Salesforce Commerce Cloud & AI: Where is Everything Heading?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud delivers eCommerce on the Salesforce platform – meaning you can use one vendor for all corners of your customer experience. Catering to both B2C and B2B commerce as the result of two acquired products (Demandware in 2016, and CloudCraze in 2018), there has been significant progress made in the time since. 

I had the pleasure of speaking directly to Michael Affronti, GM of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, who has been in the role for one and a half years. In our conversation, we spoke about his and his team’s current priorities, the status of “Commerce on core”, the newly announced Commerce Copilots, and a glimpse into the future of Commerce Cloud.  

Commerce Cloud Priorities

When asked about priorities for himself and his organization, Michael emphasized the word scale. 

During his tenure, Commerce Cloud has experienced double-digit growth in new customers, speculatively, thanks to the composable innovations Salesforce has managed to deliver. The technology needs to continue to scale with this demand, especially when merchandisers will seek out more sophisticated use cases to engage their customers. 

Data Cloud is a platform-wide strategic move to support the needs to share insights (derived from what the data is saying, beyond the ‘naked eye’) and also enabling hyper-personalization. 

In terms of international growth, Commerce Cloud uptake is apparent in APAC, LATAM, and South Africa. As with all Salesforce products, Hyperforce is increasing in importance for growth into various regions, delivering not only power but also data residency (i.e. the customer data has to be stored within the borders of that country). With B2B Commerce baked into the core platform, Hyperforce can serve this de facto – but we have no information on how this will impact B2C Commerce as of now. 

On the topic of ‘scale’, there’s also an increasing number of industry-specific use cases.

No surprises, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has always been strong in retail and consumer goods. However, with other industries vying for commerce, the team has been challenged to fulfill use cases that are specific to their customer’s industries – and have done so, successfully. 

Healthcare in the EMEA region is one example use case that brings together both industry-specific and regional requirements. This has involved working with Industry Cloud product teams (Health Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Communications Cloud, etc.), with the overarching goal for customers to not feel like they are engaging with different organizations. 

There was some light shed on two terms included at every Salesforce event – AI and data – from a Commerce Cloud perspective. Through the keynotes at Connections, the narrative emphasized bringing the marketing and commerce products/disciplines together in a tighter, end-to-end way of working. 

For any industry, there are lulls and peaks in demand from eCommerce shoppers; however, this is more acute in some industries than others (think retailers with Black Friday and Cyber Monday). Salesforce works closely with key customers on their campaign plans, and stated that they’re investing heavily in this area. This enables Salesforce to ‘keep a pulse’ on what merchandisers are doing while circling back their challenges into new feature development. 

Finally, those who are involved in the development of Commerce Cloud are highly specialized. For the past year, everyone has been encouraged to think in a ‘what if’ approach with AI at their disposal. For example, what if AI could work with the Commerce Cloud user to achieve an optimized product listing for SEO?

“Commerce on Core” Status

We heard about Commerce Cloud moving onto the ‘core’ Salesforce platform, but if you’re like me, I was wondering where the ‘on core’ infrastructure starts, and where does it end? 

Luckily, the answer is pretty straightforward. B2B Commerce is on core (as mentioned, taking advantage of any movements your organization makes toward Hyperforce), whereas B2C Commerce is operating on its own architecture. But what’s interesting is that the connection between this and the core Salesforce platform can be done via Data Cloud: B2C Commerce ↔ Data Cloud ↔ core. With the effort to ensure Data Cloud and Commerce Cloud work smoothly together for data ingestion and activation, this could be a method that one could explore if still using the more traditional connectors. 

Next question, how far through the ‘core’ vision are we? The answer was interesting: “It will never end”. While this sounds extreme, Michael raised a good point in his response. As Service Cloud/Sales Cloud continues to develop, there will be a need for Commerce Cloud to take advantage of these features – innovation won’t stop to continually tie together all Salesforce’s clouds in more intelligent ways.

Commerce Copilots 

One of the key pieces of news at Connections ‘24 was the copilots for Commerce Cloud. The two satisfy different personas: 

• Einstein Copilot for Merchandisers: Set up storefronts, write product descriptions, and even optimize product listing SEO and eCommerce site conversion rates.
• Einstein Copilot for Shoppers: Sitting ‘on top’ of your eCommerce/website, browsers can interact using natural language to find the right products, delve into your catalog, and ask questions that would otherwise be gathering dust in your FAQ (frequently asked questions) section.

While this may come across as “they’re trying to make you spend more money”, the reality is that what was witnessed at Connections is really powerful (dare we even say unprecedented?). There’s only so much that can be expressed in a demo, and by stripping the technology back layer by layer, you will struggle to find a vendor that can achieve what Salesforce have set out to do. 

The idea that Salesforce was pushing at Connections is that multiple copilots should be working together – like an AI symphony. We witnessed how these two commerce copilots can be prefaced with Einstein Copilot for Marketers to be a strong thread, end-to-end. 

What’s in the Future for Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Answering the question: “What are the priorities for Commerce Cloud over the next 6 months/year?”, Michael didn’t hesitate in sharing his, and his team’s, ambitions. In addition to the upgoing foci mentioned earlier, there are two points that this leader was excited to share… 

1. AI-Driven Goal Setting and Recommended Actions (Upcoming OOTB Dashboards) 

As we know, the ability to leverage data gets more powerful with Data Cloud, bringing together multiple data sources to make clearer meaning about an individual person. 

With more sophisticated data harmonization, comes more sophisticated analytics. Coming soon are between 20-25 dashboards, surfaced using the CRM Analytics tooling. These could be described as ‘cause and effect’ tracking, such as tracking the impact on conversion points over time from activities – for example, the impact that one marketing campaign had on purchasing behaviors. 

2. Return Insights (OMS)

The ‘forgotten’ part of eCommerce, returns can really screw with a merchandiser’s operations. A sizable proportion of purchases end up returned, which costs the organization a huge loss in their profit margins. Reducing this is a priority as shipping costs rise, and also as consumers have higher expectations of the brands they purchase from. 

As part of Order Management (OMS), an add-on to Commerce Cloud, Return Insights is now available to pinpoint reasons why returns occur. AI will be able to surface these action points, for example, if a product listing is inaccurate for it to be updated. 

Summary

Usually, we use the summary section to (as the heading suggests) summarize the article. First, I wanted to give a shout-out to Michael who “got geeky” in the Connections ‘24 keynote, taking over one of the demo stations. That was a welcome change. 

Having met Michael over the past two years, I have seen first-hand that he’s a capable, interesting, and personable leader within the Commerce Cloud organization. The results include the effort from the wider team, which continues to keep themselves on the forefront of eCommerce innovation. 

As for Commerce Cloud as a whole, with copilots available now and new advancements constantly at the forefront of the whole team’s mind, we’re sure that the future is going to be very exciting.