With rapid AI developments, a strategic approach to integrating and harmonizing data is essential. AI requires comprehensive, accurate, and timely data to deliver effective results. However, connecting this data across disparate systems remains a significant challenge, with 95% of decision-makers citing integration as the primary barrier to successful AI implementation.
These challenges arise from the complexities of connecting and unifying data from various sources, including legacy, homegrown, and industry-specific systems. Moreover, for AI to have a significant impact, it must not only have unified data, but also have pathways to act on the insights and outputs it generates.
As organizations strive for improved AI outcomes, many are finding that once-effective platforms are no longer sufficient. To unlock AI’s full potential, organizations need a solution that can connect and unify the massive amounts of data needed to enable generative and autonomous AI capabilities. In this article, we’ll explore how the combined power of Salesforce Data Cloud and MuleSoft empower organizations to connect and activate their data effectively to power innovative AI solutions.
What is Data Cloud?
Data Cloud is a data activation layer that lets organizations integrate data from disparate sources to centralize and unify it on the Salesforce Platform. Data Cloud consolidates it all to create a unified customer profile, no matter your data source (whether internal apps, systems, channels, external data lakes, or even emails, images, and PDFs).
By providing this holistic view of customers, Data Cloud helps your Sales, Service, and Marketing teams better understand customers, enhance productivity, and deliver superior experiences.
Data Cloud comes with numerous capabilities for ingesting data, enabling you to connect data from multiple Salesforce orgs seamlessly. It facilitates the ingestion of data from SaaS applications and hyperscalers through native connectors, including unstructured data from various cloud storage providers including Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. It also supports data federation with data lakes and warehouses, bringing together data from various sources.
But unifying data is only the beginning. You must be able to act on that data so it can have a positive impact on your customer experiences. After ingesting CRM data, Data Cloud also helps act across your C360 platform. You can enrich CRM objects through seamless reverse extract, transform, load (ETL) processes to ensure your data is up-to-date and actionable.
Data Cloud also supports zero-copy integration, allowing data to be shared across multiple databases without physical movement or duplication. This means organizations can access and harmonize data from different sources – like cloud data warehouses – without the risks and costs associated with traditional ETL processes. Plus, with partners like Google and Facebook, Data Cloud enables ad activation to enhance marketing efforts, while Tableau provides data visualization to help take decisive actions based on data.
As you can see, Data Cloud goes far beyond a simple customer data platform. However, great AI requires great data, and it’s critical to have a comprehensive integration strategy to derive maximum value. That’s where MuleSoft comes in.
What is MuleSoft?
MuleSoft is a comprehensive integration, automation and API management platform that enables businesses to connect their data and applications seamlessly. As part of the Salesforce ecosystem, MuleSoft provides robust tools to facilitate integration and automation across various systems, ensuring that organizations can leverage their data effectively and efficiently for AI.
Let’s explore MuleSoft’s primary capabilities:
- Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS): Connect data across any system, whether on-premises or in the cloud, and make it discoverable and consumable wherever needed. With MuleSoft, every integration asset is a composable building block that can be reused across projects, significantly reducing development time and costs.
- Automation: Use low-code or no-code tools to automate tasks and workflows, increasing efficiency and reducing human error. This allows businesses to focus on strategic activities and drive innovation.
- API management: Design, build, secure, and manage APIs to ensure they are scalable, reliable, and easy to use. MuleSoft’s API Management (APIM) capabilities provide robust governance and security, ensuring that all data in transit is secure and monitored.
By leveraging MuleSoft, organizations can take a strategic approach to integrating their systems for AI, ensure all of their integrations are secure with API Management (APIM), and automate actions derived from AI insights to maximize the value they’re able to derive.
How do Data Cloud and MuleSoft work together?
MuleSoft is a complementary solution that extends Data Cloud capabilities. While Data Cloud offers native connectivity for ingesting data, the reality is that companies have critical data sprawled across hundreds of systems, and some of these systems can be hard to reach.
MuleSoft enhances Data Cloud’s ability to ingest data in a few key ways:
- On-premise systems: MuleSoft enables data ingestion from on-premise systems like core banking and internal databases by running locally and streaming data to and from Data Cloud, addressing networking challenges and enriching the data available in Data Cloud.
- Transactional systems: MuleSoft also enhances data ingestion from transactional systems such as HR, POS, and ERP solutions through pre-processing capabilities like queueing, error handling, filtering, and security, ensuring a higher degree of control over how data is ingested.
- Unstructured data: MuleSoft unlocks unstructured data for AI applications within Salesforce using Intelligent Document Processing and pre-built integrations for knowledge repositories like Google Drive and Microsoft SharePoint via MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud.
- Activation capabilities: Enabling seamless integration and automation across your entire tech ecosystem. It allows you to use APIs and bots to activate data changes and respond to data events in any external downstream app and data system — not just your C360 platforms. With MuleSoft, customers can create automated workflows that respond to data events, ensuring efficient and timely data-driven actions within your organization.
What does this mean for AI?
By providing the ability to connect, harmonize, and action all of your data, Data Cloud and MuleSoft help ensure that AI-driven apps with Salesforce have the necessary data to produce valuable outputs and take action on the insights generated across every department and line of business. This means that your AI apps will be able to deliver more accurate insights and predictions, enhance customer experiences, and streamline operations.
With real-time data access and seamless integration, your AI applications can make informed decisions quickly, adapt to changing conditions, and drive innovation across your organization, ensuring every department benefits from AI-driven efficiencies and improvements.
Learn more about how MuleSoft’s integration and automation capabilities can help your organization activate AI to deliver superior customer experiences using the Salesforce Platform.
