The State of Salesforce 2023–24

From boardrooms to product development team meetings, generative AI is the topic du jour the world over. It ranks high on CEO agendas, with 75% of CEOs believing competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI. Half (50%) are now integrating generative AI into products and services, while 43% are using generative AI to inform their strategic decisions.

AI budgets are up

Generative AI sales budgets are expected to triple by 2025, with marketing and service budgets expected to more than double. Given the inflow of funds, hitting “pause” is less likely for any organization. Given that many organizations, however, are still on a learning curve for predictive AI, generative AI presents an even more daunting set of challenges. Not since Moore’s Law have we seen a pace of change so exponential, which means that Salesforce users keeping pace with AI (in all its forms) is essential not only to keep up but to survive.

Use cases focused on overall profitability

Leading organizations have big plans for generative AI but are strategically focused, selective, and pragmatic about how they move forward. They aren’t settling for incremental gains. Instead, they are experimenting with use cases specifically to increase overall profitability and with an eye to freeing up their people for the higher-value, customer-focused tasks that can help drive it.

Leaders are thinking outside of the box

Embracing the power of generative AI within the Salesforce platform has become easier with the introduction of generative AI versions of Einstein, Slack, and Tableau, all of which now fall within the scope of the Salesforce AI Cloud. But that’s not enough for strategic Pioneers—61% of them are looking beyond out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities to support their long-term goals. They want additional capabilities and more integration to gain clear competitive advantage. In short, Pioneers are more focused on using generative AI capabilities as a tool that’s part of a larger strategy rather than as a final product.

In the even faster-paced customer environment of tomorrow, a compelling customer experience is essential to optimizing AI—and AI is often essential to creating a compelling customer experience. Generative AI expands the scope of automation, particularly in administrative and service areas, as well as marketing. User-friendly interfaces such as chat or voice have lowered and, in some cases, eliminated the friction companies can experience during adoption.

Pioneers connect generative AI and topline revenue growth

Pioneers recognize using generative AI solutions to generate customer value creates the most impact right now; as a result, they are more bullish on generative AI than Pensives, with 34% more Pioneers believing it will increase topline revenue growth. Pioneering leaders are embracing generative AI to drive topline growth, such as customer service, sales, and marketing—a bolder move than most Pensives, who are cautiously focused primarily on internal use cases. Pioneers also augment customer-facing operations with AI at a rate 134% higher than Pensives, with a strong focus on using AI for middle-and back-office connections.

Source: State of Salesforce 2023. Q: Within the next year, what percentage of your organization’s workforce will be using generative AI to augment their daily tasks? Q: In which areas is your organization already using generative AI? n=2000

Starting with AI versus adding AI

By changing mindsets from “adding AI” to “starting with AI,” enterprises are creating huge transformations. In early 2023, we cited adding AI-first intelligent workflows as one of the “seven bets” every organization should make this year. Why? Because for years we have known that AI would transform business in most industries, but adoption—while accelerating—was slow and expensive. Foundation models have changed that; pre-trained AI can easily be used almost “out of the box” for automatable tasks, and its user-friendly interface makes it highly accessible for customers and employees.

The introduction of generative AI brings workforce issues to the foreground; Pioneers see high potential in workforce augmentation. They expect nearly 15% of their workforce will be augmented with generative AI tools within the next year as more employees are trained and gain hands-on experience. While this impacts the way they use their Salesforce platform, it goes beyond it.

Most Pioneers are looking beyond Salesforce to build and strengthen their generative AI capabilities, likely because 13% more expect targeted generative AI to provide a significant competitive advantage.

Source: Generative AI State of the Market. Q: For each of the following time periods, what percentage of each of the following budgets was, is, or will be allocated to building generative AI capabilities for Salesforce solutions? n=300

Pioneers are working rapidly to prepare for broader generative AI deployment. With multiple methods to approach generative AI, Pioneers are strategically considering an open approach—one that fuses elements of open-source and commercial platforms with proprietary modeling. But, to achieve true competitive advantage, they need to build out proprietary data further to stay ahead. They have a head-start on enterprise readiness with Salesforce data preparation but need to focus on untapped data sources to keep that lead.

Since 1966, Camping World has specialized in products and services for vehicle owners and campers. It has grown into the nation’s largest retailer of RVs and recreation camping products and services.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge in customers revealed some issues in the existing infrastructure of the company’s contact centers. As the volume and traffic increased, gaps within agent management and response times became more prominent. When customers could not reach a human agent, their queries went unnoticed, were pushed off until the next day when a rep could respond, or were accidentally dropped entirely. To address these issues, the retailer modernized its contact centers and invested in a new infrastructure to improve processes and workflow automation.

AI augmentation of the call center along with flexibility to adapt new workflows resulted in great success for Camping World’s service centers. “We were looking to create more free time for our agents to build meaningful and impactful conversations with our clients,” explains Saurabh Shah, chief digital officer and chief information officer for the company. “That meant removing noisy, quick, simple queries that could be answered faster with automation.” Of the 13,999 chat conversations for the retail area, only 6,000 needed to be transferred to a live agent.

