What is Salesforce Genie?
In September 2022, Salesforce announced Genie, which they describe as the world’s first “real-time CRM“.
Salesforce says that the solution is powered by a real-time customer graph, which includes a real-time customer profile. They also suggest that the solution integrates easily with existing AI and decisioning capabilities:
“With Genie, Einstein AI and Flow automation services can harness the power of hyperscale real-time data to enable more dynamic and responsive actions and engagement.”
This is one of Salesforce’s most ambitious set of new capabilities yet. However, details on the experience of early adopters is hard to find.
Wait, isn't that what my IT department is doing?
Does all that sound familiar? Perhaps they remind you of capabilities that have been promised to you from an on-going AWS, Azure or Google Cloud initiative?
Salesforce is effectively promising to deliver directly into the hands of non-technical users, what the typical enterprise requires hundreds of data engineers and years to implement. Only time will tell whether or not Salesforce can deliver on this promise.
In the meantime, many of the promises and capabilities of Genie likely overlap with the goals and objectives for a large data platform project already underway within your enterprise. If the Snowflake datawarehouse happens to be part of this strategy, you’re in luck, as SnowSelect offers an easy way for Salesforce Marketing Cloud users to tap into the hard work already underway by your IT peers.
Top Salesforce Genie Questions
Is Salesforce Genie Free?
Pricing is only becoming available now for this new product. It’s best to check with your account representative.
If Genie is priced like other CDP offerings at Salesforce, customers can expect to have a usage and data volume based licensing agreement (i.e. pay for what you use).
Is Salesforce Genie a CDP?
Customer Data Platforms remain a nebulous term (it’s similar to teenage sex: everyone is talking about it, but noone has done it). Experts at the top three cloud infrastructure vendors have argued convincingly that “CDPs are not a thing” (they see CDPs as an overarching concept built from their existing underlying services).
The claimed benefits of Genie are very similar to CDPs. One major difference, is that Genie is focused on realizing maximum benefit when adopting as many Salesforce products as possible. This contrasts sharply with other CDP vendors, who are neutral about which CRM and customer engagement tools they integrate with.