AI has the potential to transform customer experiences. However, despite IT leaders recognizing the value and imperative of AI, many companies still struggle to realize the benefits.
One significant hurdle is integration challenges. For AI to be effective, it needs secure access to data from many different sources and across a variety of formats, including structured and unstructured data.
- Structured data includes anything that is already organized into rows and columns, like an account, contact, opportunity or case record in Salesforce.
- Unstructured data is everything else that isn’t organized in a pre-defined way, like in emails, call transcripts, product specification documents and internal FAQs.
Historically, utilizing unstructured data in an automated way has been challenging as it doesn’t have a consistent format, making it hard to categorize and analyze. It requires complex processing to find the relevant information and convert it into a format that can be used in AI applications.
With the power of MuleSoft and Salesforce Data Cloud, organizations can unlock the full potential of their unstructured data, paving the way for more accurate and useful AI outputs. With this in mind, we’re excited to introduce a new solution that makes it easier than ever by integrating common knowledge repositories with Data Cloud: MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud.
What is Salesforce Data Cloud?
Salesforce Data Cloud is a powerful data platform that centralizes and harmonizes all structured and unstructured enterprise data, allowing organizations to create a unified, real-time Customer 360 view. By bringing together data across Salesforce and external sources, organizations can gain deeper insight into their customers, and take action on these insights to transform customer experiences across every touchpoint. MuleSoft Direct enriches the unstructured data available within Data Cloud by unlocking new sources to connect to.
What is MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud?
MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud is a new solution that allows organizations to quickly and easily tap into their organization’s unstructured data. With MuleSoft Direct, you can seamlessly discover and deploy out-of-the-box integrations to connect your organization’s knowledge repositories to Data Cloud.
This includes connectivity to key systems like Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Confluence, and Sitemaps. To power this experience, MuleSoft has pre-built the integration applications including API specs, implementation templates, and other technical assets required to unlock data from knowledge repositories and ultimately unify the data in Salesforce Data Cloud.
By leveraging these integrations through MuleSoft Direct, organizations can simplify and accelerate the process of connecting their unstructured data while adhering to MuleSoft’s industry-leading approach to connectivity. These integrations can be discovered, configured, and deployed all within Salesforce.
Once the unstructured data is ingested into Data Cloud, it can be used across Salesforce to ground AI prompts for faster and more personalized customer experiences through a technique called retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
Enhancing AI Outputs with retrieval augmented generation (RAG)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique that enhances the quality and reliability of AI-generated content by retrieving relevant information and using it to augment AI prompts with additional context. By using this technique, organizations can make use of their unstructured data for AI grounding without having to fine-tune an off-the-shelf LLM.
Salesforce Data Cloud Vector Database makes it possible to power RAG across Salesforce by storing both structured and unstructured data for easy search. The more data available in Data Cloud Vector Database, the more context is available to ground AI prompts for better outputs. MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud significantly enhances the unstructured data and organizational knowledge available within Data Cloud to power innovative AI experiences.
To see how this works, imagine a service agent is interacting with Agentforce Assistant, Salesforce’s AI-powered assistant, asking if a customer is eligible for an account upgrade. Agentforce Assistant can search Data Cloud’s Vector Database for relevant context regarding the organization’s account upgrade process and enhance the user’s prompt using RAG.
Some of this data is already available in Salesforce such as case data, but some of this data is unstructured and lives outside of Salesforce, like knowledge articles and internal FAQs. With MuleSoft Direct, we can now enrich Data Cloud Vector Database with more data by providing connectivity to new sources. This ensures that Agentforce is able to access all the key organizational information needed to provide the most accurate and reliable responses.
Example use cases for MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud
Below are example use cases that illustrate how organizations can benefit from unlocking and making use of their unstructured data with MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud.
Sales
- Sales rep productivity: Enable sales reps to create personalized sales content and improve product positioning by providing access to a wealth of organizational knowledge.
- Sales rep coaching: Improve training and performance of sales reps by offering continuous access to up-to-date information and best practices, ensuring they have the latest knowledge at their fingertips.
- Autonomous sales agents: Boost sales effectiveness with Agentforce Sales Agents by grounding responses in comprehensive sales strategies and knowledge.
Service
- Service agent productivity: Empower service agents to respond swiftly and accurately to customer inquiries by providing easy access to information such as product specifications and internal FAQs, enhancing overall productivity.
- Service agent coaching: Enhance training for service agents by offering quick access to up-to-date product knowledge and best practices, enabling effective customer engagement.
- Autonomous service agents: Improve customer interactions with Agentforce Service Agents by grounding responses in organizational knowledge, ensuring accurate and personalized responses.
Getting started with MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud
- Set up: Users can login to their Salesforce account and access MuleSoft Direct directly from the setup menu. With a few clicks, they can connect to MuleSoft using the credentials provided by their organization’s MuleSoft developer.
- Discover: Once connected to MuleSoft, users can browse the pre-built integrations available for Salesforce Data Cloud, and view relevant information about the integrations in the overview. If needed, MuleSoft developers can customize default fields and implementations for any unique needs and requirements.
- Connect and deploy: Users can then configure and deploy the integration using clicks and form fills. MuleSoft developers can support the deployment and monitor the integration in Anypoint Platform.
- Initiate ingestion: Once integration is deployed, users will navigate to Salesforce Data Cloud and create a Unstructured Data Lake Object (UDLO) to ingest the unstructured data into the vector database.
In just a few steps, we were able to connect to MuleSoft, discover pre-built integrations to knowledge repositories, deploy an integration to connect unstructured data to Data Cloud, saving 150 hours of development per integration application.
All of the knowledge at your fingertips
MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud allows you to unlock the full potential of your organization’s knowledge. By providing connectivity to common sources that hold relevant organizational information like Google Drive, Confluence, Microsoft SharePoint, and Sitemap, MuleSoft Direct enables more relevant and effective AI.
If you want to dive deeper, explore the documentation on Anypoint Exchange and watch our demo video to see the solution in action. To learn more about how MuleSoft enhances Data Cloud, check out our session on how to Connect Systems and Action Data with MuleSoft and Data Cloud from Dreamforce on Salesforce+.
