What you need to know:

• Brands are realising strong returns from investments in AI. 
• Barbeques Galore doubled sales in some areas, Spotify has driven massive increases in sales team productivity and Mecca cut cart abandonment by three quarters.
• And the AFL is using it to give clubs hyper-personalised content, including information about their fandom, while taking out hundreds of hours of work out across every club on the platform and powering double digit member growth.
• The common factor in each case, Einstein 1 a suite that includes Data Cloud, AI tools, and automation capabilities that enhanced the capabilities of Salesforce's various clouds. The platform dominated the conversation at Salesforce world Tour in Sydney yesterday, which drew 15,000 registrations, marking it as the biggest SaaS event on the Australian tech calendar.

The speed at which AI is inculcating customer experience outcomes was on full display at Salesforce World Tour in Sydney yesterday.

Brands like AFL, Barbeques Galore, Mecca, Spotify, Decathlon and BizCover are wracking up impressive gains in fields such as ecommerce, sales, service and analytics using Salesforce’s Einstein 1 platform which dominated proceedings yesterday.

According to Rowena Westphalen, SVP Innovation AI and Customer advisory: “Einstein 1 is the platform that enables us to allow every business to have access to AI. It’s integrated, it’s intelligent, it's automated. And you don't have to be a developer to take advantage of it. You can take advantage of the low code or no code, and most beautifully, it's open.”

Kicking personalisation goals

One of the first local adopters of Einstein 1 was the Australian Football League (AFL) whose GM Technology, Rob Pickering, took to the main stage and described how investing in a unifying technology platform and data approach provided the sporting giant with productivity efficiencies. 

He said that the Einstein 1 platform helps the code to unite people from diverse backgrounds by personalising and accelerating fan engagement.

According to Pickering the AFL’s mission is to progress the game so everyone can share in its heritage and possibilities. The challenge is driving growth – and honing experience consistently across a disparate landscape, given 18 clubs with different set-ups and capability. Pickering has spent the last few years building a blueprint for shared martech and resource, creating a hub and spoke model across the code its clubs in a bid to drive engagement and personalised customer experience across a massive membership base. The aim, he previously told Mi3, is to deliver personalised CX for members on game day, so the experience begins "before they leave the house".

“No one club is the same as the next – they have different backgrounds and needs,” he told the conference. “We needed to build one platform that’s scalable, reliable, and can work for every one of these organisations. Einstein 1 platform does that in the best possible way. We can now see that full view of customers.” 

One example highlighted was GWS Giants. As a club established in Western Sydney in 2010, its relative newcomer status means it has to fight for every fan it gets, per head of strategy and growth, Mitchell Dale. Hence needing every tech advantage it can get. “We’re looking to reconnect with fans in a whole new way with the combination of CRM, AI, data, and trust,” he said. 

In addition to Einstein 1, AFL is leveraging Tableau Pulse and its mapping capability to create a visual data and insights tool that brings multiple data sets together and “enriches the data”, said AFL head of data and analytics, Elisa Koch.

“We’ve taken our member data and combined with Australian Bureau of Statistics plus Census data to get a holistic picture of where members are in relation to the demographics of the area,” she said. 

The ability to use AI built into the Einstein 1 platform means the AFL can augment out people and continue to service fans into the future too, Pickering continued. 

“We can give them hyper-personalised content, including information about their fandom, while taking out hundreds of hours of work out across every club on the platform,” he said. “In 2023, of the 10 clubs on the platform, we saw eight grow their membership, the last two of these growing by greater than 10 per cent.” 

Data safety is equally a massive responsibility and important to everyone, Pickering added. “All of our jobs are about making the game better in the time we’re working with the AFL,” he said. 

Dale also stressed the importance of community alongside building out the AFL game and product. “While the product on the field is AFL and that’s what it’s about, it’s also about building a community that is so much bigger than the sport we play. That’s where Salesforce comes in,” he said. 

Pickering also flagged the AFL’s recent announcement that it’s spending $1 billion over the next 10 years on game development. 

“Whether that’s our NAB Aus Kickers kicking a football at half time, or whether it’s 55-year-olds playing Masters football on the weekend with their mates. What we get to do with Salesforce is bring people closer to the game,” he said. “Moving forward, to operationalise that $1bn investment, it’s having all those interactions powered by Einstein 1 platform and making sure we continue in our goal to bring a football to every home.” 

