A guide to Salesforce AI Smart Promotions in 2025

Let’s be honest, trying to cook up the perfect promotion at the perfect time can feel like a thankless task. You've got pressure from all sides to boost sales, clear out last season's stock, and keep customers loyal, but actually building a campaign that works is a ton of manual effort. If you're deep in the Salesforce world, you’ve probably heard their pitch to solve this: Salesforce AI Smart Promotions.

This feature claims to use generative AI to streamline how you create and launch promotions. But what’s it really doing, and is it the right move for your business? This guide will give you a clear, no-fluff breakdown of what the feature is, how it works, what it’s good for, and some critical limitations you need to think about before jumping in.

What are Salesforce AI Smart Promotions?

Salesforce AI Smart Promotions is a feature within Salesforce Commerce Cloud that uses their AI, Einstein, to help you draft promotional campaigns for your B2B or D2C store. Think of it as a new assistant for your marketing or e-commerce team.

The idea is simple: you tell the AI what you want in plain English, and it spits out the basic framework for your promotion. For example, you could type, "Create a 15% discount on all hiking gear for our VIP customers." The AI then taps into your store’s data, like product catalogs and customer groups, to build out the promotion’s rules, discounts, and conditions.

This tool is part of Salesforce’s larger mission to bake AI into all its products. The aim is to make your team more productive by automating some of the tedious parts of running an online store. It’s designed to turn a manual, multi-step chore into a quick, AI-assisted task.

How Salesforce AI Smart Promotions works

To really get what this tool can (and can't) do, you have to look under the hood. The whole thing hinges on two factors: how well you can direct the AI, and what data it can actually see. This is where you find both its strengths and its biggest limitations.

Using plain English prompts

It all starts with you telling Einstein what you want. Instead of clicking through a maze of settings, you can just write a simple instruction like, "Draft a promotion for 20% off all winter jackets for loyalty members." As the Salesforce documentation points out, you can get pretty specific with these prompts, and they even offer templates to get you going.

Sounds pretty great, right? But there's a catch. The quality of the draft you get back is only as good as the instructions you give it. More importantly, the AI is limited by the data it can actually access. If your prompt mentions something the AI has no context on, it’s just not going to work.

Knowledge is limited to Salesforce data

The "magic" behind Salesforce AI Smart Promotions is that it's "grounded" in your Commerce Cloud data. This means it can pull information from your product catalogs, categories, and customer segments (what Salesforce calls "Buyer Groups") to build the promotion. This is a huge advantage if your entire business already runs on Salesforce. The AI knows your products and customer lists, so it can whip up relevant campaigns without much fuss.

But that's also its biggest Achilles' heel. If your most important business knowledge lives anywhere else, the AI is completely in the dark. Got important customer notes in Zendesk tickets? Product docs in Confluence? Internal strategy sitting in Google Docs? Salesforce's AI can't touch any of it. This creates a silo where the AI can only build promotions based on a tiny slice of your actual business context, which really limits how "smart" or personalized they can be.

The step-by-step workflow

Once you feed Einstein your prompt, it gets to work. According to the official Spring '24 Release Notes, it follows a guided process:

1. You type in a prompt describing the promotion you want.

2. Einstein drafts the promotion using your Commerce Cloud data.

3. You review and tweak the draft on a "New Promotion" page. Here, you can adjust everything from the audience and display name to adding tiers or specific coupon codes.

Having a human in the loop to give the final okay is definitely a good thing. The downside? All this intelligence is stuck inside a very rigid, pre-set process within Salesforce.

Key features and use cases

When it’s a good fit, this tool can genuinely help e-commerce merchants. Here are the main ways businesses are putting it to work.

Speed up campaign creation

The most obvious perk here is speed. Let's face it, setting up promotions manually is a total drag, especially if you have a huge product catalog. Salesforce AI Smart Promotions can cut that time down quite a bit.

A classic example is a marketing manager needing to launch a last-minute flash sale on items that aren't moving. Instead of spending an hour clicking around to create discounts for a dozen different products, they can use a single, clear prompt to get the whole campaign ready in minutes.

Build complex, tiered promotions

This isn't just for your basic "10% off" deals. The tool is smart enough to build more complex promotions, like tiered offers that nudge customers to spend more. For instance, you could tell it to create a promotion where customers get 10% off when they buy two items, but 20% off when they buy three.

This is super useful for businesses trying to boost their average order value. You could use Salesforce AI Smart Promotions to draft a spending incentive like, "Spend $100, get free shipping. Spend $150, get free shipping and a 10% discount."

Target specific customer groups

Because the AI is hooked into your Salesforce data, it can easily target promotions to specific customer segments, or "Buyer Groups." This allows for more focused marketing.

