AI is shaking things up for businesses everywhere, especially when it comes to managing customer relationships (that’s CRM, for short). At the heart of Salesforce’s AI push is something they call Einstein. Think of it as a set of smart tools built right into the platform, designed to make every customer chat or email a bit smarter and help everyone on your team get more done. AI isn’t just a buzzword anymore; it’s becoming a must-have for handling customer relationships smoothly, particularly in busy support teams.
Einstein is woven throughout the whole Salesforce platform. The idea is to transform everything from figuring out future sales to automating customer service. But like any advanced tech, it helps to really understand what it can do, what might be tricky, and how it stacks up against other options. In this post, we’ll break down what Salesforce AI, or Einstein, is all about, how it works, the many ways you can use it, some good ways to put it into practice, and why checking out alternatives like eesel AI might be the right move for what you need.
What is Salesforce AI and Einstein?
Basically, Salesforce AI is a bunch of artificial intelligence and machine learning tech built directly into the Salesforce platform. They’ve branded all these capabilities under the name Einstein. The main goal here is to make CRM smarter, helping companies guess what customers might need next, automate tasks, and get better insights from their data.
First launched back in 2016, Salesforce Einstein has come a long way. It started with more basic prediction features and has grown into the bigger Einstein 1 platform we see today. It mixes Salesforce’s own private AI models with public ones, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and feeds them your CRM data. This means you can talk to the platform using plain language and get AI-generated stuff and ideas that are specifically about your customers.
How Einstein works and it’s core capabilities
Einstein uses core AI tech like Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand, process, and create text and insights that sound like they came from a human. It learns from tons of data, ideally the trusted internal data specific to your business, so it stays relevant.
When you ask Einstein a question or give it something to do, it uses methods like dynamic grounding to understand what you mean based on the data around your request. The Salesforce Data Cloud is a big help here. It pulls together all your company’s customer data from different spots, making it ready for Einstein to look at and use.
There’s also a key piece designed to help with data privacy worries called the Einstein GPT Trust Layer. This setup helps keep sensitive customer data safe by making sure those big language models (LLMs) don’t hang onto it. This way, businesses can use generative AI without worrying as much about security or following the rules.
Einstein across Salesforce AI’s product suite
Einstein isn’t just one tool you open; it’s a whole set of AI features tucked into the different parts of the Salesforce Customer 360 family. This means you’ll find AI built into many of the Salesforce products you might already be using.
You’ll spot Einstein in major product areas like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Slack, Tableau, Flow, and even tools for Developers. It offers a bunch of features, from predicting things and automating tasks to creating content and helping with conversations.
Some key parts include:
- Einstein Copilot, which is like a conversational AI helper right inside Salesforce.
- Copilot Studio, a set of tools (like Prompt Builder, Skills Builder, and Model Builder) that lets businesses build and launch their own AI-powered apps and workflows.
Einstein is built to deliver billions of predictions and insights every day across all these connected apps.
Applications and impact across your business
One of the coolest things about Einstein is how it can apply AI across different parts of a business, adjusting what it does for what each team needs.
Einstein in sales cloud
Einstein helps sales folks work smarter. It can automate things like:
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- Researching accounts
- Getting ready for meetings
- Keeping records updated
- Writing personalized emails
- Looking at call notes to see how a customer felt and suggest what to do next
- Helping write sales emails and make contracts personal.
Einstein in service cloud
For customer service teams, Einstein can handle the first questions that come in automatically. It also:
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- Generates personalized replies based on live info
- Creates summaries of work and calls
- Suggests helpful articles
- Gives field service teams mobile work briefings
It’s designed to help agents be fast and good at their job by taking care of routine stuff and making information easy to find.
Einstein in marketing cloud
Marketers can use Einstein to:
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- Write copy for campaigns
- Get better at dividing audiences into groups
- Improve who they send emails to
- Create personalized landing pages
- Make sense of marketing numbers
An AI marketing assistant can help look at real-time data to make campaigns perform better.
