Dreamforce 2022: Salesforce debuts Genie CDP to power real-time customer experiences

Today, at the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce announced the launch of Genie, a real-time customer data platform (CDP) that can help enterprises deliver improved experiences to their customers.

Modern-day businesses run on hundreds (close to 1,000 on average) of internal applications. Each solution serves a unique purpose and gathers valuable data on the customer. However, most organizations tend to keep this information siloed, leaving close to 1,000 versions of information on a single customer. This is a major gap that leads to broken customer experiences.

While Salesforce Customer 360 addresses the issue by bringing together customer data in a single, easy-to-understand view and enabling action on it, the CRM (customer relationship management) platform had only been solving part of the problem. The volume of data is increasing rapidly and companies need a way to act on information as soon as it is generated — to acquire new customers, retain them and keep them satisfied. This is where Salesforce’s latest innovation, Genie, comes in.

“Milliseconds matter for every line of business in every industry in this new world of data-driven digital experiences,” Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce, said. “That’s why we developed Genie, the most significant innovation in the history of the Salesforce Platform. Genie makes every part of Customer 360 more automated, intelligent, and real time, enabling customer experiences that weren’t possible before and deepening every relationship.”

What does Genie do?

Available generally starting today, Genie adds a real-time touch to Salesforce Customer 360’s capabilities. The offering, as the company explains, ingests and stores real-time data streams and transactional data at scale, empowering enterprise teams to deliver seamless, personalized experiences that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs. 

Genie runs on Hyperforce public cloud infrastructure and uses built-in connectors to bring in data from every channel (mobile, web, APIs), legacy data through MuleSoft and historical data from proprietary data lakes, in real time. Then, it transforms and harmonizes the data into a real-time customer graph — a unified customer profile. Everything in this graph becomes visible and actionable across the entire Customer 360, every industry solution, AppExchange, and custom apps.

How Salesforce Genie works. Image source: Salesforce.

With Genie, Salesforce CRM’s Einstein AI, which generates over 175 billion predictions every day, can deliver predictions and suggested actions in real time. Similarly, Salesforce Flow automation, which saves customers over 100 billion hours every month, can use real-time information to trigger actions automatically. This can ultimately transform the functioning of different departments using Customer 360. For instance, sales reps could get real-time guidance and recommendations from Einstein to adapt to an ongoing conversation and close a deal, while marketers could deliver personalized messages across channels to adapt to customer activity across various brand properties in real time.

Salesforce partners with data and AI players

Notably, Salesforce has also partnered with multiple data and AI ecosystem players to enhance the impact of Genie. This includes an engagement with Snowflake to let Genie access the data stored in Snowflake without duplication, as well as a partnership with Amazon to let organizations use SageMaker, Amazon’s cloud machine learning platform, with Einstein AI, to build new AI models.

David Schmaier, the chief product officer at Salesforce, said about 500 enterprises are already using Genie and leveraging its benefits, including Formula 1, Ford, L’Oreal and PGA Tour Superstore.

“As the game of golf has increased in popularity the past few years, we knew we needed to quickly elevate our digital presence and deliver personalized, relevant experiences to a new, diverse audience across every channel,” Jill Thomas, CMO at PGA Tour Superstore, said. “With Salesforce, we’re much more in control of our messaging and are able to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. This allows us to be truly customer-driven and meet people where they are in their journey with the game.”

Other announcements at Dreamforce

Alongside Genie, Salesforce also used the stage at Dreamforce to announce updates for Slack, including Slack Canvas, and a new Net Zero Marketplace that makes carbon credit purchases simple and transparent.