Does Salesforce use AI? A practical guide for 2025

There’s a ton of buzz around AI, and big companies like Salesforce are leading the charge. They promise their AI will revolutionize your business, but if you’re like most people, you’re probably wondering what it actually does and if it’s worth the hype.

You're not alone in feeling that way. Spend a little time on Reddit or industry forums, and you'll find plenty of folks who feel Salesforce's AI can come across as a buzzword, seems half-baked, or is just too complicated to set up without a perfectly defined project. It’s easy to get lost in the marketing speak.

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This guide is here to give you a straight answer. We’ll break down what Salesforce’s AI tools are, look at their real-world limitations, and show you how to get results, even if Salesforce’s built-in options aren’t the right move for your team.

Salesforce AI: A look at the Einstein platform

Let’s get one thing straight: when people say "Salesforce AI," they’re almost always talking about Einstein. This isn’t a single product you can just flip a switch on. Think of it more like a layer of AI tech that’s woven into Salesforce’s various products, which they call "Clouds" (like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud).

Originally, Einstein did two main things:

1. Predictive AI: This was its starting point. It analyzes your CRM data to guess what might happen next, like scoring leads to see which ones are most likely to turn into customers.

2. Generative AI (Einstein GPT): This is the newer, flashier part. It uses large language models (LLMs) to create new content, like drafting emails, summarizing phone calls, or writing knowledge base articles.

The main takeaway here is that Salesforce AI is a huge ecosystem. That’s both its greatest strength and, as we’ll see, a huge source of its complexity.

Key features and capabilities of Salesforce AI

To figure out if Salesforce AI makes sense for you, you need to know what its tools actually do. Here’s a look at some of the common uses for sales and customer service teams.

Einstein for Sales Cloud

For sales folks, Einstein is sold as a personal assistant that automates grunt work and offers up smart suggestions.

• Sales Emails: The AI can generate personalized emails, pulling customer info from your CRM to save reps from typing the same thing over and over.

• Call Summaries: It can transcribe and summarize sales calls, pulling out key action items so you don’t forget what was promised.

• Opportunity Scoring: This feature looks at your past deals to predict which current ones are most likely to close, helping your team focus on the right leads.

These all sound pretty handy, but there’s a catch: they work best if you have perfectly clean, organized data that lives only inside your Salesforce CRM. If your data is messy or incomplete, the AI’s predictions might not be very useful.

Einstein for Service Cloud

On the customer service side of the house, Einstein is designed to help agents solve problems faster.

• Service Replies: It can draft responses for support agents to use in chats or emails, helping them reply more quickly.

• Case Classification & Routing: It automatically reads incoming support tickets, figures out what they’re about, and sends them to the right person or team.

• Knowledge Article Generation: When a support case is solved, it can suggest creating a new help center article based on the solution.

This is where you can really start to feel the constraints of a closed system. The AI only learns from data inside Salesforce. It’s completely blind to the heaps of useful information your team has stored elsewhere, like in your company’s Confluence wiki, shared Google Docs, or recent troubleshooting threads in Slack.

Einstein Copilot and Copilot Studio

Einstein Copilot is the friendly chatbot interface that your employees use to get help. Behind the curtain is the Copilot Studio, which is the toolkit your admins use to tweak how the AI works with custom "Prompts," "Skills," and "Models."

While this customization is powerful, it’s also incredibly complicated. This is far from a plug-and-play solution. Building custom "skills" requires deep technical knowledge and a serious setup process, which often turns into a major hidden cost.

Common limitations and challenges of Salesforce AI

Now for the part that often gets skipped in the sales pitch. Let’s talk about the real challenges businesses run into when they try to use Salesforce AI.

It’s complex and not self-serve

Getting Einstein and Copilot Studio to do anything truly useful is a heavy lift. Building a custom "skill" isn’t something a support manager can knock out in an afternoon. It requires a specialist who knows Salesforce inside and out, and often, the help of pricey consultants. There’s no simple "sign up and try it" option.

This is a huge problem for teams that need to move fast and see results without a nine-month project. In contrast, tools like eesel AI are built to be self-serve. You can connect it to help desks like Zendesk or Freshdesk with a single click and be up and running in minutes, not months.

It struggles with knowledge outside Salesforce

We touched on this before, but it’s a big enough deal to mention again: Einstein’s brain is limited to what’s inside Salesforce. But most companies have their knowledge spread all over the place.

Here’s the problem that creates: a customer asks a question, but the answer is buried in a Google Doc, on a Confluence page, or in a Slack thread from last Tuesday. Einstein can’t find it. So, it either gives a wrong answer or just gives up, leaving your agents and your customers frustrated.

A good AI needs to connect all your knowledge dots. An AI platform like eesel AI plugs into over 100 sources right away, including Google Docs, Notion, and Confluence, giving it a complete picture to answer customer questions accurately.

Proving the ROI is difficult and risky

Remember those forum comments about unclear use cases? That’s because it’s hard to know what you’ll get out of a big Salesforce AI project before you’re already deep into it. You have to sink a lot of time and money upfront without a clear idea of what your automation rate or savings will be. It feels like a gamble.

That’s why being able to test with confidence is so important. With eesel AI, you can use a simulation mode that runs the AI on thousands of your past support tickets in a safe environment. You get a solid forecast of its performance and ROI before you let it talk to a single customer. No guesswork needed.

Salesforce AI pricing explained

Salesforce’s pricing is famously confusing, and its AI products are no different. A lot of it is kept under wraps, but here’s what we generally know.

• Sales & Service Cloud Einstein: This is usually sold as an add-on for around $50 per user per month. It’s included in the top-tier "Unlimited Edition" plan, but that plan costs a small fortune.

• Einstein GPT Credits: This is where it gets really tricky. The generative AI features aren’t unlimited. Instead, you get an allowance of "credits." If your team has a busy month and burns through them, you have to buy expensive "Enterprise Expansion Packs" to keep the lights on.

This credit system means your costs can be all over the place. A sudden spike in support tickets could leave you with a surprisingly big bill. This approach is the complete opposite of the transparent and predictable pricing of eesel AI. Our plans are straightforward, with no per-resolution fees, so you always know exactly what you’re paying.

Is Salesforce AI the right choice?

So, let’s circle back to the original question: does Salesforce use AI? Yes, absolutely. They’ve put a lot of money into it. But the reality is that it’s built for massive companies that are already 100% committed to the Salesforce world and have the technical teams and deep pockets to handle the complexity.

For most small to medium-sized businesses, or even specific teams that just need a flexible and affordable solution, Salesforce AI is often more trouble than it’s worth. The long setup times, siloed data, and unpredictable costs are serious downsides.

This is where specialized, integration-first AI tools really stand out. They give you a much faster, more flexible, and more honest path to automating your support without making you overhaul your entire way of working.

Get started with practical AI in minutes

Instead of getting bogged down in a complex implementation that takes months, you can see how powerful AI can be with your own data today.

eesel AI connects to your existing helpdesk and knowledge sources in just a few clicks. You can build and test an AI agent that learns from your team’s resolved tickets, drafts replies in your brand’s voice, and handles your frontline support. It’s simple enough for anyone to set up but powerful enough to make a real difference.

Sign up for a free trial and see for yourself how easy it is to launch an AI support agent that actually works, right from day one.