Salesforce unveils new real-time data platform Genie

Salesforce Logo on wall of office Reception

Salesforce has announced the arrival of Salesforce Genie, its new hyperscale data platform that creates real-time customer profiles to help businesses deliver personalized experiences.

Detailing the platform at its Dreamforce ’22 event, Salesforce said Genie powers the entire Customer 360 CRM platform to provide a “more automated, intelligent, and real-time” experience.

Complete with its data lake, the platform is designed to help businesses deliver highly personalized experiences across sales, services, marketing, and commerce, that continually adapt to customer needs in real-time.

“Every business leader wants to take advantage of real-time data to create compelling, personalized customer experiences — milliseconds matter in this new digital-first world,” commented David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce.

“That’s why we built Genie, our most significant innovation ever on the Salesforce Platform. Genie makes every part of Customer 360 more automated, intelligent, and real-time.”

Genie gathers and stores real-time data streams at scale and combines them with Salesforce transactional data. It does this using built-in connectors that bring in data from across all channels – including mobile, web, and APIs – as well as legacy data through MuleSoft and historical data from proprietary data lakes.

It then transforms this data into a real-time customer graph which acts as a unified customer profile record. Everything in this graph is visible and actionable across the entire Customer 360, industry solution, AppExchange, and customer apps.

Salesforce says the offering enables Einstein AI and Flow automation services to create more responsive and dynamic actions and engagement based on real-time data. The platform also runs on the firm’s public cloud infrastructure Hyperforce, which provides data residency, security, privacy, and regulatory compliance controls.

Partnerships also expand Genie’s abilities, Salesforce added. These include real-time data sharing between Salesforce and Snowflake, tailored AI model building with Amazon SageMaker, first-party advertising with the likes of Amazon Ads or Meta, as well as a new Genie collection on AppExchange.

Penny Gillespie, VP and analyst at Gartner, said Genie has the potential to bring real-time personalization across the entire enterprise.

“It harmonizes disparate data with privacy consent and compliance, automation, intelligence (Einstein), and speed,” she said. “It enables the discernment of millions of records to have one unified customer profile which is neither easily achieved nor highly available today with suggested real-time actions—be it a presentation layer change for a digital experience or coaching a sales or service employee.”

With the ability to know and discern every aspect of what a customer is trying to achieve, Gillespie added that the days of asking customers a lot of questions to help them may now be surpassed.

“Coupling the power of customer knowledge with AI has the power to solve the customer’s problem before the customer has even framed the problem—regardless of whether the area is service, sales, etc,” she explained.

“The result is truly effortless customer experiences which we know foster customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repurchase.”

Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform, which is powered by Genie, is available now, alongside Genie for Industries, Tableau + CDP Connector, and MuleSoft Anypoint Connector. Further integrations will be released from December and into 2023, the company said.

Daniel Todd

Dan is a freelance writer and regular contributor to ChannelPro, covering the latest news stories across the IT, technology, and channel landscapes. Topics regularly cover cloud technologies, cyber security, software and operating system guides, and the latest mergers and acquisitions.

A journalism graduate from Leeds Beckett University, he combines a passion for the written word with a keen interest in the latest technology and its influence in an increasingly connected world.

He started writing for ChannelPro back in 2016, focusing on a mixture of news and technology guides, before becoming a regular contributor to ITPro. Elsewhere, he has previously written news and features across a range of other topics, including sport, music, and general news.