Automation in App Development: How AI is empowering the industry?

Every now and then, we come across various technological advancements in the domains of smartphones, wearables, AR, VR, AI, and Blockchain. These developments helping entrepreneurs to take their business to the next level. AI enabled solutions enhancing productivity as well as reducing errors, similarly, we can see the impact on app development process.

To understand advantages of automation in app development we spoke to Deepak Pargaonkar, VP, Solution Engineering, Salesforce (Founded by Marc Benioff and just turned 20, as an organization now Salesforce is #1 CRM employee, #1 cloud platform, a leader in the platform in service, and have quite great credentials when it comes to being the most innovative company, the best place to work etc.). Deepak talked about the process and how AI is benefiting the App development industry.

How automation in app development empowering the industry?

Today we are in the fourth industrial revolution and that is the reality around us. There is a proliferation of mobile, proliferation of narration on digital transformation, the proliferation of IoT, Artificial Intelligence that is becoming important.

It is now important that in the era of fourth industrial revolution organizations are able to deliver innovations faster and that is where the important communications or important conversation starts. Look at any organization; the customer dynamics or the situation around the customer, the competition is there. AI is ruling and there are a lot of processes, which are getting enabled by AI and IoT is also coming in a big way.

In this scenario, organizations should have the ability whereby they can deliver innovations faster by the business community because they are the ones going to leverage the capabilities for the transformational part of their business. This is where we see the trend of low code development in this app revolution. With the proliferation of mobile phones, the market demands a lot of these new app development platform and that is when we are talking about the business profile kind of working with the click and not the code, maybe the low code or no code movement, which will be redefined and that is what I would start with.

At Salesforce we are empowering the business leaders and what we do is we bring the IT to do some added business critical terms propounding important tasks which are always there. However, when it comes to the business level transformation we allow the business leaders to become developers. When it comes to the stack will have a full stack, some low code, and some citizen code. With more than 1,50,000 customers globally, this platform is very important and we are delivering more than 1.9 trillion transactions per year. There are a lot of innovative customers globally as well as locally who are doing innovation at NYC Institute.

Trust is the most important value. Today many customers are banking on Salesforce to deliver the innovation on Salesforce cloud platform and it is critical that they have a highly structured platform. Our website trust.salesforce.com explains how transparent we are and customers use this platform and use this standard out of the box capability. We also provide the capabilities to be built on that platform.

Salesforce AppExchange is equivalent of an app store. We have made this huge platform -Salesforce and Salesforce customer success open to the ISV (Independent Service Vendors) community. There are a lot of ISV who develop their applications on the Salesforce platform and those applications are the ones which are used by the ecosystem of their core customers. As an organization, the way Salesforce helps is with a low code or no code movement which means we are doing it will less code or no code. We are just doing it with a click. We are doing a lot of value added thing with App Exchange and businesses are becoming developers.

How AI is impacting the app development and how are you utilizing AI for better outcomes?

All the organizations are using data and Artificial intelligence as such is actually a part of everybody’s life. We at Salesforce use deep learning and Natural language Processing. There are two ways in which we are delivering Artificial intelligence to our customers.

First, we need to have an infrastructure where organizations data can be stored and then you need to have the ability of data time whereby you know which algorithms to apply to start which business problems and then deliver the outcomes. At Salesforce we have created and provided that huge cloud platform where the data innovation becomes very easily available at highly scalable infrastructure.

Also, there are some of the standard applications that we use. For example, we have an application called Salesforce and if I am the sales person I need intelligence in the form of AI coming in and telling me that hey Deepak you work on this. What this means is the ability for AI to go and fix through the user data and give an appropriate outcome. We have products like this that are one part of how we bring it to the customers through our standard apps. Second, we have the ability to have our own data scientists and you will be able to come out with an algorithm, a technology infrastructure whereby we can build our own algorithms and we also need a space for storing our data so that we can work out of our data space and that is what we provide to them.

At Salesforce, our artificial intelligence is branded as Einstein. Our entire analytics platform which includes standard analytics, artificial intelligence is branded as Einstein. Salesforce Einstein also has Einstein API that helps developers to use the Einstein API to build their own artificial intelligence in their organizations. Organizations are going to choose the way they want to work with artificial intelligence. It may be in the sales, marketing, service, or the area of human resources AI plays an important role and therefore Salesforce is providing standard artificial intelligence capability through which people can develop their own algorithms. So that is how we provide the capability to our customers.

We spoke about the IOT also. A lot of IoT data migration is coming in from multiple devices and then taking some important calls on them. For example if I have my elevator deployed all over the place and there are smart elevators providing the data, this data is captured on our IoT platform but actually what I need to do is in case an elevator has a problem which the elevator itself can detect before someone else reports the problem, we send the information to our teams so that they can fix that problem. Therefore, we empower any business to collect the data of IOT and secure the interaction and then launch proactively for the sale, service or marketing.

How are you leveraging AI to develop apps with better consumer experiences?

Our main focus is our customers. So we call ourselves as customer satisfaction and as I mentioned we are the world’s number 1 CRM company and at every platform, we try to enhance customer or consumer experience.

For example, Say I am calling a call center and you need to take a call as to which agent is best suited to do the job for this customer. Now artificial intelligence embedded in our service solution is delivering some of these outcomes. For example, if Ashok as a consumer is calling for a particular reason then the AI which is embedded in our sales application has all the capabilities to go through the previous similar process, similar customer and the type of customer and then decide who is the best person to resolve Ashok’s query. So that identified person gets immediately to work on this particular customer engagement which results in quicker turn around enhancing the consumer experience and satisfaction.

We now have embedded bots in our AI that are part of customer conversations. So in the form of customers chat the bot starts playing the role. They engage and converse with consumers as if it is you who is having the conversation about many things and what is meaningful to that it is 24*7. This is impacting consumer experience with quick turnaround time. These are the ways in which the customer feels that artificial intelligence has been able to deliver consumer experience and elevate it further.

AI which is embedded and made as a part of the platform comes out with something called the next best action. This provides the right inputs to the consumers and also to the salesperson about what needs to be proposed and what the consumer should consider. The first part is enhancing customer satisfaction and the second part is proposing the real type of product at the right time at the right place to the consumer. These are some of the things which play a role in the satisfaction of the consumer’s life. The third area that is a path-breaking thing is Einstein voice which we have recently launched. The way in which we have been engaging with the technology has changed, earlier it was touch and now it is the voice. We are bringing this voice technology for the salespeople, channel people, employees, and consumers. This is again increasing the construction of consumer and you are feeling the engagement of voice command. These are all the ways in which we show that technology is part of AI in multiple spheres.

Do you think automation in App development can lead to job risk of the coders?

Any kind of change in technology initially comes with a kind of anxiety or apprehension. However, it does not necessarily happen that way. For example, when the automated teller machines (ATM) was introduced there was a fear that the bank teller in the branches would lose their jobs. However, it never happened. While ATM’s automated certain transactions what it created is the ability to scale up for the branches and branch tellers were hired in more numbers. Similarly, this technology will bring in end consumers, development business users and developers an alternate or a different way to generate more opportunities because the work will be more creative, use case-based, outcome-based and innovation based rather than just an ability to use this automation. So I believe this will bring in more innovation.