Discover Salesforce

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain what Salesforce does.
Summarize how Salesforce can transform your business.
Describe how CRM + AI + Data + Trust can help you connect with customers in a whole new way.

What Is Salesforce?

Let’s start with the basics: What does Salesforce do?

You may be familiar with Salesforce and some of our CRM (customer relationship management) solutions, but you may not understand the full breadth of our capabilities and benefits to our customers in harnessing AI (artificial intelligence) and data to grow their customer relationships.

So how do we do that when customer expectations are ever on the rise?

With Salesforce, every employee has the apps, trusted AI, and unified data they need to exceed expectations and make customers happier. Our portfolio of solutions works across your entire business to give you a 360-degree customer view from unified data across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more. It all happens right within CRM where your employees are working and assisted by our trusted AI, Einstein. In a nutshell, Salesforce is the world’s #1 AI CRM that helps you connect with your customers in a whole new way with CRM + AI + Data + Trust.

Bring AI to Salesforce

Salesforce pioneered AI in CRM by giving employees predictive AI in the flow of work. And now, with Agentforce, we’re in a new wave of innovation where AI agents can take action autonomously. Using Agentforce, our groundbreaking suite of customizable agents and tools, you can build autonomous agents that assist your employees and customers with common business interactions. Agentforce’s capabilities are made possible by Salesforce’s unique ability to deliver a unified experience between apps, models, and data layers.

And it all happens on one platform that’s truly integrated in one common metadata model—which is a fancy way of saying data that describes data that creates a seamless way for apps to communicate and work with each other. AI can learn from that 360-degree view and apply its full context to every customer experience, wherever they’re interacting with your business: Service cases become sales opportunities. Merchants can resolve service issues. Marketers can dynamically upsell. Our integrated platform of CRM + AI + Data + Trust means your business is more integrated than ever before.

Our ability to help companies grow their customer relationships with the combination of CRM + AI + Data + Trust is why we’re a partner to the world’s most trusted brands and why we’re recognized as industry leaders for driving customer success. In the next sections, you get a breakdown of all the components and benefits that make up our full range of products.

Create a Customer 360

It’s hard to deliver great customer experiences and grow relationships when you don’t have a clear view of your customer’s data and interactions across your business. Even if you have solutions for each team, these apps are often disconnected and end up creating data silos leading to disjointed customer experiences.

Salesforce helps you overcome these challenges by helping you create a 360-degree view of your customers in every app to enable your employees to meet your customers where they are in their journey. Any company can create a Customer 360 with our industry-leading CRM apps, and because every app runs on the same integrated platform, all your AI, data, customizations, and upgrades work seamlessly in every experience. Unlike disconnected point solutions for every separate team, Salesforce apps work on one platform, so you have fewer contracts, integrations, trainings, and out of sync release cycles that slow down your business.

Salesforce unites every department around the customer.

But you may be wondering, what do CRM apps do? And more importantly, how will they help you grow customer relationships? Here are ways each department benefits from shared customer insights and the right tools.

Sales: Arm your sales organization with the tools and data they need to close deals faster with AI-generated close plans that are specific to your prospects and customers—so your sales reps spend more time thoughtfully connecting with customers.
Service: Deliver consistent, personalized support experiences across your customers’ preferred channels—from the contact center to out in the field—with AI-generated service replies and automated approvals that help your agents be more efficient.
Marketing: Improve lead generation, customer acquisition, and upselling opportunities using AI to dynamically generate personalized content across email, mobile, web, and advertising.
Commerce: Build seamless digital commerce experiences and bring new products to market faster with tailored product recommendations that exceed customer expectations and boost revenue.
IT: Empower IT teams, admins, and developers with an extensible AI platform that unifies your CRM, AI, data, development, and security into a single, comprehensive platform—facilitating fast development of generative apps and automation.
All Teams: Unlock productivity by bringing conversations, collaboration, and automation together with trusted AI in Slack to help every team speed up processes and deliver big results.

Scale Trusted AI

Every company wants to get to their AI future. But how do you balance boosting productivity with AI while protecting customer and company data? When AI is disconnected from your business, it’s pretty clueless about your customers. That means it's not really sure how to lend a hand and deliver predictions and generated content that resonates with your customers. But here's the catch: Using customer data to make AI smarter can raise privacy concerns. Turns out, 59% of customers do not trust companies with their data, as highlighted in a 2023 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey. Plus, when you dive into generative AI, there are risks of hallucinations, bias, and toxicity.

