AWS and Salesforce Forge New Paths in AI Collaboration

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced an expansion of its partnership with Salesforce, introducing integrations in data and artificial intelligence (AI). Select Salesforce products will now be accessible on the AWS Marketplace, marking a pivotal step towards seamless and secure data management across the Salesforce and AWS ecosystems. This collaboration aims to enable users to responsibly incorporate cutting-edge generative AI technologies into their applications and workflows.

“Today’s announcement is an incredible milestone in the evolution of our longstanding partnership with AWS. We’re bringing together the #No. 1 AI CRM provider and the leading cloud provider to deliver a trusted, open, integrated data and AI platform, and ensuring we meet massive customer demand for our products on the AWS Marketplace. With these enhancements to our partnership, we’re enabling all of our customers to be more innovative, productive and successful in this new AI era,” said Marc Benioff, chair and CEO, Salesforce.

The integrations encompass Salesforce's support for Amazon Bedrock, an intelligently managed service for foundation models, now seamlessly available through the Einstein Trust Layer. Simultaneously, Salesforce Data Cloud is poised to extend its support for data sharing across a broader spectrum of AWS technologies, all governed by centralized access controls, providing users with control over secure access at various hierarchical levels.

Streamlining data processing  

Key aspects of this expanded partnership include the availability of select Salesforce products, such as Data Cloud, Service Cloud, and Sales Cloud, on the AWS Marketplace, streamlining the purchasing journey for customers and providing a unified view of their IT expenditures. The evolution of Data Cloud into a comprehensive SaaS data platform, coupled with innovative Zero-ETL integrations, signifies a significant stride towards simplifying data processing tasks and enhancing insights and predictions through a secure environment.

Seamless integration of AWS data and services into the Einstein Platform 

The collaboration also addresses the secure integration of AWS data and AI services into Salesforce's Einstein Platform, providing inventive solutions like Salesforce Prompt Builder. This tool helps users craft custom prompt templates grounded in their data, securely harnessing advanced techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation with models from renowned AI entities.

“Salesforce and AWS make it easy for developers to securely access and leverage data and generative AI technologies to drive rapid transformation for their organizations and industries. With this expanded partnership, our joint customers gain powerful new ways to innovate, collaborate, and build more customer-focused applications using the broadest and deepest set of cloud services,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO, AWS.

Transforming customer experiences through integrations  

Integrating Service Cloud Voice and Amazon Connect is set to transform customer service experiences. The introduction of Amazon Connect Chat to Service Cloud Digital Engagement, coupled with forecasting, capacity planning, and agent scheduling, enables a unified customer journey. Integrated generative AI capabilities aim to elevate agent productivity and provide invaluable insights to supervisors.

In addition, the partnership envisions a reimagined Heroku as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer for crafting AI-first apps across both Salesforce and AWS. Leveraging the prowess of AWS infrastructure, including accelerated EC2 instances, Trainium, Inferentia for ML training and inference, GPU-optimized EC2 instances, and AWS Graviton-based EC2 instances, this initiative aims to provide developers with an unparalleled, high-performance, and cost-effective computing environment.

Availability   

Anticipated for release in 2024, these product integrations are poised to reshape the landscape of cloud services, offering users unprecedented capabilities at the intersection of AI and data management. Notably, joint customers in the U.S. can already explore and acquire select Salesforce products through the AWS Marketplace, with plans for expanded support in 2024.