and connectivity provider, today announced it has deployed Webex Calling and Contact Centre in a multi-year managed services agreement with paper manufacturer, Opal Packaging Australia.

COMPANY NEWS:  Adds two-way messaging capability to Salesforce for personalised, contextual communications to improve first contact resolution and customer engagement, and enhance Vonage Contact Center

Work operating system provider monday.com has appointed Stefan Pfister to the role of senior director of ANZ sales and Eric Kim to the role of business operations team lead. Both roles are based in Sydney.

COMPANY NEWS: WalkMe, a leading provider of digital adoption solutions, today announced that NEC has implemented WalkMe to drive the utilisation of purchasing, procurement, and customer management systems as a part of its digital transformation initiatives.

Sydney-based ecommerce specialist StoreConnect has secured $9 million in a seed round led by Bellini Capital.

COMPANY NEWS: Lucid Software, the leader in visual collaboration software, today announced the launch of its latest APIs and developer platform, which will enable Lucid users and partners to better streamline their workflows by creating, publishing, and distributing their apps and integrations within the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite. Top partners utilizing the APIs and developer platform at launch include Salesforce, Slack, ServiceNow, and Notion.

Salesforce Research: 88% of customers in Australia say financial service providers didn’t fully prepare them for an economic downtown