Salesforce announces beta availability of Einstein Copilot
“Everyone has an opinion, but data wins the debate,” one executive told me recently. If that’s true, non-technical people may end up winning many arguments in the near future. That’s because Salesforce just released a beta version of its Einstein Copilot for Tableau, an AI assistant that the company claims “allows anyone to become a data expert.”
Or, essentially, provide your own personal data scientist.
“To succeed in the modern enterprise, employees across all departments must develop fundamental data skills,” Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay said in a statement. “Einstein Copilot for Tableau streamlines that skill development, empowers anyone to become an expert in understanding data, and empowers everyone in the business to uncover insights faster using trusted AI.” I will make it possible.”
Copilot is not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot (your “everyday AI companion”). It helps in a variety of ways, including:
- Suggest questions related to the dataset
- answer specific questions
- Extract the data you need from larger datasets
- Build charts to visualize extracted data insights
- Remember previous questions to understand the context so you can dig deeper
Essentially, it’s a natural language interface to large, complex datasets, powered by the same kind of large language model (LLM) technology that powers ChatGPT. This allows potentially millions of people who don’t have data analysts or scientists to quickly and quickly provide data-driven answers to business questions, even if they don’t know exactly what to look for. It could be possible to get it easily.
Salesforce has been working to embed AI into the enterprise for years. His AI research team at the company dates back to 2014 when he was awarded more than 300 AI patents. The company’s AI CEO, Clara See, told me last year that we are witnessing a pivotal moment in the “step function of human potential.” When the company announced Copilot, CEO and CEO Marc Benioff specifically mentioned human-level AI or better as a company goal. As of a year ago, Salesforce AI was making 1 trillion predictions per week.
Our overall goal is to be an “AI-first company.” This is a company with less of a technology foundation than an intelligence framework that leverages AI in nearly every corporate function, from support to sales, marketing, product development, and more.
At the end of the day, this Copilot beta is a small step in that direction, but it should make jobs easier, tasks faster, and help people do more and better.
However, AI engines built on LLM tend to hallucinate and make mistakes because they don’t understand what they’re actually doing. That’s something I’ve witnessed firsthand many times with his GPT-4 in OpenAI. Salesforce has built layers of reliability and security into its technology to minimize this possibility, they say.
I can only imagine the power of having a data scientist in your pocket to answer your data-related questions, but it definitely changes the type of work I do and the quality of results I can achieve. Once this technology ships with near 100% reliability, things will change dramatically.
Tableau’s Copilot is currently available in limited beta, but Salesforce plans to make it widely available by this summer.
