Salesforce Data Cloud Momentum Soars with Rising Adoption and New Innovation That Brings Trusted Data to Agentforce

September 17, 2024 at 08:00 AM EDT

Data Cloud saw 130% year-over-year growth in paid customers and processed more than 2 quadrillion records per quarter

Data Cloud can now surface insights from unstructured audio and video content to Agentforce, making them more contextually aware, knowledgeable, and adaptable to customer needs

Data Cloud strengthens policy-based governance to better control how sensitive data is shared with Agentforce Agents, adds AI tagging and classification to categorize data, and introduces Private Connect for Data Cloud to enable secure data sharing with external public clouds

New Salesforce Datablazers Community enables IT leaders, developers, and Data Cloud enthusiasts to stay connected and share insights on the latest data best practices, trends, and tools

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) continues to build momentum with Data Cloud, the heartbeat of the Salesforce Platform and foundation of Agentforce. The growth is fueled by strong business demand for unified data to deliver more personalized, contextually relevant, and timely customer experiences across the Customer 360 applications, Flow, analytics and Agentforce, Salesforce’s groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents.

Building on that momentum, Salesforce today introduced several new Data Cloud innovations that advance an organization’s ability to transform the customer experience using data and AI. They include: additions to unstructured data support including native processing of audio and video content — such as webinars and calls — to unlock deeper customer insights; a standardized semantic data model that enables Agentforce Agents and humans to interpret and use data consistently; improved search capabilities that factor in customer context and allow for quicker information discovery; real-time data activations to respond instantly to changing customer needs; and additional data security and governance features to safeguard operations and prevent unnecessary data exposure.

As the fastest-growing organic product in Salesforce’s history with 130% YoY growth in paid customers, Data Cloud has shown impressive scale, processing 2.3 quadrillion records (+147% YoY) in the second quarter alone. Companies like The Adecco Group, Air India, Aston Martin, FedEx, Kawasaki Motors Corp., and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts rely on Data Cloud daily to help strengthen customer relationships, boost productivity, and improve their bottom lines. Air India, in particular, is unifying its data across loyalty, reservations, and flight systems. Now, the airline has a single source of truth to handle more than 550,000 service cases each month.

“In this new era of AI and Agents, customer data and metadata are the new gold for the enterprise,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM for Data Cloud at Salesforce. “Every day, more companies are using Data Cloud to unify all their data—from customer interactions and product usage to IoT and social media data—to gain deeper customer insights across all touchpoints and channels. Because Data Cloud is the foundation of Salesforce, companies can act on data to create the most personalized and meaningful customer experiences.”

Data Cloud + Customer 360 + Agentforce: Data Cloud surfaces trusted customer data in all Salesforce Customer 360 applications, Agentforce, Flow, and analytics — creating a foundation for personalized customer experiences and real-time analytics, triggering data-driven actions and workflows, and safely driving AI across all Salesforce apps. With its zero-copy technology and MuleSoft connectors, Data Cloud can ingest data from hundreds of diverse data sources, including data lakes and warehouses. Its built-in vector database converts various data formats — PDFs, texts, calls, voicemails, often trapped in 90% of customer data — into readily usable data and harmonizes it with structured data to create comprehensive customer profiles that are stored as metadata in a unified data foundation. Because it's fully integrated in the Salesforce Platform, this metadata can flow seamlessly into any Salesforce application based on set governance policies. This gives every team a 360-degree view of the customer to power trusted AI and drive automation and analytics across every touchpoint — without compromising data security.

Data Cloud provides the vital customer data that grounds Agentforce, making agents more contextually aware, knowledgeable, and adaptable to customer needs. For example, when a frustrated customer contacts Agentforce Service Agents, Data Cloud’s built-in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities add real-time insights and context from past emails, support tickets, product photos, voicemails, and any sources as defined by governance policies to help Agentforce better understand the customer perspective. Data Cloud’s hybrid search then identifies the right knowledge article based on customer context to help Agentforce resolve the issue accurately. As customer requests evolve, Data Cloud guides Agentforce with next-best steps, like automating follow-up emails or passing detailed chat summaries to support human representatives. Finally, Tableau Semantics facilitates a seamless transition between AI and employees by ensuring they speak, understand, and operate using the same definitions of data.

New innovations and additions: Data Cloud customers now have access to new capabilities and enhancements that make data accessible and actionable across every Salesforce activation, including:

Support for unstructured audio and video content: With 90% of customer data trapped in unstructured formats, businesses and AI can now analyze and extract customer data from previously inaccessible audio and video sources like customer calls, training sessions, product demos, feedback surveys, voicemails, and webinars. This content, now searchable, enriches customer profiles, reveals deeper intent behind customer preferences and behaviors, and improves Agentforce’s accuracy.
- For example, by analyzing recorded sales calls, a sales team can pinpoint common objections and refine their pitch to address them more effectively, leading to higher conversion rates.

Data Cloud connectivity ecosystem expansion: Building on Data Cloud’s promise to be open and extensible, organizations can bring their own data using additional pre-built Data Cloud connectors for apps like Square, Stripe, Meta, Splunk and more, adding to the rapidly growing connector ecosystem that already supports various data lakes, warehouses, and third-party systems. They can also tap into unstructured data from Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Confluence, and Sitemap in Data Cloud using pre-built integrations provided with MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud. This means data can be pulled in and unified from wherever customers interact, then used to power agentic experiences.