For example, a B2B store might want to give its top-tier wholesale partners an exclusive discount that other customers can't get. They can use the AI to generate a promotion that only applies to that specific group, helping to build stronger relationships.

But let's be real, true personalization goes deeper. It often happens at the individual level, like in the middle of a live support chat. An AI agent that can see a customer's full history across all your tools can offer a perfectly timed, relevant promotion right when it matters most. That's a much more dynamic and powerful way to do things than just targeting broad segments.

Limitations and hidden costs

While the features sound nice on paper, there are some big drawbacks and hidden costs to think about before you commit.

You're locked into the Salesforce world

Okay, this is the big one. Salesforce AI Smart Promotions is built to work with one thing and one thing only: Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It can’t see the data in your other tools, like your external knowledge bases, other helpdesks like Intercom, or internal wikis where so much valuable customer info lives. This basically forces you into a corner, pushing you to move all your important info into Salesforce just to make its AI useful.

This is a huge difference from modern AI platforms like eesel AI, which are designed to connect all your scattered sources of knowledge. eesel AI plugs into over 100 tools like Confluence, Google Docs, and your current helpdesk, giving its AI a complete view of your business, without making you ditch the tools you already rely on.

The setup isn't a cakewalk

Salesforce might sell you on a "few clicks" setup, but getting this feature off the ground is rarely that simple. As their own docs mention, you need to buy an extra "EinsteinGPTCommerceAddOn" license just to use it. On top of that, Salesforce setups can be notoriously complicated. You’ll probably need a specialized admin or developer to get everything configured right, adding to the total cost and delaying how long it takes to see any value.

This is where a solution like eesel AI really shines with its self-serve setup. You can connect your helpdesk and knowledge sources in minutes with one-click integrations, with no need for sales calls, mandatory demos, or pricey consultants.

No way to test first

While Salesforce lets you review a drafted promotion before it goes live, they don’t mention any kind of simulation mode to test its impact on past data. How would this promotion have worked last month? How many customers would it have applied to? Without a good way to test your automations, launching them for live customers can be a real nail-biter.

This is another spot where a tool built for confident automation stands apart. eesel AI, for example, has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test your AI agent on thousands of past support tickets. You can see exactly how it would have answered, get a forecast of resolution rates, and tweak its behavior before it ever interacts with a real customer.

Pricing

When it comes to price, Salesforce plays its cards pretty close to the chest. You won't find a public pricing page for Commerce Cloud or its AI add-ons. Instead, you have to get in touch with their sales team for a custom quote. We do know that Salesforce AI Smart Promotions requires that "EinsteinGPTCommerceAddOn" license, which is another cost piled on top of your Commerce Cloud subscription. This lack of clear pricing can make it tough to budget and often leads to surprise costs down the line.

A flexible alternative: Automating actions with eesel AI

Instead of a tool that just drafts promotions, what if you had a flexible AI platform that could automate any action based on what's happening with a customer in real-time? That’s where a tool like eesel AI comes at the problem from a completely different angle.

Rather than just being a promotion generator, eesel AI is an automation engine for your entire customer service team. Its AI agents can be trained on all of your company knowledge, from past tickets in Freshdesk and help articles in your knowledge base to product info in Shopify and internal playbooks in Notion.

Here’s a real-world example: an eesel AI Agent is handling a support ticket from a customer who is frustrated about a shipping delay. Based on rules you’ve set, the agent can use a custom action to check their order history, see that they're a loyal customer, and automatically offer a personal 10% discount code for their next purchase. Just like that, a bad experience is flipped into a positive one that drives a future sale.

This approach is way more dynamic than pre-drafting static campaigns. It weaves promotions directly into the customer journey at the exact moment they'll have the biggest impact. Plus, eesel AI's transparent pricing means you won't get hit with any nasty surprises.

Final thoughts on Salesforce AI Smart Promotions

Salesforce AI Smart Promotions is a decent tool if your business is already all-in on the Salesforce ecosystem and your main goal is to make promotion creation a little faster. It can save you time and help you build complex offers without a ton of manual work.

However, its complete dependence on Salesforce data, tricky setup, and mysterious pricing are serious downsides for any business that values flexibility, transparency, and being in control of its own tools. For companies looking for a more modern and agile way to use AI, platforms like eesel AI offer a much better path. By bringing all your business knowledge together and letting AI take real action, you can automate tasks, make customers happier, and grow revenue without getting stuck in a single vendor's world.

Ready for an AI solution that works with your tools, not against them? Try eesel AI for free and see how you can unify your knowledge and automate support in minutes.