Unify and Act on Your Data with Data Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how Data Cloud can help you connect the data from Salesforce and systems you already use to put your data to work.
- Explain why data is crucial for using AI across your organization.
What’s Data Cloud?
With the massive boom in customer data and the services to manage it, companies are finding themselves with lots of trapped or disconnected data. In fact, a whopping 72% of company applications are disconnected! This trapped data is a real roadblock, preventing companies from getting the most out of their data across their entire business. It also makes it tough for AI to take autonomous, trusted actions since they rely on trusted data to do their thing.
Data Cloud is an exceptional hyperscale data engine designed and built within Salesforce to bring together your structured data, such as customer records and sales figures, and unstructured data, like emails and social media posts, from any source, including third-party systems or data lakes. This powerful tool harmonizes your data, creating unified customer profiles that serve as the foundation for every action, automation, and insight across Salesforce.
Imagine having a single, comprehensive view of your customers that integrates data from various sources like CRM systems, external databases, social media, and more. Data Cloud makes this possible by seamlessly combining and organizing your data, ensuring that every piece of information is accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible.
These unified customer profiles are not just static records: They’re dynamic, living entities that evolve with every customer interaction. They also power every Agentforce action, from autonomous customer service to marketing campaign creation. And they provide employees both a 360-degree view of every customer and the insights needed to make informed business decisions that improve efficiency and effectiveness across your organization.
Zero Copy is another important feature offered by Data Cloud. Zero Copy is a technique that lets you shift data around between systems without the need to physically copy or move the data, ensuring real-time access and reducing data redundancy. With Zero Copy, for example, a retail company that uses Salesforce and other tools can access customer data in real time across its CRM, ecommerce platform, and marketing tools without duplicating data across its different systems. This enables instant personalized marketing actions, like sending thank-you emails or product recommendations, and ensures up-to-date and consistent information across all systems.
Whether you’re looking to enhance customer experiences, activate AI for your workforce, simplify operations, or gain deeper insights, Data Cloud is the engine that makes it all possible. Check out how Salesforce customers are using Data Cloud to improve their customer experiences:
How Does Data Factor Into Your AI Strategy?
Think of data as the fuel that powers your AI engine. The more high-quality data you have, the better your AI can learn, make predictions, and increase smart decisions. It's like trying to bake a cake. Without the right ingredients (data), you can’t expect a delicious outcome (effective AI). Plus, data helps AI understand customer behaviors, market trends, and even improve internal processes. So, if you’re serious about AI, you’ve got to be serious about your data strategy.
That’s why Data Cloud is crucial for a company’s AI strategy. By providing a unified 360-degree view of customer data, Data Cloud brings all your customer data together in one place. This means not only your employees but also your AI models get the full picture of your business so they can predict customer behavior with more accuracy.
Take Agentforce, for example. With Data Cloud, Agentforce can dive into that rich, unified data and make it accessible to your agents. It uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which basically teaches large language models (LLMs) about your specific business without the hassle of retraining them from scratch or sharing your data widely.
That means your agents anticipate customer needs and proactively act on those insights. And best of all, they can personalize interactions to feel like they’re tailor-made for each individual—because they’re pulling from all your unified data. It’s like giving your AI a pair of glasses that let it see clearly—everything clicks into place and your customer experiences level up!