A practical guide to Salesforce AI contact enrichment in 2025

If your team lives in Salesforce, you know the struggle. It’s supposed to be the single source of truth for your customer data, but let’s be honest, it gets clogged with old, incomplete information surprisingly fast. Contact details go stale, new stakeholders pop up, and suddenly your reps are spending more time researching than selling.

It’s not just a feeling, either. Some studies have found that sales reps can spend up to 72% of their week on tasks that aren't selling, and a huge part of that is just trying to keep records up to date.

That’s the problem that Salesforce AI Contact Enrichment is meant to solve. The idea is to have AI automatically update, verify, and add detail to your contact and account records, freeing up your team to focus on building relationships and closing deals.

So, let's dig into what that actually means. We’ll look at how Salesforce’s own Einstein AI handles this, where it tends to fall short, and how a more connected AI platform can give you the clean, valuable customer data you’re really after.

What is Salesforce AI contact enrichment?

Put simply, Salesforce AI Contact Enrichment is the use of artificial intelligence to automatically add, update, and verify the information in your Salesforce CRM. It's about turning a basic contact record with a name and an email into a detailed profile, without anyone having to do the manual grunt work.

This goes way beyond just finding a missing phone number. Modern AI can read and understand unstructured text from all kinds of sources, like email signatures, meeting notes, and old support tickets, to pull out genuinely useful information.

It adds helpful layers of context to your data, including things like:

• Firmographic data: Details about the company itself, like its size, industry, location, and revenue.

• Contact data: Verified email addresses, direct phone numbers, and links to their social profiles.

• Technographic data: A list of the technologies a company uses, which can be gold for sales outreach.

• Behavioral and Intent data: Clues that a prospect might be actively researching a solution like yours.

The whole point is to build a complete and accurate picture of every contact and account. When your data is that reliable, your sales and support teams can stop guessing and start making smarter, more personal connections.

How native Salesforce AI contact enrichment works

Salesforce’s main tool for this is Einstein AI, which includes a feature for "Automatic Contact Enhancements." The way it works is by using generative AI to scan your team's email and calendar activity (assuming you've got it synced up through Einstein Activity Capture) to find and suggest updates to your records.

A view of Salesforce Einstein AI summarizing a case, showcasing one of the platform's native Salesforce AI Contact Enrichment features.

It’s programmed to spot key bits of information from your daily back-and-forth, such as:

• Contact details: Spotting phone numbers, addresses, and new job titles in email signatures.

• Hierarchical information: Figuring out seniority levels and departments to help you map an organization.

• Deal-related attributes: Identifying roles like "Decision Maker" or "Champion" to give you a better sense of who you're talking to.

It sounds pretty good on paper, and for catching basic updates, it’s definitely a step up from doing everything by hand.

Limitations of Salesforce's native tools

While Einstein is a decent start, relying only on Salesforce's built-in tools for enrichment has some real limitations that can keep you from getting the full picture.

• Siloed knowledge: The biggest catch is that Einstein mostly learns from data that’s already inside the Salesforce world. It’s looking at your emails, calendar invites, and logged calls. But what about all the valuable info scattered across the rest of your company's apps? Your team’s collective knowledge lives in internal wikis on Confluence or Notion, project plans in Google Docs, and years of customer solutions buried in Zendesk tickets. Einstein is blind to all of it.

• Limited customization: For the most part, the rules and data points Einstein looks for are set by Salesforce. If you want to teach it to find something specific to your business, like a customer's subscription plan or a product interest they mentioned in a support ticket, you’ll likely find it’s not really possible. You're more or less stuck with what Salesforce decides is important.

• A "closed ecosystem" approach: Salesforce's AI tools are designed to work best when you're using their entire suite of products. If you try to pull in knowledge from other sources or build custom workflows that connect to other tools, you'll probably need developer help and complex API work, which kind of defeats the purpose of an easy, automated solution.

This all leads to a pretty important question: what if you could enrich your Salesforce data using knowledge from all your tools, and have full control over how it works?

Key features to look for in a contact enrichment tool

If you're feeling boxed in by the native tools, you're definitely not alone. When you start looking for a dedicated enrichment platform, here are the things that really make a difference.

