IBM announced at the end of August that its consulting division, IBM Consulting, has entered into a collaboration with Salesforce, to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) for customer relationship management (CRM).
“Together, the two companies support clients to revolutionize customer, partner and employee experiences, while helping safeguard their data,” the company said in a statement about the collaboration. “IBM Consulting and Salesforce are working with our shared clients to help accelerate business transformations with generative AI.”
According to the statement, IBM will use its industry expertise and delivery models to guide clients through the adoption and deployment of Salesforce AI technologies, giving them access to AI “experience and implementation accelerators.”
“For example, IBM Data Classifier, an AI-powered application trained on industry-specific data models, helps to reduce the data mapping process,” they state.
Interestingly, at the same time, in a separate announcement, Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer series warns that businesses could soon face an AI trust gap with consumers. The assertion is based on a survey of more than 14,000 consumers and business buyers across 25 countries, including Canada.
“As brands increasingly adopt AI to increase efficiency and meet increasing customer expectations, nearly three quarters of their customers are concerned about unethical use of the technology,” they write.
“Notably, consumers have become much less open to using AI over the last year. While 73 per cent of business buyers and 51 per cent of consumers are open to the uses of AI to improve their experiences, those figures have dropped significantly since 2022’s survey, from 82 per cent and 65 per cent respectively.”
They add that companies can close the trust gap by implementing ethical guidelines and providing visibility into how technology is applied.
Other findings include the fact that 76 per cent of customers surveyed say they trust companies to make honest claims about their products and services but only 57 per cent trust companies to use AI ethically. “This is striking because 68 per cent of customers say advances in AI make it more important for companies to be trustworthy, putting a growing onus on brands to earn customers’ confidence as technology matures.”
The State of the Connected Consumer report also says 89 per cent of customers say it’s important to know when they’re communicating with AI or a human and 80 per cent say its important for humans to validate AI outputs.
