Salesforce

Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Airkit.ai, a company specializing in the creation of AI-powered customer service applications and experiences. Airkit.ai focuses on enabling both Fortune 500 companies and rapidly growing businesses to develop adaptable, omni-channel customer engagement applications, and AI-based customer service agents.

Businesses could soon face an AI trust gap with customers, according to a new survey of more than 14,000 consumers and business buyers across 25 countries. As brands increasingly adopt AI to increase efficiency and meet increasing customer expectations, nearly three quarters of their customers are concerned about unethical use of the technology.

More and more major IT providers are paying attention to Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and are incorporating this into their own solutions. For example, Salesforce recently announced that RPA will be a part of its Einstein and Mulesoft portfolio. Rocking Robots talked about this with John Kucera, SVP of Product Management at Salesforce.

Salesforce rolled out three new Einstein Automate products to help every Salesforce customer, regardless of technical background, use low-code tools to automate time-consuming, manual processes and integrate data across systems right from their digital HQ. 

Salesforce has announced it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Servicetrace, a provider of robotic process automation (RPA), which, upon closing of the acquisition, will become a part of MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022, ending October 31, 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.

In two hours, robot Tally drives through the Decathlon branch in San Francisco to count the entire stock. According to Decathlon, this eliminates a lot of tedious and routine work that employees would otherwise have to do manually: it takes longer and is less accurate. This robot is part of a completely new infrastructure with software from MuleSoft / Salesforce.

Respect and responsibility, that’s what developing AI is all about, says Kathy Baxter, Architect, Ethical AI Practice at Salesforce.  “In fact, developing AI is like raising a child. As a developer of AI, you are actually a parent.” According to Baxter, we must therefore always show sufficient respect and responsibility.

The past years in the Fall San Francisco was the scene of Dreamforce, with 170,000 attendees the largest IT event in the world. Artificial Intelligence, under the name Einstein, is becoming increasingly important within the Salesforce portfolio. An important development of Einstein at Dreamforce was the offering of deep voice interaction with artificial intelligence. Carola Verschoor of Royal HaskoningDHV called this in a report by professional title Executive People at the time “ talking to data. The video above is a conversation Marco van der Hoeven had with Allison Witherspoon about the development of Einstein last year.