Preface

Salesforce is one of the world's leading enterprise software platforms. Businesses across the world rely on it to run increasingly critical parts of their business. Artificial Intelligence (AI), principally in the shape of machine learning models of ever-increasing scale and complexity, is equally becoming influential in many areas of business operations and strategic decision-making.

The Einstein platform is Salesforce's answer to how to marry the core functionality of their product offerings with the need for sophisticated AI-based solutions to improve, automate, and enlighten business processes. In this book, we will explore this platform in terms of what it can and what it can't achieve, so that you as an architect can make the right decision for your stakeholders about how to implement AI solutions on Salesforce.

We start by surveying the big picture in the introduction. Then, in the following four chapters, we dive deep into the Einstein functionality embedded into the various Salesforce clouds. We start with Sales, then move on to Service, followed by Marketing and Commerce, ending up with a look across the industry clouds.

Having learned how to use the built-in offerings, we will proceed to explore your options for when the out-of-the-box features just won't cut it. We will start by looking at declarative options, then move on to various programmatic ones, starting with those provided by Salesforce and moving on to three examples of using third-party services in your Salesforce solution.

After mastering how to build custom AI solutions on the Salesforce platform, we will end the book by condensing our learning into a decision guide. Then we will draw some final lessons and give some pointers to where you might go to deepen your mastery of the topics at hand.

Architecting AI solutions is different from traditional architecture, but it will increasingly become part and parcel of your work as an architect. I hope this book helps you to do this work well.