Coveo
GenAI is the Next Make or Break Moment for CIOs

There are few moments in time when the world is affixed and attuned to the same thing. Today, that’s generative AI and its expected benefits for companies everywhere. Instead of talking about solutions or pain points, the business world is talking about the technology and going deeper to try and understand how it works. Generative AI stands to bring tremendous opportunities, with McKinsey1 projecting that it could add $2.6 - $4.4 trillion in productivity value across industries.

A key element of generative AI and the value it brings is its ability to work with large amounts of data that exist today. For enterprises, this is a critical need given the terabytes of structured and unstructured data that firms continue to struggle to unlock value from.

CIOs and IT leaders have traditionally solved for these data and information challenges by purchasing core technologies including systems of engagement and record, like Salesforce. This was done with the hopes that these technologies would deliver a single source of truth for the use case at hand.

But reality is very different, and companies have yet to achieve the centralization, standardization, unification and intelligence expected, even after decades of investment. The question is why?

Part of the answer is rooted in the complexity of companies, organization structures, decision making, budgets and more. Firms have ebbed and flowed between centralized and decentralized decision making - resulting in thousands of applications, more departmental silos, shadow IT and a lack of technology interoperability.

With all the challenges that exist at companies, generative AI represents yet another opportunity for leaders to break down barriers, unify siloed knowledge and information, and deliver productivity value beyond what we can conceive today.

The matter of genAI’s success will depend on whether companies (and CIOs in particular) are ready. Ready to manage the real risks of generative AI for the enterprise. Ready to change purchasing decisions. Ready to set true enterprise-wide policies. And finally, ready to ‘change manage’ and bring talent along for the ride. Companies that are able to adapt to the realities of genAI will gain competitive and operational advantages, while those that do not will fall further behind as they compete against the former.

How Coveo and Salesforce deliver on nextgen experiences

Technology has always promised to deliver efficiencies in the workplace, with the best technologies positively impacting revenue and costs. Salesforce is just that. They’re no strangers to CIO and IT leaders since they pioneered the cloud CRM market. The simplicity and ease of use of the Salesforce platform helped companies achieve growth and efficiencies. More importantly, the tech helped companies deliver great customer and employee experiences, shifting expectations for how it should be done.

“The Advent of Generative AI Makes Support Experiences even more Personal, Powerful and Advisory, but it Needs to be done in a Trusted, Secure, Accurate, Verifiable, Scalable and Cost-Effective Manner”

However, all technology ecosystems are focused on their own development cycles, intended for specific use cases or lines of business, and rarely consider external ecosystems. This leaves a further gap in achieving a truly unified enterprise solution, which is particularly relevant with generative AI - where the value increases exponentially as you expand across the entire data ecosystem.

This is where Coveo has played a key role for Salesforce, as a Summit Partner, and for other technology ecosystems. Coveo has acted as a unifying AI platform that connects search with knowledge, information, and all content across the enterprise: making it contextually available within the various Salesforce Clouds and UIs, effectively amplifying the value of the cloud ecosystem with unified results and answers, guided recommendations and 1:1 personalization.

For nearly a decade, Coveo has served as the “relevance intelligence layer” that turbo charges Salesforce and enables customers to improve metrics like CSAT and NPS, costs, revenue and margin. Coveo enables organizations to securely harness their enterprise data by unifying ALL content (inside and outside of Salesforce).

Coveo AI uses search, behavioral analytics, machine learning, large language models, generative AI, and user context to deliver bespoke and prescriptive experiences. It automatically surfaces the content, navigation, answers, and products people actually need by using data from previous interactions, from Salesforce and other channels, to deepen content and product discovery that matters to both the user and the business.

In order to provide an intelligent, coherent experience, there needs to be a single pane of glass that brings the right information to users in the moment of need. Coveo does the heavy lifting by connecting natively with Salesforce and other enterprise repositories such as Sharepoint, Jira, Confluence, Office365, Box, etc. (while respecting security and permissions) to deliver 1:1 personalized relevant experiences.

In order to illustrate, let’s look at three specific examples of the power of Coveo AI and Salesforce:

1) a connected Support experience,
2) a Commerce experience, and
3) Salesforce’s own journey with Coveo.

