The Big Salesforce-NVIDIA Announcement: A Closer Look

“We’re going to bring a level of automation capability that the world has never seen,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

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The Big Salesforce-NVIDIA Announcement: A Closer Look
CRMNews Analysis

Published: October 2, 2024

Charlie Mitchell

At Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce announced a new partnership with NVIDIA.

The partnership will see the tech giants team up to infuse Salesforce Data Cloud and Agentforce with capabilities from the NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, praised the link-up. He told CX Today: “I think partnerships like this are the future of tech.

No company can do AI alone, and success depends on ecosystems working together to optimize experience and cost.

Kerravala also suggests that the partnership between Salesforce and NVIDIA should accelerate CX innovation and the ability of the former to deliver turnkey solutions.

“This helps derisk deployments for [Saleforce] customers while delivering immediate value,” he concluded. “We should expect to see more partnerships like this as AI matures.”

On closer inspection, the partnership will drive that value in three specific ways.

1. AI Model Customization

Salesforce will leverage NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA NeMo – both available on the NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform – to customize the generative and predictive AI models across its platform.

As the CRM leader increasingly focuses its innovation on particular industries – with 100 sector-specific bots already on Agentforce – that model customization will become increasingly critical to the sustained accuracy and success of its Agents.

With such accuracy, Salesforce differentiates its Agentforce platform as – at Dreamforce – CEO Marc Benioff marketed its Agents as the “least hallucinogenic” GenAI-powered autonomous bots.

Maintaining that reputation is essential for Salesforce as it seeks to overcome the fear many CX teams have of implementing GenAI without a human in the loop.

For Salesforce to achieve its aim of deploying “billions” of these Agents “in the years to come”, alleviating those fears and quickly delivering new Agentforce Agents is key.

That’s why NVIDIA’s robust reputation and ability to accelerate Salesforce’s innovation cycle may prove extremely significant.

2. Data Cloud Computing

NVIDIA will optimize computing resources and accelerate processing within the Data Cloud. That will allow Salesforce customers to connect their enterprise data more seamlessly and make it available for Agentforce Agents to act on.

The move continues Salesforce’s mission to bolster Data Cloud, as does its recent $1.9BN move for Own Company.

So, why is Salesforce investing so much in the customer data platform (CDP)? Because it pulls insight from external data warehouses and lakes to enrich Salesforce records. It also channels metadata across various enterprise teams.

In short, it’s the glue that binds the Salesforce Platform together.

As such, NVIDIA is not only powering Salesforce AI but also working in the background, helping run the data engine for those Agentforce Agents to fly.

3. Agentforce Avatars

Finally, Salesforce will develop AI Agent Avatars, utilizing NVIDIA NIM once again alongside NVIDIA ACE, its portfolio of digital human technologies.

Over time, these Avatars will augment specific Agentforce Agents that directly interact with employees and customers. In doing so, they may offer more human-like, engaging experiences, while delivering contextual guidance via voice and visuals.

Salesforce promises all this out-of-the-box and has already scoped out Agent Avatars for use cases such as sales feedback, employee training assistance, and live event management.

Consider that first example. An Agent Avatar may analyze a conversation in real-time, offering live suggestions to improve engagement. It may also recommend products, correct misstatements, and highlight key talking points in the moment.

After the interaction, the Avatar could even bring that feedback to life with a live demo to ensure the salesperson understands what they could do better next time.

While that’s only one example, Salesforce eventually hopes to leverage NVIDIA NIM Agent Blueprints to support customers in building and deploying their own Agent Avatars for specialized use cases.

Salesforce & NVIDIA Share a Vision for the Future of Autonomous Agents

Enterprise software vendors offer tools to businesses. Conventionally, human employees leverage these tools. But, with the launch of Agentforce came the vision for AI Agents to sit on top of those tools and unlock new efficiencies.

NVIDIA shares this vision with Salesforce, as Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, confirmed in a conversation at Dreamforce 2024.

“We now have AI agents that understand reason and collaboration,” he said. “These agents can understand the subtleties of our requests, use tools, and even reason and collaborate with one another.

Imagine giving a problem to a group of agents. They will find other agents that can help accomplish the mission, come together, and solve the problem.

Yet, the part that most excites Huang is how these AI Agents will evolve with unsupervised learning.

After all, the biggest blocker to the growth of AI was the scale at which humans could label data. However, brands like NVIDIA can now use language models to codify human knowledge and learn from multimodal data. As such, they can scale AI exponentially.

“This flywheel is accelerating, and the progress we’ll see in AI agents over the next year or two will be spectacular and surprising,” added Huang.

Given this alignment in NVIDIA’s vision and Salesforce’s Agentforce proposition, the prospect of co-innovation is all the more exciting.

Nevertheless, Salesforce will face challenges in scaling its guardrails as the number of Agents on Agentforce explodes. The CRM leader must consider this closely, as accuracy is central to its proposition.

Moving forward, NVIDIA may help here, too, as it is developing AI systems that reflect on the quality of their responses, ensuring they are safe, proper, and the best possible answers.

While that may be for the future, the current three-pronged Salesforce partnership already excites Huang. “For the industry, we’re now seeing the beginning of the enterprise AI era,” he concluded. “This is a big deal.”

We’re going to bring a level of automation capability that the world has never seen.

NVIDIA and the Broader CX Tech Space

While Huang shared his enthusiasm for partnering with Salesforce, this partnership is one of many statement collaborations from NVIDIA.

Elsewhere, NVIDIA is helping SAP finetune LLMs for sector-specific innovation. Meanwhile, with ServiceNow, it’s building GenAI-powered service solutions for telcos, with BT an early customer.

Yet, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. After all, NVIDIA has also forged close partnerships with the likes of AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

Although, it’s not just the big boys. Get into the several subsets of CX tech, and NVIDIA has partnerships with many of the most prominent vendors.

For instance, in CCaaS, it’s working with Avaya, Genesys, and Five9, all of which proved quick to jump on the bandwagon and leverage NVIDIA’s software libraries, broad AI ecosystem, and hardware.

As such, businesses should expect NVIDIA to play a critical role in pushing forward their customer experiences, no matter which vendors they work with.

Eager to learn more about NVIDIA? If so, check out our article: What Exactly Does NVIDIA Do, and Why Should You Care?

 

 

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