When used intentionally as part of a defined, repeatable process, it can provide tremendous value to a business and ultimately be a blessing to that business leader. This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion. A team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com.

Welcome to part two of our discussion on how to give your business an edge with A.I. In the first part of our conversation, we talked about what A.I. is, trends in A.I., some of the concerns about these new technologies, what business owners should know about A.I. and CRM technology and more. Okay Chad, let’s dive back into our discussion. Specifically, let’s dig into the Salesforce tools a little bit.

Can you tell us more about Einstein? At the heart of it, you do have to understand that Salesforce has just a host of feature functionality all in all, three different forms of A.I. So machine learning, deep learning generative A.I. Salesforce has been doing this really well for over a decade and we’ve been working with customers truly for over a decade to leverage A.I.

And what underpins all of their A.I. capabilities is what they call the Einstein one platform. So across sales, service, marketing, commerce, it brings all the native A.I. functionality into this package that they call Einstein. And so inside of Einstein, the actual features that a real user could be leveraging inside of Salesforce is things like sales emails or service replies or case classification or chat bots — most likely you’ve interacted with a chat bot that was built on the Salesforce Einstein one platform — or even content creation. Salesforce is adding new A.I. that allows you to create things like landing pages and the content around those landing pages. But it’s not only those features, it’s also a platform approach. And so what that means is that they’re not only providing the endpoint solution, the end task itself, but also the platform to build processes around leveraging this A.I. well.

As they’re introducing Einstein Copilot, which is a conversational tool similar to ChatGPT, but right in the flow of work right within Salesforce. So you can interact with Copilot, you can ask it questions, you can get it to respond to you and you’re interacting with an assistant that knows your business because it knows your data, it knows your customers, your contacts, your opportunities, and it’s able to use that to respond to you.

And it’s learning from your business and learning from the application, the upvotes or downvotes of the responses. And so it builds on that platform and then it’s introducing things like Prompt Builder. So the Prompt Builder is an incredible piece of technology because what it does is — if you begin leveraging Einstein Copilot today, you may ask a question to it. It’s exceedingly valuable. It allows you to ascertain a little bit of information that helps you close the deal. Well, I could go into a Copilot and I may want the same value out of it, but I don’t know how to ask the question effectively. And maybe, as a salesperson, I don’t know all of the data that I have available to me inside of Salesforce.

And so I don’t know how to ask my question as effectively as possible. So Salesforce has released this new functionality called Prompt Builder, and what Prompt Builder allows you to do as an organization is pre-define what those requests, what those conversational asks are of Copilot. So you can ask the most intelligent, sophisticated question that you’ve tested over and over again and refined, and you as an administrator, as an organization, can define what data you have in your system that’s applicable to this question.

And then once you have that question defined — so you know the question you always want to ask — you can actually embed that right in the flow of work inside of Salesforce. And the way that looks is from an opportunity, you could have a button that says “Summarize this opportunity for me,” and that summary is a prompt that you as an organization have built to highlight the things that are most important to your salespeople. The data that’s appropriate for you. The experience has been tailor-made for your organization. So being able to professionalize that interaction with Copilot through Prompt Builder is a differentiator. And that’s a technology that we’re really excited to see how it’s adopted in the ecosystem.

Whoa. Okay. I mean, that’s just absolutely incredible. So there’s so much functionality. I mean, how does Salesforce go about keeping it all secure?

Yeah, that’s really the magic. Salesforce has built what they call the trust layer. And the trust layer underpins all of the functionality we’ve talked about. And so what it does — stepping through — it’s a technology that allows you to ask a GPT model a question and receive a response in a secure way. The way that actually works is you’re going to interact inside of Salesforce with, let’s say, Copilot.

Well, when you’re interacting with Copilot, it’s going to retrieve the data from your Salesforce instance — your data, the data that you don’t want shared just anywhere. It’s going to intelligently retrieve that data and it’s going to ground your prompt. So the question that you’re asking with your data — and this is the magic part — but then it’s going to mask your data before it goes outside of the walls of your Salesforce.

So when your question, which is grounded in your data and your business information, when it leaves the walls of your Salesforce and goes to this GPT tool that’s going to return a response, it’s masked your data. So that’s not maybe your customers’ names or the financial numbers exactly — it’s things that you want to keep hidden are hidden. And so then when the prompt actually goes out to the GPT tool, there is a zero retention policy that says the model can’t keep this prompt and it can’t keep the response.

So before we’re going to have an engagement, before we’re going to make our ask in Salesforce and go out into the technology, we’re going to ensure that it’s a secure relationship with zero retention. And then when that answer comes back in from the tool, it’s going to ensure that there’s no toxicity in the response. So Salesforce is saying across all of our responses, let’s ensure that we’re not getting anything inappropriate in, and then let’s de-mask the data back inside the walls of our platform.

