Salesforce Inc. said today it’s boosting its Consumer Goods Cloud with new artificial intelligence and data capabilities that aim to boost productivity in retailer’s and supplier’s route-to-market processes.

The Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud platform provides tools that help companies to unlock and unify customer data and industry market research. It’s most often used by account representatives to gain deeper insights into buyer’s preferences, so they can better optimize their retail planning and execution operations.

With today’s updates, the Consumer Goods Cloud platform is being integrated with Salesforce Data Cloud, which is a platform for unifying and harmonizing structured and unstructured data. With this integration, Consumer Goods Cloud users will be able to connect account data with broader industry data to create more comprehensive, unified profiles for each customer. They’ll also be able to segment those accounts and define micro-segments by retail store to plan more precise assortments and promotions at the hyper-local level, Salesforce said.

For instance, a company that sells soft drinks in Latin America will be able to use Data Cloud for Consumer Goods to unify customer loyalty data with syndicated consumer data, such as market research. Using this combined dataset, account managers will be able to identify which flavors of soft drinks are popular with local consumers in a certain region of, say, Brazil, and which convenience stores tend to replenish supplies of that product most often. That soft drinks company could use that information to recommend a higher monthly purchase order for convenience stores in that region, or use that popular product as the basis of a promotion.

With the integration of Data Cloud in Consumer Goods Cloud, users will also be able to take advantage of Salesforce’s Einstein artificial intelligence tools. For instance, Consumer Goods Cloud will be able to tap Einstein Copilot’s account summarization features to improve the productivity of service agents.

It can provide AI-generated account summaries directly within the Consumer Goods Cloud service console, removing the need to switch between screens, knowledge articles and history. In this way, agents will be able to handle more complex, high-volume inquiries with a more personalized touch, the company said.

Salesforce said agents could use Einstein Copilot Account Summarization to get up to speed on their last interactions with a specific retailer, including the most recent orders placed and their customer satisfaction scores, drilling all the way down to a specific point-of-sale location for that retailer. Using these summaries, the agent can then address retailers’ questions about that most recent order, and suggest additional products for upselling during the resolution process.

Finally, Salesforce revealed new data- and AI-powered features in Consumer Goods Cloud Einstein 1 for Sales to improve productivity for sales managers, field representatives, merchandisers and others. With these new features, users will be able to surface retail execution details and recommendations. So sales reps can determine if special product handling is required for perishable or fragile products, ensure faster replenishment cycles, improve product availability in rural areas, or reduce payment defaults when collecting payment on product delivery.

As an example, a snacks company field rep can trigger an out-of-stock notification for an account when they see a high-performing product is out of stock at a large retailer. The sales manager will see that OOS notification immediately, and can notify the relevant team to prioritize a replenishment visit. As a result, the store is restocked, enabling it to capture sales that would otherwise not take place if the product were out of stock.

Salesforce said the new features are all about driving growth in the consumer goods retail industry, in line with a forecast from McKinsey that shows how generative AI can potentially deliver between $400 billion and $600 billion in value for global retailers by increasing productivity.

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