Salesforce is committed to South Africa and launches new AI solutions
“When you lead with values, business can be the greatest platform for change.”
This is the message from Zuko Mdwaba, the Salesforce Area Vice President, who was presenting the keynote address at the Salesforce World Tour Essentials conference.
The event, which took place at the Kyalami Convention Centre, featured over 30 sessions, multiple demos, and more than 20 sponsors.
“Today is a celebration of our partners and the companies you have built,” said Mdwaba.
“We are successful when our customers are successful.”
Mdwaba spoke about the importance Salesforce places on bringing change to South Africa – and highlighted its ongoing mission to bring 31,800 new jobs to the country.
He also highlighted Salesforce’s Triple One model for doing good, which commits to giving back:
- 1% of Salesforce equity – $614 million
- 1% of Salesforce time – 7.8 million volunteer hours
- 1% of Salesforce product – 52,000 non-profits helped
Roundtable
The event then featured a roundtable with Ursula Fear – the Senior Talent Programme Manager at Salesforce – and Robin Fisher – Salesforce’s Head of Mediterranean, Austria, Israel, CEE, Middle East, and Africa.
Fear expanded upon Mdwaba’s points about skills development in South Africa and explained that Salesforce has had to change the narrative of how skills are developed locally.
“To do this, we have launched a partnership with The Collective X,” said Fear.
The Collective X is an organisation comprising South Africa’s most prominent ICT companies and leaders that is focused on training the country’s youth in digital skills.
Key to its goals is eliminating the estimated R10 billion a year that is spent by South African businesses outsourcing tech jobs.
Instead, The Collective X believes that through collaboration, digital skills training can bring in as much as R300 billion to the country’s economy, and will establish South Africa as a technology powerhouse.
“This is an incredible initiative that is about taking control of in-demand digital skills in South Africa,” said Fear.
Salesforce, through its partnerships, is already able to offer the most affordable training in the world – and it is committed to extending this value to South Africans by working with The Collective X.
Fisher continued the discussion by sharing the insights and advantages that Salesforce’s industry-first generative AI – Einstein GPT – will bring to South African businesses.
Personalised content can be generated by Einstein GPT across every Salesforce cloud, he explained, taking mundane tasks out of your employees’ hands and letting them focus on tasks that generate business value.
“It is like every single employee having their own executive assistant,” said Fisher.
An open and extensible model allows Einstein GPT to be trained on trusted, real-time data, and it even offers integration with OpenAI for out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities.
Salesforce AI Cloud
At the event, Salesforce Solution Engineering Director Linda Saunders also unveiled AI Cloud, a trusted enterprise platform that is built for Salesforce’s CRM and powered by Einstein GPT.
“AI Cloud is the fastest, most trusted way for businesses to supercharge their productivity and customer experience,” said Saunders.
“It is designed to power every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction.”
Salesforce has baked trust into the core of the solution with its new Einstein GPT trust layer, she added.
“This will set the new industry standard for protecting your sensitive customer data with AI technology.”
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