What We Saw at the Salesforce Trailblazer DX Conference in San Francisco March 2024

Like all businesses that want to stay ahead, the world’s leading marketing platforms are embracing cutting-edge technologies that drive innovation and efficiency — technologies like generative AI. 

Salesforce recently unveiled Einstein 1, a suite of generative AI tools that are designed to be “superpowered collaborators” for the businesses who know how to use them.  

As a Salesforce partner, we work with local, regional, and multinational clients to help them leverage their investment in the platform. And this spring, Ingredient Director of Development, Rose King, and email developer, Laura Gough, attended the Salesforce TrailblazerDX conference in San Francisco to learn all things Einstein 1. The knowledge they brought back is already being used to help our clients make the most of this powerful platform.

Here are highlights from a post-conference conversation with Rose and Laura:

Very briefly, for the novices and tech luddites (me), describe what you do at Ingredient.

ROSE: We take content and translate it into websites and email. The Ingredient content planners and designers will give us a shell of what they want and we make sure it’s interactive, that it renders correctly in the user’s inbox, that everything is linking to the right place. We do one-to-one personalization and build email journeys, things like that. 

LAURA: Basically, we make dreams come true!

What does it mean to be a Salesforce partner?

ROSE: To be accepted as an official Salesforce partner, your company has to meet specific criteria — you have to demonstrate a certain knowledge base and have people with specific certifications. You have to demonstrate how well you know the platform.

Once you’re accepted as an official Salesforce partner, you get access to even more in-depth training and real-use cases. And there’s a really huge help center community, so if you run into issues you can ask questions and get feedback in less than a day, which in the tech world is pretty fast!

Who is the annual TrailblazerDX conference for? 

ROSE: TrailblazerDX is for administrators, architects and developers — basically anyone who works within the actual platform. It’s a really high-tech conference, and it’s really hands on.

Salesforce is an entire ecosystem, and the conference focused on the technology behind that ecosystem and what’s up and coming. So we learned a lot about Einstein 1, which was just announced earlier that week. 

Einstein 1 is Salesforce’s new generative AI tool?

ROSE: Yes, it’s a suite of tools that utilizes generative AI to help businesses get the most out of their data and help them complete tasks. 

Can you give an example?

Let’s say you have all this data about your clients and you want to create more personalized experiences for them. You can ask Einstein 1 to tell you about your users and what would make their experience more enjoyable. 

Or let’s say you’re a company that sells a product and you want to gather all the customer feedback on your product. So if all your customer reviews are in Salesforce and you want a summary of how well this product is doing — are there complaints? Is customer sentiment good? Is it bad? What are the specific issues? — you can have Einstein 1 comb through all the data and analyze it for you. 

Or with a recipe email, for example, if you have enough meaningful information about that user — if you know their site activity, and if everything’s connected properly, and if the data streams are flowing together — then you could utilize the entire unit ecosystem to say that X or Y is the product that this user is most likely to purchase based on their interactions. Then you could place that product within an email.  

So, basically, Einstein helps brands understand what data they have and how to interpret it, so they don’t have to do it manually. Brands can have Einstein assist them in filling out the data attributes and identifying the most relevant things to put in a particular email.  

Since generative AI burst onto the scene in late 2022, people have had questions about what it means for humans. Will generative AI take our place?

LAURA: A big theme of the conference was how AI is never going to do the entire job for you. It was  reiterated multiple times how you always need a human at the helm, which is a model taken from nuclear weapons development and aviation — there always needs to be a human guiding the use of great power or manning the plane so you’re not going somewhere you don’t intend. 

With Einstein 1, it’s purposely made so you always need to have a person involved in the process — to ensure that the data is going in correctly or that summaries and results are coming out in the way you want them to, and that things are coherent and that things don’t look misleading. 

Generative AI, including tools like Einstein 1, is an assistant, not a replacement. 

Anything else you want to share about the conference or about Ingredient’s Salesforce capabilities?

ROSE: The entire developer team at Ingredient is certified in Salesforce and, as a company, we’ve been working with Salesforce marketing cloud back to its exact target days. And we’re using Salesforce and their marketing cloud internally for our own newsletter. We’ve really put a focus on making sure we’re up to speed on trainings and certifications. 

LAURA: We’re really committed to deepening our expertise in the entire Salesforce ecosystem. We’re committed to learning the platform at the foundational level. 

Looking for ways your brand can capitalize on these trends? Give us a shout at hello@ingredient.mn. We’d be thrilled to help.