So when we receive it back, we’re taking that mask off and putting our customer information back into the response, and then we’re recording inside of Salesforce exactly what the response was, as well as the question that prompted it. So that organizations have an audit trail of how their team members are actually leveraging A.I. and what’s the value that they’re getting back — in a secure way.

So the trust layer is the underpinning that allows for a very safe and secure utilization of A.I. Chad, what about HubSpot? It’s now one of the leading platforms. What are your thoughts on their A.I. capabilities?

Yeah, absolutely. HubSpot has a ton of new features around A.I. Like I said, they have been rolling them out for a while now. So there are real users really getting value from it today, and a wide audience of people getting value, in multiple hubs. Things like the website generator — you’re able to really go in and HubSpot can produce a new website for you. And then from that website they can produce the blog posts, they can produce outlines for the content, landing pages, calls to action, they can create social captions.

And then over in the service hub, it can create knowledge articles for you, can create knowledge content. The A.I. assistant will help you in your conversation inbox to craft the most appropriate response to support requests. There’s just a ton of A.I. feature functionality available to you, and one of the highlights in the HubSpot space is something called ChatSpot and you can access it from chatspot.ai. But it is HubSpot’s conversational tool — like Salesforce has Einstein Copilot, HubSpot has ChatSpot — so you can go to chatspot.ai and today you can begin interacting with the technology and it’s informed by your CRM, so by your HubSpot instance, so it knows your data, your customers, your contacts, but it knows your content as well. So if you’re leveraging HubSpot for your CMS, for your website, it knows all of the content that’s on your website and can leverage that in its responses to you.

So it’s a very powerful tool. And not only is it conversational — so it can provide you some content and produce images, things like that — but it’s also inside of your CRM so it can build reports for you. So as a business owner, I can go in and I can ask ChatSpot.ai to build a report for me and it’ll walk through the process of building that report and actually produce the end result so that I can see the analytics that’s meaningful for me. That’s extremely powerful and very meaningful for business leaders.

It is interesting. I kind of go back to the phrase that you used earlier when you said you need a human in the loop, right? Do you still need a human in the loop when it comes to all these features that you’re mentioning just now? Or is this technology able just to give you the outcome in its entirety? And would you be happy with the result?

Yeah, sometimes. But honestly, ultimately you need a human in the loop vetting the responses. Remember hallucinations — don’t be that person that doesn’t review the content, right? Ensure that it matches your brand, ensure that it’s truthful and appropriate. Right? And so right now, like we’ve said, A.I. is task-based. It’s on the human — I’m asking it to accomplish a task for me — and ensure that you’re still in that loop. It’s the human-in-the-loop cycle, and that ultimately is going to get the most value out of A.I., is when you’re supercharging a human’s ability by leveraging it effectively.

Okay. So it’s in addition to human nature, right? Chad, there’s so much exciting stuff on the horizon when it comes to A.I., and it really has the potential to give businesses an edge in so many different ways. What would you say to business owners who are currently considering whether to use some of these tools?

It’s really just like any other technology that we’re having a conversation with business leaders about — when used intentionally as part of a defined, repeatable process, it can provide tremendous value to a business and ultimately be a blessing to that business leader. But inversely, if your team doesn’t have a plan for how to effectively utilize the technology, or they don’t understand the significance of the data risk, or understand the significance of understanding how the A.I. has been trained, then there are real security risks that are inherent with the technology and it could be potentially harmful to your business.

So our intent at FSM is to be a blessing to business leaders as they grow and scale their business. And helping business leaders adopt A.I. well is a key way we’ve found that we can be a blessing. So if you had to sum up how a business leader might get started with A.I., what are the steps that they should be taking?

Yeah, it’s really fourfold. Define the problem. Identify the technology best suited to overcome the problem or achieve the opportunity. Make a plan for safe and effective use of the technology. And then continuously communicate, iterate, and enhance on the technology. So in the A.I. space: define the problem or the opportunity that you want to achieve with A.I., identify what A.I. feature functionality is available to you, make a plan for how to actually leverage that technology effectively and adopt it well inside of your organization, and continuously communicate to your team the what and the how, and then iterate, continue, enhance and improve as the technology improves and as you learn how to effectively adopt the technology.

Thank you so much for all this valuable information. I know that I thoroughly enjoyed hearing all about it for myself. Chad, here at the Fast Slow Motion podcast, we like to end each episode with a quote related to the topics that we’ve been discussing. Do you have any quotes that offer some wisdom on A.I.?

There’s one quote from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, that has been impactful and comes up often: “One person with a really good idea and deep understanding of what a customer needs is going to be able to execute on that with what would have taken complex many-person teams before.”

Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Chad, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your wisdom. And thanks to the listeners out there — we really hope that you feel more equipped to make the most of A.I. and it helps you to propel your business forward. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast.