Salesforce has announced the beta availability of Einstein Copilot
An executive recently told me that everyone has an opinion, but the data wins the argument. If that’s true, non-technical people may win a lot of arguments in the near future, because Salesforce just released a beta version of Einstein Copilot for Tableau, an AI assistant that the company says will help “make everyone an expert in data”.
Or, essentially, provide their own personal data scientist.
“Every employee, in every function, must develop fundamental data skills to be successful in the modern business,” said Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay. “Einstein Copilot for Tableau modernizes this skill development, helping anyone become an expert in understanding data and empowering everyone in the business to surface information faster with trusted artificial intelligence.”
Copilot, not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot (“your everyday AI companion”), will help you in several ways:
- suggesting relevant questions for your data set
- answering specific questions
- extracting necessary pieces of data from larger data sets
- create graphs to visualize the data information it extracts
- remember previous context questions so you can dig deeper
Essentially, this is a natural language interface to large and complex data sets, based on the same kind of large language model (LLM) technology that powers ChatGPT. This opens the door for potentially millions of people who don’t have data analysts or scientists at their disposal to quickly and easily get data-driven answers to business questions, even if they don’t fully know what to look for.
Salesforce has been working on integrating artificial intelligence into the business for years. Its AI research team dates back to 2014 and has over 300 AI patents. The AI company’s CEO Clara Shih told me last year that we’re witnessing a watershed moment right now: “a step function in human resources.” At the time the company announced that Copilot and CEO Marc Benioff specifically mentioned human-level AI and not just as the company’s goals. A year ago, Salesforce AI was making a trillion predictions a week.
The overarching goal is the “AI-first company,” one that doesn’t have a technology foundation so much as an intelligence framework that enables AI in nearly every business function from support to sales to marketing to product development and more.
Ultimately, this Copilot beta is a small step in that direction, but it will make jobs easier and jobs faster, allowing people to do more and better work.
However, AI engines built in LLMs tend to hallucinate and make mistakes since they don’t really understand what they’re doing. This is something I have seen many times first hand with OpenAI’s GPT-4. Salesforce has built a level of trust and security into its technology to minimize this possibility, they say.
I can only imagine the power of having a data scientist in my pocket to help answer any data questions I might have, but it will certainly transform the kind of work I do and the quality of output I could to succeed. If and when this technology is released with near 100% reliability, it will be a game changer.
Copilot in Tableau is available in limited beta right now, but Salesforce expects to make it widely available by this summer.
