Silvio Savarese

A growing number of companies are using chatbots. Einstein GPT–a generative AI platform which rolled out last year, can go beyond questions and answers and help customers with more complex tasks like product returns or refunds. It is a first-of-its-kind Gen AI geared towards customer relations management (CRM), supercharging the work of sales teams and customer service people around the world.

Silvio Savarese, who leads Einstein GPT, says Salesforce has been betting big on generative AI since before ChatGPT's popularity exploded, developing a large language model to help write code and deploying it for internal and external developers. But now, they are moving into agentic AI, which can work autonomously to help automate things like customer service. It can also flag appropriate sales leads and generate marketing emails and copy.

The company has just released an AI benchmark for customer relationship management, which aims to help businesses make more informed decisions when choosing the best large language models for their business. The benchmark can help businesses choose a leaner, more targeted model rather than a huge one, one that can also come with a smaller carbon footprint than larger more power-hungry models, Savarese says.

*Disclosure: TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO of Salesforce.