Einstein in in commerce cloud
In online stores, Einstein helps staff create digital shops that actually get people to buy. It automates tasks like:
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- Filling in product details
- Writing product descriptions in different languages
- Creating personalized deals and ads for customers.
Einstein in Slack, Tableau, Flow, and developer tools
Einstein also shows up in other spots:
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- Slack AI brings trusted generative AI into team chats for summaries and writing help.
- Tableau AI helps users look at data and create charts with smart predictions.
- Einstein for Developers helps with writing and checking code.
- Einstein for Flow lets you create workflows just by typing what you want.
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While Einstein can do a lot across these different teams, sometimes teams specifically focused on making customer support workflows work better find that tools built just for that job offer more specific features and are easier to manage costs with, especially for AI agents and assistants focused on service.
Key benefits of using Salesforce AI
Bringing Salesforce AI tools into your business can really help you out, making things run smoother and better in today’s competitive world.
Here are some key benefits:
- Better Sales and Marketing: Einstein helps teams find the right potential customers more easily, which can mean more sales. It also makes marketing campaigns run smoother with messages tailored just for the person receiving them.
- Improved Customer Experience: By automating boring tasks and giving personalized help, businesses can make customers much happier overall.
- Increased Productivity: Automating repetitive jobs like sorting leads, entering data, and drafting replies frees up your team to spend time on more important stuff.
- Better Decision Making: AI tools give you valuable insights into how customers act, what they want, and how they buy. This helps you make smarter decisions faster.
- Competitive Advantage: When you understand customer behavior better, you can give them personalized responses and offers. This helps you stay ahead of the curve.
- Unified View of the Customer: Einstein works smoothly across all the Customer 360 products. This helps bring customer data together so everyone in different departments sees the same picture, which helps them work together better.
Considerations, implementation, and alternatives
While Salesforce Einstein is definitely powerful, businesses thinking about using it should also know about potential downsides and difficulties.
Common challenges and limitations
Here are some limitations and challenges:
- Complexity: It can be a bit tricky and might need a lot of time, money, and know-how to set up a full AI system across a whole company, especially for smaller businesses.
- Cost: While some basic AI features come with certain plans, many of the more advanced things, especially those that do deeper automation and smart work, are extra add-ons or cost money based on how much you use them. This can make budgeting tough, as costs can jump up quickly depending on how many interactions happen or which specific features you’re using.
- Customization Limits: While Einstein lets you customize things, it might not be as detailed as tools built just for specific jobs. For example, getting the exact tone right or setting up complicated workflows with many steps might be limited compared to platforms made specifically for automation in areas like customer support.
- Training Data Sources: Training can sometimes be mostly limited to specific data sources like help center articles for certain features, which might not cover everything your business knows.
- Data Privacy and Responsibility: Even though Salesforce has done a lot with the Einstein Trust Layer to help with data privacy and using AI responsibly, these are still really important things to consider with any AI setup.
Many businesses find that while Einstein is strong, figuring out its pricing and how to customize it for specific needs like customer support can be a headache. This often leads them to look for options that are more flexible and cost less.
To get the most out of Salesforce AI, businesses should think smartly about how they put it in place. It’s not just a matter of turning it on; it takes planning and ongoing work.
Best practices for implementing Salesforce AI
Here are some best practices for implementing Salesforce AI:
- Define Clear Goals: Figure out exactly what you want to achieve and where AI can make the biggest difference. Do you want to automate those first-level support tickets, get better at predicting sales, or make marketing campaigns more personal? Having clear goals helps you focus.
- Ensure Data Quality: Making sure your data in the Data Cloud is good quality and easy to get to is super important. Einstein relies on this data to give you good insights and take the right actions, so if the data is messy, the results will be too.
- Prepare Your Teams: People need to know how to actually use AI tools like Einstein Copilot, how to understand the info it gives them, and when a human still needs to step in.
- Prioritize Responsible AI: Thinking about using AI responsibly right from the start is a must. Be aware of potential unfairness in the data used for training and make sure you have strong data security in place, using features like the Einstein Trust Layer.
