Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Salesforce is prepared to go to market, pricing and all, with your AI replacement! 🤖 

The good news (for now) is that it’s expensive! Really expensive 💰💰💰!

Salesforce held their semi-hyped 👀 AI Day and our biggest takeaways from the event are today’s discussion points!

And of course, our biggest takeaways are focused on you, the Salesforce professional 😉.

Agenda for today includes

• The Price For AI To Replace You

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Salesforce Just Put a $$$ Amount on AI Replacing You

Here is the link to Salesforce’s AI Day, in case you missed it. We’ll skip the summaries and pleasantries and jump right into it-

$360,000/yr

That is the cost for the AI Cloud subscription for your org.

And that’s for up to 50 licenses on the CRM. Most customers who can afford this will be above 50 users 💰💰💰.

Here are 3 takeaways-

1) What does AI Cloud mean for you, Salesforce Professional?

At $360k/yr, AI Cloud is priced at about 3.5 Salesforce professionals.

That’s Salesforce’s first shot at putting a (stakeholder-friendly) value on their AI solution.

The primary functions of this early-version of AI Cloud are

• Frontline Content Tasks - for Marketing and Sales content (emails), product descriptions, and summarizing sales cycles, as examples.

• Insights - creating clarity out of chaos, at best. (Misinformation at worst? Salesforce’s Trust Layer will surely be put to the test).

So what does this mean for us? Let’s look at it from a timescale perspective-

Short Term

Our jobs are safe 😅. Because-

1. Few companies have the ability to spend $360k/yr for AI Cloud. Implementation, maintenance, support, managed services, etc is going to multiply this cost.

2. Implementation will take time. Time for at-risk roles to obtain more skills that will keep them employed.

3. You know what people hate? Change. People→AI is a big change.

Long Term

The more time AI Cloud is in the market, the more polished of a roadmap the path from human → AI Cloud will be 😲.

The more AI Cloud customers and time on the platform they have, the more data that will be produced 😳.

If that data points to financial benefits to Salesforce’s customers, you better believe Salesforce is going to champion those use cases on every earnings call until the machines fully takeover 😉 🤖.

2) Salesforce Risk and Reputation

Salesforce is brave for being one of the first to go to market with an enterprise-level AI solution that will live deep and wide in their customer’s technology solutions.

So, not only are they taking on the risk of being “first,” but they are also pricing this product at a relative premium!

The speed that Salesforce got AI Cloud to production-ready adds risks. There will be problems. Some that could have been resolved with more resources, time, and testing.

Remember - this isn’t Microsoft’s Clippy 📎. AI Cloud is a solution that will generate customer emails with the intent of making sales. There is literally a lot of money at risk!

Marc is a brave dude!

3) AI Cloud Implementation Complexity and Cost

Raise your hand if you’ve implemented an enterprise-level AI solution!

Yeah, there are not a ton of people out there who have expertise in this area.

Pioneers will be born every day in the beginning months of AI Cloud implementations.

They will make many mistakes, and learn many lessons. Bugs and bad solutions will make their way into production, and negatively impact customers.

Tis a necessary cycle 🔄.

Any volunteers to pay $360k/yr + implementation fees for the status of being an early adopter?

Speaking of implementation fees, Salesforce called out Deloitte, PWC, and Accenture as trusted AI Cloud implementation partners.

Not the cheapest group. Not only are these Big Accounting firms new-ish to the Salesforce implementation game, but they have the professional services leverage model dialed in 🎯.

Prepare to pay big implementation fees and have as many of the lowest paid analysts on your project that the implementation partner can get away with.

AI is here to stay…and grow.

It is not something to fear. It is definitely something to understand.

A good place to gain understanding is Salesforce Trailheads. This is quality, FREE content. Take advantage of it!

Salesforce AI Trailhead

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes