Salesforce Briefs: The week in review (Trailhead Tracker, Magic Quadrant & SF AI Breakthrough)

With Salesforce Briefs: Week in Review, we jump into the launch of the new Trailhead Tracker app.  Also saw Salesforce celebrating their Leadership position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for an astonishing nine consecutive years!  And finally there was a research paper published from Salesforce Metamind team, relating to Artificial Intelligence and how it may be able to start improving our productivity by creating summaries of text heavy documents and emails.

Salesforce launches Trailhead Tracker

This week Salesforce released a new app called Trailhead Tracker on the App Exchange.  With this app, you can now link Trailhead directly to your org.  Why would you want to do this?

You can now assign badges and track employees progress on what they complete in Trailhead.  This signals a move for Trailhead towards a Learning Management System (LMS).

Remember Trailhead isn’t just a tool for Admins/Developers, there are some great trails for end users too.  Imagine creating an onboarding plan for new employees, where users can work through self paced learning and get recognised within Salesforce for the modules they have completed.

Find the app here on the AppExchange.   Additionally Trailhead also received a small update, allowing users to add content to a ‘favourite’ list.

Salesforce maintains position in ‘Leaders Quadrant’ of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for ninth consecutive year

This month has seen Salesforce named in the ‘Leaders Quadrant’ of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

What is the ‘Magic Quadrant’?  Gartner rate vendors in various fields based on two metrics, Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execution.  This narrows a vendor down into one of four quadrants:  Leader, Challenger, Visionary, Niche.  You can read more about the Magic Quadrant here at Wikipedia.

It isn’t a foolproof grading system.  In addition it does give potential buyers an added dimension to support the buying process.  By showing the potential future roadmap of the system and how likely the vendor is to actually deliver on that vision.

You know all those ‘Safe Harbour/Forward Looking Statement’ slides from Salesforce?  They are there for a reason. 🙂  As we all know Salesforce is a great innovator and this is one way they prove it.

And on to the great news, Salesforce has achieved a Leadership position for the 9th year in a row in the CRM Customer Engagement, outperforming the likes of Oracle (and Microsoft which isn’t even rate in this category)!

Earlier in the month, they were also named as a ‘Leader’ in the catchily named category ‘high productivity aPaaS’ Magic Quadrant, you can read about that here.

Future direction of Einstein?  Breakthrough in Salesforce AI research allows the generation of long, coherent and relevant text summaries.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a very recent development in the CRM arena.  The future potential excites me (and hopefully things don’t go the Terminator way) and I am excited in seeing how it benefit end users of Salesforce.

But we are a little way of seeing the full power of AI, as I mentioned in the Deep Dive article.  We are only just starting to see the potential of Salesforce Einstein and what it can do for users.

This week Salesforce Metamind published a research paper on how AI could be used in the future to increase productivity.  They have trained AI to provide a summary of long text blocks.  Ultimately this will be leveraged to produce an accurate summary of large unstructured text (like email or documents).

For more you can read the TechCrunch article about the announcement here.  Alternatively Forbes also had a write up about this announcement.