Customers now can switch from voice to SMS messaging when they are calling. In addition:

• Agent efficiency increased by 33% and wait times decreased to 33 seconds overall.
• AI and live agents can work simultaneously, with AI proactively collecting customer data while fielding web and SMS messaging, and live agents handling multiple simultaneous chats.
• Customer engagement increased 40% on all platforms, and agent efficiency increased by 33%.

Among all the things that differentiate Pioneers from Pensives, industry Salesforce solutions could be the major growth driver that sets the first group exponentially apart. Each industry cluster we studied has at least a few organizations that fall into the Pioneer group, showing that Salesforce industry solutions are no longer confined to just a few industries or sectors; successful take-up is happening across the board.

Source: State of Salesforce 2023. Q: Which industry best describes your organization? (Pioneers) n=397

These Pioneers are deriving high ROI from Salesforce industry clouds, making these clouds the leading Salesforce investment Pioneers make (150% more than Pensives).

On average, our research shows 81% more strategic Pioneers are using industry clouds well and 74% more see increased future potential in industry clouds through positive impact on their business.

Industry clouds allow Pioneers to accelerate how quickly they get to value, using more specific, customer-centric solutions tailored for their industry. They allow organizations to serve customers better without having to start from the ground up.

Industry clouds are making the greatest impact in customer service and ecommerce, but over the next three years, enterprise leaders say they will either completely or significantly implement a wide range of industry-specific Salesforce solutions for customer-facing use cases.

Source: State of Salesforce 2023. Q: How likely are you to implement industry-specific Salesforce solutions over the next three years in the following areas? n=2,000

A large energy and utilities organization with more than 5.7 million electricity customers set out to improve its ability to support those customers.

To do so, they replaced existing CRM systems and tools with Salesforce Industry Energy & Utilities, Service, and Sales Clouds. They provided a unified desktop, sourcing data from multiple systems.

The utility took a prudent approach in this transformation, facilitating a designated data mapping workstream to define data requirements for the central data repository used to populate Salesforce.

Its transformation delivered:

• 31 newly designed customer service processes
• The first implementation of an advisor solution utilizing Salesforce’s Energy & Utilities Cloud
• Integration across 7 applications

Organizations run better when everything works together. Integrating data across enterprise silos helps optimize Salesforce platform value by creating a trusted single source of truth. Being able to connect data from virtually any system to generate real-time insights for personalized customer experiences is essential to creating the kind of value that is transformational across the enterprise.

Here again, Pioneers lead the way in integration, with 24% more of them taking active steps to eliminate silos and improve interoperability—leading to better performance and access to better insights. Integrating multiple Salesforce clouds can lead to higher revenue per license, which generates even more value from Salesforce investments. Previous research shows that only 12% of Salesforce users reported exploring Salesforce Cloud integration. Pioneers, however, are generating 40% higher revenue per license than Pensives, in part because of their integration efforts.

Keep in mind that integrating Salesforce clouds is not customizing Salesforce clouds. Salesforce has invested significantly in its configurable workflows, intelligence, and automation, crafting widely used best practices for a broad range of clients. But the integration of Salesforce clouds intensifies the power and value of Salesforce investments while optimizing Salesforce platform design.

Organizations that connect multiple Salesforce platforms also have more comprehensive enterprise transformation plans, moving beyond silos to integrated action. Pioneers embed Salesforce in a continuous process improvement cycle—33% more than Pensives—that contributes to ongoing transformation. It’s working because Pioneers are twice as likely as Pensives to execute transformation that brings change to the entire enterprise.

Source: Mine the Gaps 2022. Q: How do your organizations business processes support your digital platform? Q: How extensive will your enterprise transformation be by 2026? n=1159

CaixaBank is the leading financial group for retail banking in Spain. For CaixaBank, creating reliable and accessible digital channels for customers is a critical part of delivering a high standard of trust and compliance.

As its customer base grew, the bank saw a large increase in support requests, and needed to build a system that could effectively scale and route inquiries. For example, prior to transformation efforts, CaixaBank had over 10 teams managing its contact center services and over 50 different customer support phone numbers. It knew that finding a way to unify its systems on a single platform would enhance both the customer and the agent experience.

CaixaBank’s transformation needed to accomplish three things: efficiently manage the contact center, unify customer service channels, and unify its technology platform—all with a focus on improving user experience for customers and agents.

The bank incorporated AI, including agent-facing chatbots. These chatbots offset basic inquiries, escalate to live agents when appropriate, and surface answers during customer interactions to reduce time to resolution. To improve back-office productivity, automated workflow processes create consistent customer journeys while reducing redundant workload for agents.

Through unification of Salesforce platforms and incorporation of IBM Watson AI, CaixaBank was able to consolidate 50-plus service numbers into one service number. It provides over two million answers to inquiries each month via IBM Watson.

Pioneers are 59% more confident than Pensives that Salesforce will drive innovation, and they back that belief up with action. They invest 41% more in change management and are 89% more willing to adapt business modification efforts. Why? Because Pioneers understand that simply implementing Salesforce is not enough. Without creating a culture of adaptability, resiliency, and innovation—a culture that embraces change on all levels—true transformation cannot occur no matter how good the technology tool. Here, Pioneers have a secret weapon: effective change management.

Crowdsourcing innovation from within is a cost-effective way to explore new ideas and ways of doing things. Pioneers do so 38% more than Pensives. Modernizing work so employees stay productive and connected now means embracing cross-cloud experiences and operations that make their work easier, faster, and more insightful. Salesforce technology becomes an engagement layer, facilitating connections and experiences for the network of employees, partners, and customers—which leads to more innovation across the entire system.

Source: State of Salesforce 2023. Q: How effective has your organization been at change management around Salesforce implementations since 2020? N=2000

Besides hosting the GRAMMY Awards ceremony that recognizes top achievers in the music industry, the Recording Academy is hard at work year-round ensuring the recording arts remain a thriving part of the world’s shared cultural heritage. As a member-based society of music professionals, the not-for-profit represents the voices of performers, songwriters, producers, engineers, and all music professionals.

A call for modernization
Ever since its founding in 1956, members have been the lifeblood of the Academy. But engaging these more than 22,000 members—including the Recording Academy; the Latin Recording Academy; and voting, nonvoting, student, lifetime, and online members—is a growing challenge in today’s fast-paced digital environment.

To better engage its members and attract new ones, the Recording Academy needed to modernize. To migrate its legacy CRM database to a cloud-based solution, the Academy turned to IBM.

IBM Consulting™ is helping the Academy optimize its implementation of Salesforce Experience Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud platforms as part of the Academy’s overall digital transformation based on hybrid cloud and AI.

Phase one
Shortly after the Recording Academy embarked on its Salesforce journey this past year, the music organization realized it did not have enough time or sufficient resources to unlock the full value of the Experience and Marketing platforms.

In the first phase of engagement, IBM Consulting teams helped the Academy develop a roadmap focused on nominations, ticketing, and membership renewal journeys.

With just weeks left to send out nominee email notifications, IBM teams began conducting IBM Garage™ workshops with the Recording Academy that included mockups of what the journey might look like. Through this process, the Academy revamped its email journey in time for the 65th GRAMMY® nominations.

During this phase, IBM Consulting was able to help the Academy speed the development of Salesforce functionality using pre-built accelerators that saved 1,000 development hours and allowed the Recording Academy to customize the experience. Now from the moment a GRAMMY nominee receives their first email notification, they’re taken on an engaging and easy-to-follow journey, where they can access all the exciting GRAMMY-related information such as events leading up to the ceremony and how to buy tickets. Where the marketing team previously handled all communications manually, now they can create an automated journey.

Phase two

For the Recording Academy, a critical part of this new journey includes retaining and recruiting members. With the previous legacy system, it was difficult for members and nonmembers to navigate renewals and signups through email journeys. Now nominees who are already members of the Academy can quickly access the renewal portal, and nominees who are not members can easily sign up, through a fully automated process.

“IBM is dramatically accelerating our digital transformation, enhancing the user experience of our members and bringing the GRAMMYs digital experience to life for music fans around the world,” said Panos Paney, president of the Recording Academy.

Enterprises can fuel transformation using many inputs, but generative AI is among the most powerful at the moment. However, optimizing value from generative AI ROI—or any new technology—hinges on continual enterprise readiness. And enterprise readiness hinges on the agility to move in any one of a multitude of directions, with the ability to shift to another quickly and efficiently as circumstances change.

This kind of agility comes from a variety of sources but increasingly, in a digital world, it hinges on data. Data consistency, data sharing, and the hybrid architectures that fuel speed and adaptability are essential for agility in any large organization.

Roughly 8 out of 10 Pioneers (82%) believe that Salesforce drives enterprise innovation, but they also recognize that innovation has the most revenue potential when data is consistently and widely shared. Pioneers have a clear, comprehensive view of the future partly because they invest in innovation and strategic business objectives that cross business areas; they’ve eliminated the silos that would prohibit the bird’s eye view. They are benefiting from their organizations’ use of Salesforce 360, which bridges data consistency gaps across platforms and builds a more comprehensive view of customer needs, preferences, and desires.

Pioneers buy Salesforce for the best practices but then invest in differentiation. This is where open architectures bring value because they allow for that differentiation. It’s about more than just the data and architectures, however. It’s about how proactively organizations use the data insights and transformation power Salesforce can fuel. Pioneers, for instance, use Salesforce to discover new business models 37% more than Pensives. It follows, then, that Pioneers are twice as likely as Pensives to execute transformation that brings change to the entire enterprise.

Pioneers are creating a virtuous cycle in which they continue to generate strong business results that help fund further technology investments and even greater future returns.

Source: State of Salesforce 2023. Q: In total, across all Salesforce solutions your organization uses, what ROI from Salesforce do you expect for the next three years?