As the biggest name in CRM, it was only a matter of time before Salesforce went all-in on artificial intelligence. Their collection of AI tools, all under the "Einstein" brand, aims to sprinkle a bit of smart tech into every corner of your business, from sales and marketing to customer service. The promise is huge: an AI layer that handles boring tasks, finds hidden gems in your data, and makes every customer interaction feel personal.
But let’s be honest, figuring out the Salesforce world can be a full-time job. Their AI tools are definitely powerful, but they also come with a steep learning curve, a whole new vocabulary of acronyms, and costs that aren’t always obvious. This guide is here to give you the real story. We’ll walk through the main Salesforce AI products, explain what they do in plain English, and point out where they might create more headaches than they solve for teams that need to stay agile.
What is Salesforce Einstein?
First things first, Salesforce Einstein isn’t a single thing you can buy and install. It’s more like a brand name for all the different AI technologies Salesforce has built into its platforms. It’s the intelligence layer working behind the scenes.
In the beginning, Einstein was all about predictive AI, which basically means it looked at your past data to make educated guesses about the future. For example, Einstein Lead Scoring would sift through all your old leads to figure out which new ones were most likely to become customers. It was a clever way to find patterns in the data you already had.
But with generative AI becoming the talk of the town, Einstein had to grow up. Now, with new tools like Einstein GPT and the rebranded Agentforce, it can also create brand-new content. We’re talking about drafting emails, summarizing long support tickets, and even writing first drafts of knowledge base articles.
To calm everyone’s nerves about data privacy, Salesforce also rolled out the Einstein Trust Layer. This is a built-in safety net designed to stop the AI models from holding onto your sensitive customer information. It was their way of tackling the big "is my data safe?" question that’s on everyone’s mind. It’s a good foundation, but it’s just the start of what you need to know.
Key Salesforce AI products for customer service
While Salesforce AI has its hand in everything, you feel its presence most in customer service. This is where teams are constantly trying to solve problems faster without sounding like robots. Here’s a breakdown of the main tools for support teams and the real-world hurdles they come with.
Einstein for Service and Agentforce
Einstein for Service is the main AI toolkit for support agents. It’s built to take over repetitive tasks so your team can focus on the tricky stuff. Its key features include:
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Service Replies: Suggests and generates responses for agents while they’re chatting with customers.
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Work Summaries: Creates quick summaries of cases, so anyone can get the gist of an issue without reading the whole history.
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Knowledge Creation: Helps write new knowledge base articles based on cases that have already been solved.
The challenge: These features sound fantastic on paper, but they all operate on one giant assumption: that every single piece of company knowledge is stored neatly within Salesforce. The AI learns from your Salesforce Knowledge articles and past ticket data, and that’s it. But what happens if your team, like most teams, doesn’t live exclusively in Salesforce? If your technical guides are in Confluence or your standard procedures are in Google Docs, the AI is completely blind to them. This leaves you with a massive knowledge gap, and the only solution is to undertake a huge, painful migration project just to feed the AI.
Think of your knowledge base as the brain for your AI. If that brain is split across ten different apps, you need a way to connect the pieces. Instead of forcing all your data into one box, eesel AI plugs right into the tools you already love. It pulls together knowledge from Confluence, Google Docs, past tickets, and more, giving your AI the full picture without you having to migrate a single document.
Einstein Bots
Einstein Bots are the Salesforce answer to chatbots. You can put them on your website or in messaging apps to handle common questions, deflect simple tickets before they reach an agent, and pass the tough conversations to a human.
The challenge: Actually building an Einstein Bot is nowhere near as simple as it sounds. If you want your bot to do anything more than recite FAQs, you’ll need a pretty solid grasp of the Salesforce platform. Soon enough, you’ll find yourself tangled up in Flow Orchestrator or even writing custom Apex code to make it work. This puts up a huge wall for non-technical teams and turns a quick setup into a long, drawn-out development project. You practically need a dedicated Salesforce developer on standby just to build and tweak your bot.
eesel AI alternative: You shouldn’t need a computer science degree to build a helpful AI assistant. Platforms like eesel AI are designed to be completely self-serve, letting you build, customize, and launch an AI agent in minutes. The best part? You can see how it will perform before it goes live. eesel AI’s simulation mode lets you test the AI against thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have handled them. This gives you a clear report card on its resolution rate, so you can fine-tune it before it ever speaks to a customer.
Salesforce AI products for sales teams
Over in the sales department, the Salesforce AI products are all about working smarter, not harder. The goal is to help reps focus on the deals that are most likely to close and cut down on tedious data entry.
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Key Features: The stars of the show here are Einstein Opportunity Scoring, Lead Scoring, and Einstein Activity Capture. The scoring tools dig through your CRM history to predict which deals and leads are hot and which are not. Activity Capture links up with Gmail or Outlook to automatically log emails and meetings in Salesforce, which saves reps the hassle of doing it all by hand.