- Implement Incrementally: Maybe try rolling it out in steps. Start with small projects in one department or for a few specific uses to see how it goes, get feedback, and fine-tune things before rolling it out more widely.
- Monitor and Iterate: Keep an eye on how your AI tools are doing and keep improving the models, workflows, and training data based on what you see happening in the real world.
While Salesforce AI, or Einstein, is a major player for adding AI into CRM, it’s not the only choice out there. For specific jobs like customer support, tools built just for that can sometimes offer unique benefits.
eesel AI is one such powerful alternative, especially designed to make helpdesk operations run better and automate customer support tasks more effectively. It can often do this more affordably than bigger, broader CRM AI platforms.
Comparison: eesel AI vs Einstein AI
Let’s stack up Salesforce AI (Einstein) and eesel AI side-by-side, focusing on things that matter for automation and support:
| Feature | Salesforce AI (Einstein) | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing Model | Per-agent, add-ons, usage-based fees | Pay-per-interaction, no per-agent fees |
| Training Sources | Primarily Help Center, CRM data, Data Cloud | 100+ sources including past tickets, internal docs (Google Docs, Confluence), external wikis, PDFs, etc., with auto-syncing |
| Customization Level | Preset tones, some workflow configuration | Detailed prompting, custom tone control, define specific escalation parameters and actions |
| Actionability/Depth | Summaries, suggestions, basic actions (e.g., routing) | Perform real actions via custom API calls (refunds, order lookups), multi-bot workflows, intelligent triage, tagging |
| Testing Capabilities | Limited pre-live testing | Simulation, controlled rollout, browser extension testing |
| Primary Focus | Broad CRM AI (Sales, Service, Marketing, etc.) | Specialized, deep AI for customer support automation (AI Agent) and agent assistance (AI Assistant) |
When you look at pricing, Einstein’s fees per agent, plus costs for extra features and charges based on how much you use them, can really add up. This is especially true for teams that are growing or handle lots of support requests. eesel AI, on the other hand, has a clear pay-per-interaction model with no fees per agent, which can make costs more predictable.
For training, while Einstein uses CRM data and Help Center content, eesel AI can learn from a much wider variety of sources. This includes past tickets, internal documents from places like Confluence or Google Docs, and external wikis. A neat bonus is that it can automatically sync to keep its knowledge fresh.
Customization is another area where eesel AI gives you more wiggle room. Instead of just picking from set tones or basic setups, you can use detailed instructions to really fine-tune how the bot sounds and acts. This helps it match your brand voice and specific workflow needs perfectly.
Beyond just giving summaries or ideas, eesel AI is built to actually do things. It can perform real tasks by making custom calls to other systems (like Shopify for looking up orders) or handle complicated workflows using setups with multiple bots. Its testing features, like simulating how it will work and rolling it out slowly, also let businesses perfect the AI’s behavior before letting everyone use it. This helps avoid mistakes and makes for a smoother launch.
While there are other kinds of AI tools businesses might use, from general AI chat models to specific marketing platforms, eesel AI stands out as a direct and strong alternative for the main CRM AI job we’ve talked about, especially for deep customer support automation and getting things done efficiently.
Pro Tip: If your business relies heavily on helpdesks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom, a specialized AI solution like eesel AI can often give you more customized automation and a better return on your investment than a broader CRM AI platform.
Smarter support starts today!
Salesforce AI (Einstein) is packed with tools that help teams work faster, delight customers, and make smarter decisions. But setup complexity, rising costs, and limited customization can make it a tough fit, especially for teams focused on customer support.
That’s where eesel AI shines. Built specifically for support workflows, it’s affordable, deeply customizable, and capable of taking real actions not just generating insights. It learns from a wide range of data and works right inside the helpdesks you already use, like Zendesk and Freshdesk.
If you’re looking to automate customer support, help your agents be more productive, and keep costs in check, eesel AI offers a flexible and smart solution. Start a free trial today or book a demo to see eesel AI in action.