AI is the #1 priority for CEOs, but there’s an AI trust gap with 59% of customers not trusting companies with their data.

That’s why we built Einstein, Salesforce’s AI for CRM that’s native to our Platform. It's all about giving you trusted AI that knows how to deliver success for all your customers while scaling easily and securely across your business. Einstein can do everything from predict the next best actions and generate content and code because it’s built for CRM and grounded in your unified, accurate customer data. Einstein understands a lead, an account owner, a customer case—and all the unique context that surrounds them. And this deep understanding of your entire business helps you catch opportunities you might miss and recommend next steps you might not think of to help grow trusted relationships.

Now with the power of Agentforce, you can add and customize autonomous agents that are able to carry out business tasks using a company’s CRM data, external data, and metadata—all while adhering to strict privacy and security guidelines and action guardrails. Because these agents are completely integrated with your Customer 360 apps across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more, they can seamlessly hand off to employees right in the flow of work. You can collaborate with your agents as a true extension of your team in any Salesforce app, partner app, or custom app you build.

Unlock Trapped Data

For companies to find success with AI, they first need to get their data together. But companies everywhere have trapped or disconnected data, and these islands of data are holding them back. In fact, according to MuleSoft’s 2024 Connectivity Benchmark Report, only 28% of applications are being integrated or connected, preventing companies from meaningfully implementing AI they can trust to improve employee and customer experiences.

Salesforce helps you unlock trapped data from any source—whether that be third-party or even legacy systems—to enrich your CRM with a single, harmonized view of all your customer data from every source. With all your data connected, you can then ground your AI in trusted data, improving every insight and generated content, like marketing campaigns and service case responses. This is all possible because CRM + AI + Data + Trust work together on one integrated platform.

Data Cloud helps you easily connect siloed external data with Salesforce so you can harmonize all your customer and company data to create a unified view of your customers and use it across our product portfolio. When you bring all your data together, every CRM app is better with a complete view of your customer, and you’re able to extract even more insights with Tableau, our visual analytics platform, to scale data-driven decisions. Uniting your data makes your AI better, too, because it’s working from a richer, trusted data set to deliver insights and generate content. All in all, Data Cloud helps you unlock data from its silos and put it to work for better decision-making and the fastest and most secure entry into AI for business.

Build and Customize Fast with the Salesforce Platform

No business is truly happy with a one-size-fits-all solution, but building customized functionality takes specialized skills and valuable time that many companies just don’t have. The accelerating pace of AI innovation, the explosion of data from everywhere, and rising customer expectations to keep up with it all are pushing companies to settle for subpar systems that only solve part of the problem—and are disconnected from their customer data.

The Salesforce Platform is one customer platform for your entire business, helping you keep up and get ahead in this AI revolution by harnessing the power of all your customer data and metadata to bring intelligence, automation, low-code app development, and much more to every employee—no IT degree needed!

The Salesforce Platform’s integrated metadata framework makes your data, AI, and customizations work seamlessly across every app. Metadata is data about data, and in Salesforce it provides you with critical context about your data that helps AI understand what it is and how to use it. For example, Salesforce metadata describes what an opportunity is, what fields are required, the relationship between an opportunity and an account, automation that should run every time it’s created or updated, layouts, and a lot more.

Metadata is crucial because it lets you work with your data in new ways. Within Salesforce, metadata allows you to customize and configure Salesforce to meet the specific needs of your organization. For example, an admin for a pet hospital could create a custom object for a pet profile, a tab for high-risk cases, a daily report viewable to only the veterinarians, a workflow for prescription refills, and much more–all with metadata.

Our Platform is also intelligent, with conversational AI right in the flow of work augmenting the capabilities of all your employees so they’re more productive. It’s automated with our built-in, easy-to-use (and AI-assisted) workflow engine that orchestrates processes across Salesforce and any system. It’s low-code, so admins and developers can easily customize Salesforce and build entirely new apps and experiences without writing a single line of code. And when you need more sophisticated customizations, you get powerful pro-code tools that require a fraction of the code you’d need to write for other platforms.

Finally, the Salesforce Platform is open, enabling companies to expand Salesforce’s functionality with thousands of partner apps and easily connect to all the enterprise systems you already use. With the Salesforce Platform, you can easily tailor all the capabilities of our trusted platform—from AI and analytics to integration and training your workforce—to meet your specific company and industry needs.

Now that you know that Salesforce brings together best-in-class CRM apps, trusted AI, and data on one integrated platform, next see how companies are using it to grow relationships, boost employee productivity, and drive efficient growth.

Looking for Help?

Discover More