1. Coveo AI + Salesforce Service Cloud: A Connected Support Journey

From a Customer Support experience perspective, the Coveo Relevance Cloud™ connects and unifies the customer experience across all online channels from customer self-service, to community, chatbot, live chat, and agentassisted support. Coveo AI delivers search and intelligence within every UI and channel, tracking a user’s digital journey while making AI-powered recommendations along the way. With each search, click, and outcome on a site or application, Coveo is understanding and gathering user context, intent, and authentication status.

On a self-service portal, Coveo’s case deflection and case classification AI model (which leverages LLMs) are at work, helping a customer with self-resolution intelligence. Should a customer open a case, Coveo will take a user’s entire digital journey (searches, content viewed, date/time, etc.) and case information, and equip agents with the most relevant knowledge to help them resolve the case more quickly and seamlessly.

When an agent opens the case in Salesforce, they’re presented with the customer’s information plus all their digital journey insights AND they proactively receive AI-generated knowledge article recommendations from Coveo to resolve the customer issue swiftly.

This empowers Customer Service teams to be more efficient, proficient and provide white-glove service to customers, improving CSAT and NPS. This AIpowered intelligence adds immense value to companies’ implementations of Salesforce Service Cloud and add-ons like Salesforce Einstein.

Coveo Relevance Generative Answering

Generative AI has created a demand for organizations to go even further and provide a way for customers to ask more complex questions that generate comprehensive accurate answers. Coveo Relevance Generative Answering delivers this experience, and in fact, is primed to further amplify online support interactions as it provides a natural language, conversational question answering capability, while generating responses from various documents and knowledge articles. Of course, all the main tenets of enterprise security, permissions, privacy, currency of content and citations linkage to sources of truth are respected.

"The best way to build a trusted, enterprise-grade experience for customer support that gives the accurate answers in the channel of choice (self-help, generative answering, chatbot or agentassisted) requires a single secure source of truth combined with a relevance layer. The advent of generative AI makes support experiences even more personal, powerful and advisory, but it needs to be done in a trusted, secure, accurate, verifiable, scalable and cost-effective manner.” says Connors.

2. Coveo AI + Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Profit & Margin Optimization

Managing Commerce experiences is challenging. Businesses want to provide personalized experiences while managing the complexity of product catalogs, entitlements, inventory and profit margins, to name a few. Coveo provides fast and intelligent search, AI-powered listing pages, dynamic navigation, and relevant recommendations that integrate seamlessly into Salesforce B2B storefronts to deliver personalized experiences that convert but also maximize revenue and margins.

Coveo unifies Salesforce Catalog Data with external PIMs/ERPs, and seamlessly integrates with rules defined within Salesforce. This allows for the seamless management of entitlements, dynamic pricing, store availability and variants. Coveo goes a step further by providing options to add more intelligence to the platform. Equipped with powerful AI-powered search and merchandising tools, Coveo helps businesses conduct AB tests that can simulate real-world scenarios and determine which will yield the best business results.

Coveo AI enhances the Salesforce Commerce Cloud by taking into account a customer's entitlements, history and behavior to provide targeted recommendations, based on multiple criteria that drive revenue and margins. This surgical level of personalization, powered by Coveo AI, ensures an experience that aligns business outcomes with contextual and behavioral intent, helping businesses achieve substantial improvements in revenue and profits.

As an AI-First Company we Believe that AI Allows every Company to Securely Leverage World-Class Search, Generative Answering, Recommendations and Personalization every Single Customer Expects – it Levels the Playing Field

For example, shipping costs, probability of product return, and inventory levels help offer a buyer suggestions that enhance both the likelihood of purchase while making the transaction more profitable. Cutting-edge deep learning can detect user behavior and intent to provide 1:1 personalized recommendations in realtime, without any form of authentication or cookies. Coveo Relevance Generative Answering will take this to a new level by enabling customers to ask for product guidance or to compare/contrast different products and make recommendations based on their needs.

3. Coveo AI Delivers a Total Experience Journey at Salesforce

Salesforce as a customer has embraced Coveo over the years as an AI search center of excellence, using it to power 18 different digital experiences across their own organization.

Salesforce leverages Coveo to amplify search and personalization in Customer Support & Self-Service, AppExchange, Trailhead, Salesforce.com websites, and Help & Training to name a few. With Coveo, they’ve achieved a 90+% self-service success rate as well as the highest CSAT scores in the company's history. Plus, Coveo’s AI delivered a 17% increase in app install engagement on the AppExchange.

