Salesforce today announced the general availability of the Genie customer data platform (CDP), a high-speed, hyperscalar data lake infrastructure to bring real-time insights from different systems to the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
The key word here is real-time. Sales reps now demand up-to-the-second insights from their customer relationship management software so they can act on the most relevant information. In a large organization, customer data can be siloed across hundreds of different systems and multiple clouds. Genie processes real-time data streams from multiple channels and combines them with Salesforce transaction data, feeding it all into Salesforce’s other two key components, Einstein AI analytics engine and Flow automation services, to deliver personalized predictions using that real-time data.
The platform is built using the Salesforce metadata model, meaning that data in the customer graph is visible across the entire Customer 360 platform.
“Marketers are looking at the Clickstream of every one of their customers. And they not only want to look at what you did two days ago, they want to look at what you did two milliseconds ago,” said David Schmaier, Salesforce chief product officer, during the product presentation. “And service professionals need to solve problems in real-time. If you don’t solve them in real-time, you risk losing the most important assets that you have — your customers. And so customer service has become a real-time sport.”
On stage at Dreamforce, Schmaier said Einstein already performs 175 billion predictions per day, and Flow automation saves Salesforce customers 100 billion hours of work every month. He promised that Genie will make these systems even more effective and personalized.
Salesforce says it’s also working with partners to expand the platform’s interoperability. As an example, Salesforce highlighted its recent partnership with Snowflake, which enabled open data sharing between Snowflake’s data cloud and Genie. This saves customers of both platforms the need to copy data between two products. Another example is Salesforce’s partnership with Amazon; customers can opt to use Amazon’s SageMaker AI platform with Salesforce if they choose to.
Around 500 organizations are already using Genie. For customers who choose to use it, they only need to “flip it on and it just works,” said Schmaier.