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The challenge: These tools are only as good as the data they have to work with, and that data has to be inside Salesforce. If your sales team practically lives in their email and only remembers to update the CRM at the end of the week, the AI’s predictions won’t be very reliable. The scoring can also feel like a "black box." A rep might be told a lead has a score of 95, but they have no idea why. Is it because of their industry? Their title? The web pages they visited? Without that context, it’s hard for reps to trust the AI’s judgment and build it into their workflow.
The reality check: Implementation and pricing
Beyond the list of features, the day-to-day realities of setting up and paying for Salesforce AI can be a big surprise. This is where the slick marketing promises meet the messy truth of getting things done.
The hidden complexity of setup
Getting Salesforce AI up and running isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. It’s usually a major project that demands a deep knowledge of the Salesforce platform. You have to get your data ready, tweak the AI models, and wire everything into your team’s current processes. This isn’t a weekend job; it can easily take months of work from a team of specialized admins or expensive consultants.
That long setup time means the real cost is much higher than just the license fee. You’re not just buying software; you’re investing in the time, people, and expertise it takes to make it do what you want.
In contrast, tools like eesel AI are built for speed and simplicity. With one-click connections to major help desks like Zendesk and Freshdesk, you can be set up and see it working on the very first day. It’s a self-serve model that gives you control, no developer team required.
Understanding the pricing model
Salesforce’s pricing for its AI tools can be confusing and hard to budget for. The AI features usually aren’t included in the standard licenses. Instead, they’re sold as pricey add-ons, like "Sales Cloud Einstein" or "Service Cloud Einstein," which can easily add $50 or more to your bill for each user, every month.
On top of that, many of the newer generative AI features run on a credit system. You buy a bucket of credits, and every time the AI writes a reply or summarizes a case, it uses some up. This makes it almost impossible to predict your monthly costs. A busy month for your support team could burn through credits much faster than you expected, leaving you with a nasty surprise on your invoice.
Here’s a quick comparison of the two approaches:
| Feature | Salesforce AI (Einstein) | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing Model | Often an add-on license ($50+/user/month) + credit packs | Simple monthly/annual subscription |
| Billing Basis | Per-user licenses and/or unpredictable credit consumption | Based on a predictable number of AI interactions |
| Hidden Fees | Potential for expensive overage charges on credits | None. No per-resolution fees. |
| Trial/Setup | Requires sales calls, demos, and a long setup period | Go live in minutes with a self-serve free trial |
Are Salesforce AI products practical for you?
Look, nobody’s saying the Salesforce AI products aren’t powerful. For huge companies that are already all-in on the Salesforce ecosystem and have the budget and technical teams to handle a complicated setup, they can certainly add value.
But for most teams, that approach just isn’t practical. Businesses today need tools that are flexible, easy to get started with, and don’t come with surprise costs. You can’t afford to wait six months to see if an investment will pay off, and you definitely don’t want to worry about unpredictable bills. Modern AI should work for you, connecting to your tools and adapting to your workflows, not the other way around.
That’s exactly why we built eesel AI. It’s a practical, powerful AI platform designed for how real teams work. It connects to all your apps, learns from your knowledge no matter where it lives, and gives you full control through a simple interface. And it all comes with transparent, predictable pricing and a setup so easy you can do it yourself over a cup of coffee.
Ready to see what a simple yet powerful AI solution can do for your support team? Start your free eesel AI trial today.
Frequently asked questions
Salesforce AI products, collectively branded as "Einstein," encompass various tools designed to embed artificial intelligence across the platform. These include predictive AI features like Lead and Opportunity Scoring, and generative AI tools such as Einstein GPT for content creation, Service Replies, and Work Summaries. They aim to automate tasks and provide data-driven insights.
For customer service, Salesforce AI products like Einstein for Service and Einstein Bots offer features such as generating service replies for agents, summarizing customer cases, and aiding in knowledge article creation. Einstein Bots can also handle initial customer inquiries, deflecting simple tickets to free up human agents.
Salesforce AI products are typically offered as add-on licenses, increasing the per-user monthly cost significantly. Many newer generative AI features also operate on a credit system, which can make monthly expenditures unpredictable and prone to overage charges depending on usage volume.
Implementing Salesforce AI products often involves significant complexity, requiring deep platform knowledge to prepare data, fine-tune models, and integrate them into workflows. This can lead to lengthy setup times, potentially spanning months, and often necessitates specialized admins or external consultants.
A major limitation of Salesforce AI products is their reliance on data primarily within Salesforce Knowledge articles and past ticket data. If critical company knowledge resides in external tools like Confluence or Google Docs, the AI won’t be able to access it, creating significant knowledge gaps and potentially inaccurate outputs.
For sales teams, Salesforce AI products such as Einstein Opportunity Scoring and Lead Scoring predict the likelihood of deals closing and identify promising leads based on historical data. Einstein Activity Capture also automates the logging of emails and meetings into Salesforce, reducing manual data entry for reps.
