Salesforce is doubling down on its strategy to develop industry-specific artificial intelligence capabilities and solutions with a strong focus on financial services, healthcare and life sciences, retail and manufacturing.
The company unveiled this week a new AI use case library featuring more than 100 capabilities embedded in its 15 industry clouds. Industries AI is a set of foundational, pre-built and customizable AI capabilities that tackle industry-specific needs and challenges to help customers start delivering value quickly, the company said.
For the healthcare and life sciences sectors, organizations can deploy ready-to-use AI to help automate time-consuming tasks like matching the right patients to clinical trials and verifying patients' benefits information.
Salesforce's new patient and member services AI tool, which can be found in the AI use case library, will help accelerate time to care with pre-visit recaps, AI-generated prescriptions and benefits summaries to reduce switching between platforms and secure faster approvals, the company said in a press release.
For life sciences, a new candidate auto-matching tool will speed up identification of eligible participants for relevant clinical studies, allowing researchers and site personnel to review and match patients to trials—pulling from both structured and unstructured data like diagnosis codes, medication details and demographics—to help reduce assessment time. Pharmaceutical and medtech sponsors can help their site coordinators and investigators select inclusion-exclusion criteria to obtain a targeted shortlist of clinical trial candidates for further screening, executives said.
With these industry-specific prompts, data models and AI capabilities, chief information officers at healthcare organizations will be able to easily deploy pre-built and customizable AI capabilities that were designed to address their unique needs and challenges, executives said.
In March, Salesforce launched a new healthcare AI assistant within its customer relationship management system. The company's healthcare-focused AI tool, called Einstein Copilot, is a conversational AI assistant that will provide responses based on a healthcare organization's private data. The AI assistant tool allows providers and care teams to digitally capture and summarize details from different clinical and nonclinical sources, update patient and member information, and automate manual processes, according to the company.
The Einstein Copilot: Health Actions tool can be found in the new healthcare AI use case library along with the assessment generation tool that lets healthcare organizations digitize standardized health assessments and automatically upload the information directly into Salesforce Health Cloud.
Salesforce will make most of the features generally available in October 2024 and February 2025 and plans to add more capabilities in the future.
"Our mission is to put powerful and practical AI in the hands of every worker in every industry so every organization can start seeing tangible value from AI right now,” said Jeff Amann, executive vice president and general manager, Salesforce Industries, in a statement. “With Salesforce, organizations of every size and every budget can now easily get started with AI capabilities that were purposefully designed to solve their specific challenges—whether it’s helping banks resolve transaction disputes faster, care providers automatically summarize clinical notes, retail brands better manage their inventories, and much more.”
As it steps up its work to advance AI-driven solutions, Salesforce said earlier this month that it agreed to acquire Tenyx, a developer of AI-powered voice agents. Tenyx develops AI-based voice agents for various industries including e-commerce, healthcare, hospitality and travel, according to its website.
The acquisition, for which no deal value was disclosed, is expected to close in the third quarter.