Sub-second real-time layer: With 62% of IT leaders noting the need for real-time data to stay competitive, organizations can now ingest, unify, analyze, and act upon data in real-time across Salesforce. This powers Einstein Personalization, now built on Data Cloud, along with real-time AI recommendations, analytics, and automations to enable faster decision-making and instant personalization across customer touchpoints.
- For example, a support agent assisting a customer with equipment issues can access real-time sensor data, recent maintenance records, and past support tickets directly in Service Cloud. If the equipment's sensor stops sending data, a triggered alert notifies the agent, allowing them to quickly diagnose the issue and recommend targeted solutions to minimize downtime.

Governance and security for trusted data and AI: To safeguard operations, manage governance at scale, and prevent exposure to unauthorized parties while using AI, these new features improve how structured and unstructured data are managed, protected, and securely shared with AI applications and across the platform.
- AI tagging and classification automate the labeling and organization of unstructured data per business policies. Data becomes consistent, governance is easier to apply, and both AI and users can easily search and analyze the data.
- Policy-based governance helps achieve access governance at scale by creating granular security policies that grant appropriate access to user groups based on tags, metadata, and user attributes. This simple experience ensures that users, including AI, can only access the data it’s permitted to see across the platform.
- Customer-managed keys allow organizations to manage their own encryption keys, ensuring data stays encrypted and secure regardless of how it’s used.
- Private Connect for Data Cloud enables organizations to safely share and integrate their data between Data Cloud and public cloud environments by establishing secure, direct network connections between them. This means data can be safely shared across network boundaries without compromising its integrity.

Tableau Semantics: Organizations can organize data based on its meaning and relationships, creating a standardized semantic model that allows anyone to understand, use, and act upon data consistently, regardless of origin.
- For example, a hospital can standardize data across departments, ensuring that a patient’s test results, X-rays, and doctor’s notes are all linked and understood in the same context regardless of how they are written (abbreviations, typos, synonyms, etc).

Hybrid search: Organizations can find the most relevant information in the company’s knowledge base by combining semantic capabilities of vector search with the exact match capabilities of keyword search, which are critical to deal with specific domain terms like product names or acronyms. This makes it faster and easier to find information across any medium, such as PDFs, pictures, audios, and videos.
- For example, Agentforce can use part numbers found in customer-sent photos to pull up relevant knowledge articles for that product category and help support representatives resolve customer issues faster.

Data Cloud One: Organizations can now connect multiple Salesforce orgs that may be siloed across different departments, regions or business units and extend all of Data Cloud’s functionalities across all Salesforce instances using a no-code, point-and-click setup. This allows them to create a single Data Cloud instance as the source of truth, enabling data sharing and actions, like automation, calculated insights, and more across all Salesforce orgs, without creating new Data Clouds for each org.
- For example, a sales leader looking to enrich sales leads with a 360-degree view of customers no longer needs to have their team write custom code to integrate Data Cloud data across multiple Salesforce orgs. Instead, a single central Data Cloud can now power each org with its features, seamlessly enriching sales profiles across all Salesforce orgs.

A new data community: Salesforce also announced its new Datablazer community, an online platform to connect IT and business leaders, developers, and Data Cloud enthusiasts. It provides space to learn, share insights, and stay informed on the latest best practices, trends, and tools to maximize the value of data.

The customer perspective:

“Salesforce allows us to fuse together our trusted data from across our business to deliver tailored quality experiences to every current and future Aston Martin customer while creating the personalized, VIP experience they expect, as we look to grow and succeed in the AI era,” said Matthew Randall, Head of Software and Integration, Aston Martin.

“As a professional recruiting, staffing and consulting business, we match talent to the most exciting companies and opportunities around the world. On any given day, we connect 700,000 people with fulfilling opportunities to match their skills. We are redefining the future of work by enabling augmented recruiter experiences thanks to AI, connecting employees to the right data at the right time. Today, Data Cloud gives 27,000 employee users seamless access to key information to match skills to specific roles,” said Caroline Basyn, Chief Digital and IT Officer, The Adecco Group.

“Each and every one of Wyndham’s hundreds of millions of guests wants to be seen and heard on an individual level. Salesforce gives our reservation agents a comprehensive view of the specific guest they’re serving so they can receive a personalized experience based on context about their stay history, loyalty service, and notes from past requests. This is made possible by the suite of products with Salesforce, including Data Cloud, which harmonizes data and unifies guest profiles from our reservation platform. With this data aggregated, agents can now access guests’ booking histories at any franchise property, such as accessible room requests, loyalty status or milestones, personalizing every interaction,” said Scott Strickland, Chief Commercial Officer, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

Expected availability: New innovations will be available in pilot, beta or general availability within the below time frames.

Now:
- Customer-managed keys is generally available.
- Sub-second real-time layer is generally available and can be enabled through sub-second real-time profiles add-on consumption SKU.
- MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud will be in beta in late Sept ‘24 and require a MuleSoft Anypoint Platform license to use.
- A comprehensive list of pre-built connectors generally available and in beta can be found in Data Cloud Connectors Directory.
In October ‘24:
- Support to process unstructured audio and video content, currently in pilot, will be generally available.
- Data Cloud One will be generally available.
In November ‘24:
- Hybrid search, currently in pilot, will be generally available.
- AI tagging and classification will be in beta.
- Policy-based governance will be in beta.
- Private Connect for Data Cloud will be generally available.
In February ‘25:
- Tableau Semantics, currently in pilot, will be generally available.