Salesforce has a centralized team of Coveo experts who are responsible for governance, best practices, and onboarding to set up new internal teams needing search and personalization capabilities. They innovate with Coveo using re-usable components and use cases, and generate incremental value and unified experiences on their own.

The result of a combination of existing tech ecosystems like Salesforce and Coveo?

Amplified value for existing digital investments in addition to the next generation of technologies like generative AI, without the need for wholesale changes and millions in additional investment.

Where GenAI fits into the enterprise tech stack

Generative AI is the next evolution of technology that relies on trusted AIpowered search technologies. In fact, a recent Gartner report2 reinforced this, pointing out that ‘Search augments AI, rather than the reverse’. With this in mind, it’s important to understand that generative AI is additive and should be integrated into existing technology platforms and UIs instead of being thought about as another independent technology.

With the hype and excitement around genAI, companies are being inundated with vendor sales pitches and promises of genAI apps for sale today. This departmental approach for vendor sales could put the entire genAI opportunity at risk for firms, not to mention adding to department silos, if not addressed and approached in a centralized and standardized manner. It’s crucial for CIOs today to know where and how their corporate data is being used, which is also true for genAI.

This is the prime moment for CIOs and IT leaders to step in to guide and direct the company strategy, especially given the risks and challenges associated with genAI: security, privacy, proprietary content, unification of multiple content sources, freshness/currency of content, factuality, coherence across channels, and the costs of generative AI.

Coveo mitigates these significant corporate risks through its market leading relevance platform as well as advanced security, privacy and compliance features such as ISO27001, HIPAA, SOC2 and GDPR; which ensure the trust, safety and reliability of generative AI, personalization and recommendations.

Enterprise-ready genAI depends on relevance, security, and innovation

For over a decade, Coveo has kept innovation that prioritizes client success as its overarching mission. With the largest dedicated R&D team in the AIpowered and generative search industry, coupled with Business Value processes and experienced Customer Success teams, Coveo is organized for rapid innovation that makes clients successful.

With over 1,500 activations in mid to large-sized global organizations across multiple industries, the platform currently holds the designation as the most advanced AI-powered search platform in building relevance, securely leveraging advanced technologies like AI and large language models. In addition, Coveo is currently engaged with +50 Global 1000 organizations on the at-scale testing of its latest development, a generative AI extension to its platform: Coveo Relevance Generative Answering.

“As an AI-first company, we believe that Coveo’s trusted AI platform allows every company to provide worldclass search, generative answering, recommendations and personalization - which every single customer expects. AI continues to level the playing field.” says Connors.

“The Coveo Platform Securely Indexes Content, Refreshes in Real Time, And Applies Sophisticated AI and Generative AI, Behavioral Analytics and Large Language Models to Power Relevant Experiences. This Approach Addresses CIOs' Concerns Around Privacy, Security and Factuality. The Advanced Security, Privacy and Compliance Features such as ISO27001, HIPAA, SOC2 and GDPR of the Platform Ensure the Safety and Reliability of the Personalization and Recommendations”

Going forward, Coveo will continue investments in enterprise-ready generative AI in its relentless pursuit of delivering the most modern, relevant and personalized digital experiences using AI. Coveo’s go-to-market plans, technology partnerships, talent and dedicated focus on rapid innovation set Coveo up as the category-defining leader for intelligent digital experiences across eCommerce, Service, Workplace and Website use cases.

The One Plus One Equals Three Strategy

Large technology disruptors have redefined the way businesses interact with people - introducing new ways of delivering experiences that will change and elevate expectations forever. Generative AI is the next disruption in our expectations, and it’s here today.

But this wave isn’t a rip and replace or overhaul. Rather it’s a measured integration and implementation leveraging your existing systems and data. In fact, it's dependent on the accuracy of your systems and data, and your capability to unify those intelligently.

Coveo AI is the missing part of the equation, acting as a force multiplying technology that amplifies your existing systems, upskills your teams, and delights your key stakeholders with trusted, safe and secure AI-powered information and answers that lead to increased revenues, reduced costs, and world-class digital experiences.

This make or break moment is achievable with the right guidance and a trusted partner. CIOs, are you ready?