Cooking on gas

Leandro Perez Salesforce’s APAC SVP and CMO whipped through a cavalcade of Einstein 1 fuelled brand successes during his presentation.

“Look at Barbeques Galore (a commerce cloud customer). They have doubled their online sales with Einstein recommendations. Spotify has seen a 40 per cent increase to their sales team's productivity due to Einstein lead scoring in Sales Cloud."

And he said retailer Mecca has reduced cart abandonment by 75 per cent courtesy of a chatbot called Miss Mecca.

Add to that Decathlon’s success in reducing costs by 50 per cent through smarter use of analytics and BizCover’s ability to now handle 500 cases automatically per week thanks to the platform and a clear picture of AI led productivity improvements emerges.

Big bums on seats

Another measure of the seriousness with which some of Australia’s biggest organisations view the opportunities of AI was the sheer weight of numbers they sent to the event.

Woolworths had 192 staff at the event. NAB had over a hundred among the 15,000 guests for what has emerged as Australia’s largest SaaS user conference, rivalled only by Adobe’s Symposium.

The event comes at an interesting time for Salesforce and its industry peers. The popularity of generative AI and the growing maturity of other forms of AI and machine learning are driving a new wave of tech-led innovation. And just about every brand and business is scrambling to keep up in a bid for major efficiencies.

But it's also happening at a time when brands are reevaluating their tech stack investments and turning a skeptical eye on bloated SaaS budgets after a pandemic-fuelled binge that lasted three years. On top of that, there is a drive towards composability and away from the giant all-encompassing tech stacks that characterised much of the last decade.

Salesforce APAC CMO Leandro Perez told Mi3 on the sidelines of yesterday's event that composability of different tech vendors and products today was less about deliberate strategies by companies to break up integrated single-vendor software bundles but a reality of the market which was working with and around systems already operating inside organisations.

"That might have been the approach from a few years ago," he said. "I think we've grown up in that we have an open ecosystem now. People have made investments and you can't come in and say 'throw that all away' and replace it with this ... start from scratch ... because people want to get fast returns. They want to get business outcomes. So we say, keep that. Data Cloud, for example, can connect to [existing systems] but you've got an ageing or a legacy sales or a contact centre. Why don't we help you with that?" per Perez. 

"But for us, it all works together, which is why our partnerships are so strong. We have a partnership with AWS, which is important for data residency.  Snowflake, we have an agreement with. All of these companies are needed to deliver an experience and we realise that. It's like saying if you're going to install solar, you've got to to get rid of the roof. We don't think it matters as long as you can get all that data in one view. That's what Data Cloud does – it makes it an all in one view for a unified profile." 

On the deployment of AI in marketing and by marketing teams – Einstein CoPilot in Salesforce's case – Perez' 100-plus APAC marketing unit should be the earliest of any company in the region to see its impact. 

He said his team was still experimenting and learning with early use cases, but of the circa 350 campaigns and 3 million email sends Salesforce completed in the past 12 months in Australia and New Zealand – across APAC it was 30 million – he said the company had seen "single digit increases in open and click-through rates," and rising. "We're in the single digits now because the team is just getting going."     

Perez said applying AI to communications like email campaigns is the low hanging fruit for fast improvements. But surfacing faster insights around business and customer trends and reporting is the next phase.

Data data everywhere

Marketers have been told to put data at the heart of their work for more than a decade, and now that investment is likely to help their brands deliver even greater value, thanks to AI, said Salesforce’s Australian EVP Frank Fillman.

On stage, he described Salesforce Data Cloud as the “most important announcement in the history of our company” and later Mi3 caught up with Fillman to understand the reasoning behind that view.

Salesforce was launched 25 years ago this month and for all that time it is been collecting data about customers and customer experiences. And now it turns out the work its customers have done in its platforms collecting, cleaning, organising, and activating that data has moved them much closer to the AI-led world than they – and perhaps even Salesforce until recently – realised.

“The setup for Einstein 1, which is AI embedded inside, is really quick, and it's surprising to our customers. That’s because it's like a feature you turn on. If you want to move into this house, you don't have to build the house, you're just opening the front door,” said Fillman.

“What we really want customers to understand is this; if you're a long-standing customer, you're already so close. So if there are 10 paces to get to where you're going, you're already on pace nine, you don't have to start at pace one."

He told Mi3, “That’s the overwhelming part of data and AI that a lot of customers don't realise. So when we say the future is now we mean that quite literally because customers like the AFL are using this stuff right now.”