• A unified knowledge source: Your company's real brain isn't just in Salesforce. The best tools can connect to everything: your help desks like Zendesk and Freshdesk, company wikis in Confluence or Google Docs, chat histories in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and more. A complete picture of your customer requires a complete dataset.

• A customizable workflow engine: You need to be in control. A great tool lets you define exactly what the AI does and when. This means you can set up rules to only enrich certain records, or create custom actions, like telling the AI to create a follow-up task, update a ticket, or even ping an external tool to grab order history.

• Risk-free simulation: How can you trust an AI to start changing your most valuable data? You test it first. Look for a "sandbox" or simulation mode that lets you run your enrichment rules on thousands of your past records. It will show you exactly what the AI would have done, so you can see how it performs before you ever turn it on for live data.

• Radical simplicity and self-service: You shouldn't have to sit through weeks of sales calls and demos just to get started. The best modern tools are self-serve. You should be able to sign up, connect your apps in a few clicks, and build your first workflow from a simple dashboard in minutes.

Here’s a quick rundown of how these features compare:

Beyond native tools: Why a unified AI platform is the answer

The shortcomings of native tools show that what’s really needed is a single AI platform that can connect all your company knowledge and put you in the driver's seat. This is the idea behind solutions like eesel AI.

Connect to your company's entire brain

Instead of just learning from emails, eesel AI connects to over 100 sources to learn from everything. It can analyze past support tickets from Zendesk, read your internal wikis in Confluence, and pull information from documents in Google Docs. This gives the AI the richest possible context, letting it find important details that siloed tools would completely miss.

A look at eesel AI’s integrations, which serve as a flexible alternative for Salesforce AI Contact Enrichment.

Get started in minutes, not months

You can forget the typical enterprise software experience of mandatory sales calls and lengthy demos. eesel AI is built to be completely self-serve. You can sign up, use one-click integrations to connect your tools, and have a working AI agent ready to go in minutes, no developers needed.

Take full control with a workflow engine

With eesel AI, you get a fully customizable workflow engine to build "recipes" for how your enrichment should work. You aren't stuck with one-size-fits-all rules. You can define the AI's persona, choose exactly what information it should look for, and tell it what actions to take next.

Test with confidence

The simulation mode in eesel AI lets you run your enrichment setup on thousands of past records in a safe environment. You can see exactly how it would have updated them, giving you a clear forecast of its value and accuracy before you flip the switch. It takes all the guesswork out of deployment.

Comparing Salesforce AI Contact Enrichment pricing

Let's talk money, because figuring out the cost of AI enrichment can be a real headache, especially with big enterprise software bundles.

Salesforce's AI features are often baked into their higher-tier plans, like Einstein 1 Sales Edition, or sold as add-ons. This usually means a big platform upgrade, and the pricing is almost never public. You'll have to talk to a sales rep to get a quote, making it hard to predict the true cost.

This is a world away from modern, transparent pricing models. For instance, eesel AI's pricing is designed to be straightforward and predictable.

• No per-resolution fees: The plans are based on a set number of AI interactions (like one reply or one action) per month. You won’t get a surprise bill if you have a busy month enriching a lot of records.

• Flexible plans: You can start with a month-to-month plan and cancel whenever you want. This is a breath of fresh air compared to the long-term annual contracts most enterprise tools require.

• All-inclusive tiers: All the core features like integrations, reporting, and the simulation mode are included in every plan. There are no hidden charges for the stuff you actually need.

Here's a quick comparison of the approaches:

Stop manually updating Salesforce and start Salesforce AI Contact Enrichment

Look, nobody enjoys spending their day manually updating Salesforce records. It's tedious, it's prone to errors, and it pulls your team away from actually selling or helping customers. Your data is constantly changing, and if you aren't actively and automatically enriching it, you're working with an incomplete picture.

While the native Salesforce AI Contact Enrichment tools are a step in the right direction, their siloed knowledge and lack of control often keep them from being truly transformative. The better answer is a unified, flexible AI platform that works with all the tools you already use.

By connecting all your knowledge sources and automating enrichment with a powerful workflow engine, you can finally create that single source of truth in Salesforce that your whole team can actually rely on.

Ready to see what truly automated and intelligent enrichment looks like? With eesel AI, you can connect your knowledge sources and get started in minutes, not months. Start your free trial today.