In the direction of generating additional income through regular subscriptions, both Microsoft and global cloud CRM leader Salesforce are eagerly leveraging AI to target businesses.
The tools supported by AI to improve productivity have been widely adopted, and they have indeed emerged first in the business field at the enterprise level.
As a result, there is fierce competition between the global leaders in customer relationship management (CRM) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Salesforce and Microsoft.
On Tuesday of this week, Microsoft announced that the pricing for Office 365 Copilot, an enterprise-level AI assistant, would be $30 per user per month. This pricing exceeded Wall Street's expectations, causing Microsoft's stock price to soar by 4% and "violently" break through its all-time high.
Just one day later, Salesforce, unwilling to be outdone, announced the pricing for its new generative AI tools for sales and customer service. On top of the price increase for all of its products a week ago, Salesforce announced that the AI tools would cost $50 per user per month. Two different types of these subscription-based tools were launched simultaneously, each requiring additional payment.
It is evident that both Microsoft and Salesforce are eager to use AI to "harvest" enterprises in the direction of generating additional revenue through regular subscriptions.
Wall Street fully supports this move, as evidenced by Salesforce's stock price rising by 3% on Wednesday, reaching a new high in a year and a half since January of last year.
Specifically, Salesforce has launched three new enterprise-level AI tools: Service GPT, Sales GPT, and Einstein GPT Trust Layer, which ensures data security and compliance.
The company claims that these tools can customize personalized user interaction scenarios faster and on a large scale, increase data security and compliance, and help traditional and on-site service teams work more efficiently using artificial intelligence, thereby strengthening their relationships with their respective customers through personalized interactions.
Image from Salesforce official press release
For example, Service GPT can automatically generate personalized replies based on relevant and real-time data sources, helping customer service agents solve customer problems more quickly. It can also create service cases and summary excerpts of interactions with customers based on case data and customer history.
Sales GPT has made great efforts in work emails. Sales representatives only need to click once to generate personalized emails with CRM context from Sales Cloud internally or through Gmail and Outlook, streamlining time-consuming but critical steps in the sales process.
Image from the official press release of Salesforce
The functionality of Einstein GPT's trust layer mainly includes: zero data retention (meaning that third-party large language model (LLM) providers will not store enterprise customers' natural language queries and AI responses, nor use them for model training); encrypted communication; data access checks (ensuring that end users only access authorized data); feedback storage (collecting use cases of enterprise customers interacting with Einstein GPT to improve the quality of AI services); and audit tracking (ensuring compliance when using AI).
Einstein GPT is the "world's first generative artificial intelligence dedicated to CRM customer relationship management" launched by Salesforce on March 7th this year. Interestingly, Microsoft quickly followed suit and announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, "your work assistant," on March 16th, showing a sense of urgency in enterprise-level AI applications.
According to Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, the company's generative AI capabilities adopt an open ecosystem approach and are supported by real-time proprietary data, enabling every business organization to leverage the productivity and efficiency advantages of AI while ensuring enterprise-level trust and data security remain at the core.
In terms of pricing, Sales GPT will be included in Sales Cloud Einstein at a price of $50 per user per month, and Service GPT will be included in Service Cloud Einstein at the same price. As usage increases, customers can purchase enterprise expansion packages for their sales and service teams. Initially, only customers who purchased the Unlimited Edition were eligible to use GPT-supported features, creating a trend of urging more customers to upgrade their software subscription packages.
Similar to Microsoft's price increase for office software packages embedded with AI capabilities, which caused a monthly price surge of 83% for enterprise customers, Salesforce is also "making every effort" to earn money from its customers. Just a week ago, on July 11th, they decided to raise the average global price of their products by 9% in August, claiming that they had not increased prices for seven consecutive years, but never stopped developing 22 new versions and thousands of new features.