The cloud-based software giant Salesforce announced a tool that could radically change the way brands store real-time data streams and transactional data at scale. Known as Genie, the new customer data platform (CDP) will connect all of Salesforce’s clouds, so enterprise teams can deliver more personalized experiences and seamlessly adapt to changing customer information and demands.
“Every business leader wants to take advantage of real-time data to create compelling, personalized customer experiences — milliseconds matter in this new digital-first world,” explained Salesforce President David Schmaier. “That’s why we built Genie, our most significant innovation ever on the Salesforce Platform. Genie makes every part of Customer 360 more automated, intelligent, and real-time.”
Genie is meant to modernize Salesforce’s sales database software. Its debut cements the company’s position as a longtime leader in the SaaS space. The solution was designed to enhance Salesforce’s Customer 360 capabilities, so brands can act on information more quickly — often as soon as it’s generated — in real-time.
According to Salesforce, more than 500 enterprise brands are already using Genie, including Ford, L’Oreal, and the PGA Tour Superstore.
Making Sense of Data Streams
As the volume of data increases, companies have been looking for better ways to ingest and store real-time data streams. Companies today have an average of 976 separate applications running at any given time, and that amount is expected to more than double by 2026. Rather than providing companies with even more data streams, Genie will collect, organize, and synthesize the data that’s already there.
Although there have been opportunities for companies to use Salesforce to build out customer profiles before now, the process was often cumbersome, and timelines were lengthy. Genie is meant to speed up the process, so companies can get real-time access to customer data within their CRM.
Genie will run on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s public cloud infrastructure, using built-in connectors to join data from multiple channels, along with legacy data and historical data from proprietary data lakes. With full implementation, companies will be able to transform data from those siloed streams into a single customer graph that updates in real time.
Expanding Power with Partnerships
The addition of Genie is expected to boost the relevance of Einstein, Salesforce’s AI technology CRM customization. Einstein AI generates more than 175 billion predictions each day, and it can couple those predictions with suggested actions for users in real time.
Genie could also enhance the value of a number of partnerships between Salesforce and its data partners. For example, companies using Genie will be able to access data stored in the Snowflake data cloud to enable real-time views of their customers across the Snowflake and Salesforce platforms — all without duplicating data.
A partnership between Salesforce and Amazon’s cloud machine learning platform SageMaker could also be an exciting development. Companies and their data scientists will now be able to use SageMaker with Salesforce’s Einstein to build AI models tailored to their businesses.
