#38: Salesforce Einstein GPT and the Smart CRM Market, the Law of Uneven AI Distribution, and Why the AI Productivity Narrative Is a Lie

The Marketing AI Show is back! The smart CRM market is evolving…and so are marketers and businesses with the help of AI.  First comes ChatSpot, then comes Salesforce Einstein GPT Coming on the heels of HubSpot’s ChatSpot announcement, Salesforce just announced Einstein GPT, a generative AI tool for its market-leading CRM. The tool, which is currently in closed pilot, creates content across marketing, sales, and service use cases. Salesforce’s communications say, “Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data.” They say Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails, generate specific responses for customer service teams, generate targeted content, and auto-generate code for developers. In the same breath, the company also announced a $250 million Generative AI fund through its venture arm.  The value (or lack thereof) gained by AI is dependent on three factors.  Paul recently published a post on an AI topic framing his idea of  “the law of uneven AI distribution.” In it, he wrote: “The Law: The value you gain from AI, and how quickly and consistently that value is realized, is directly proportional to your understanding of, access to, and acceptance of the technology.” This uneven distribution will create dramatic differences in people’s experiences with and perceptions of AI. And it’s all dependent on three factors: how well you understand AI, the level of access you have to AI, and how much you accept the radical changes that AI will bring about in business and society.  Do we need to fill the time saved by AI with more…work?  When we talk about AI, we often hear that the wondrous productivity gains produced by AI technology will give us back more time, in turn making our lives less busy and more fulfilling. And these productivity gains are valuable. Venture fund ARK Invest predicts that we could boost the productivity of the average knowledge worker by 140% with AI, which would create $56 trillion in value globally. But a new article from the Centre for International Governance Innovation challenges the idea that AI will liberate our time and goes so far as to call the AI productivity narrative “a lie.” However, history has shown that efficiencies often heighten expectations and standards. How can we as marketers, business leaders, and humans, ensure we aren’t exacerbating Parkinson’s law by adding to the idea that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion?” How can we invest that time in things we want to do? This is a topic we all need to listen to!