This is Bret Taylor’s first big engineering move at Salesforce as co-CEO

Ten months later promotion Co-CEO of Sales forceserved together with the famous founder Marc BenioffBret Taylor is preparing to take the stage at the annual Dreamforce convention for the first time under her new title.

A technologist with a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford, Taylor admitted to CNBC that the big product Salesforce announced for this year’s event was “without a doubt.” It’s called Genie and is designed to update Salesforce’s dominant sales database software with state-of-the-art technology that gives salespeople real-time information at their fingertips.

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“We’re really adding a new technology capability to our platform,” Taylor said in an interview. Taylor and Benioff will deliver their keynote speeches on Tuesday, begin at 10 a.m. Pacific Time in San Francisco.

To some extent, Salesforce acknowledges that its existing systems are outdated. The 23-year-old company’s original data archiving software works with a transactional database from Oracle, where Benioff spent 13 years before starting Salesforce. The world has become much more complex over the past decades, and companies are flocking to databases that can process data from more sources and enable faster decisions.

Salesforce’s foray into Genie began in 2019, when the company introduce a customer data platform or CDP that marketers can use to collect data about customers before sending them ads. With Genie, marketers will have the latest information available through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Over time, Genie will be integrated into Salesforce’s other key products, the cloud for sales, service, and commerce, Taylor said. Companies can pay to add Genie capabilities to their existing Salesforce installations, the spokesperson said.

Taylor, co-creator Google The map has also taken the lead Facebook’s The tech group, before joining Salesforce in 2016 through his acquisition of startup Quip, is under some pressure from Wall Street as rising interest rates and the threat of a recession drive investors away. drop growth stocks. Salesforce’s stock is down 40% this year, more than double the drop of the S&P 500, and is trading near its lowest level since April 2020.

In it income statement Last month, Salesforce cut its full-year expectations for profit and revenue. The company now expects sales growth for the year to be around 17%, down from 25% in the previous financial year, which would be the slowest expansion rate to date since the company went public. listed shares in 2004.

Taylor also has a lot going on outside of Salesforce. He is the president of Twitterembroiled in a heated and very public legal battle with Elon Musk that will determine the future of the social media company. Twitter is sue Musk to try and execute Tesla The CEO’s acquisition agreement that he then try to stop.

Taylor declined to talk about the challenge, saying it “didn’t make much sense” when he met with Salesforce customers. And that’s how he spends most of his time.

With the addition of Genie, Salesforce will strengthen the capabilities of Einstein, the company’s artificial intelligence engine that runs in the Sales Cloud, and other applications. Einstein can suggest which business opportunities are most likely to convert into sales and Genie will pull the most recent information, so recommendations are drawn from the data in seconds and soon, in just milliseconds.

Genie will also work in Tableau, the data analytics tool that Salesforce acquired in 2019, helping to create the most current charts possible.

Salesforce’s competitors in marketing software, including Adobe and Oracle, have touted the importance of real-time content data platforms that can draw on a wide variety of data and respond to the most recent impulses of current and potential customers. Salesforce is trying to bring those capabilities to other departments, such as customer service.

Sheryl Kingstone, vice president of customer service and commerce at S&P Global’s 451 Research technology industry, said she’s not surprised that Salesforce is working to bring real-time data across its entire lineup. me.

“I was more shocked that it took so long,” she said.

Since at least 2017, Salesforce executives have been promoting a concept called Customer 360, which involves distributing patchwork information about each customer to provide better treatment. The problem is that the data about the events is not coming into the system as they are happening. Taylor was used to those criticisms.

“I’ve heard that response before,” he said. Taylor added that with Genie’s “technology breakthrough”, that won’t be an issue going forward.

First Horizon Bank in Memphis, Tennessee, rolled out Salesforce’s CDP platform earlier this year. Erin Pryor, the bank’s chief marketing officer, says the software helps the bank navigate new customers and get them into mortgages, and it’s more responsive to behavior than a manual processing system. and the series on which First Horizon was previously based. Unlike online ads that can make some people feel as though they’re being watched too closely, Pryor says this level of product targeting is welcomed by consumers.

“I don’t think there will be a complaint about your organization knowing you and actually being able to provide you with content and advice on the things that are important to you,” says Pryor.

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