What is Salesforce Einstein Discovery? (And How to Use It)
Salesforce Einstein Discovery is a business analytics tool that helps your business discover important patterns and make better predictions and strategic decisions. Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, it scrutinizes vast amounts of data in just minutes, revealing key insights about your business and your customers.
The basics of integrating this AI-driven tool will help you better understand and predict business trends. Discover how below.
What is Salesforce Einstein Discovery?
Salesforce Einstein Discovery Is a tool that helps businesses discover key patterns and themes in their data, without having to construct complicated data models. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automatically examine data across a variety of sources and identify relevant insights. Data can be pulled from various structured and unstructured sources.
Once the selected data is loaded, Einstein Discovery uses AI, ML, and statistical intelligence to learn from the data, identify patterns, and make informed predictions. The insights identified by Einstein Discovery are presented using visualizations and easy-to-grasp “stories.” These detailed analyses enable Einstein Discovery to predict future outcomes and make suggestions on how to improve business operations.
This makes Einstein Discovery one of the most powerful yet easiest-to-use analysis tools available to your business. It is fully integrated into the Salesforce platform so that you produce detailed insights with the click of a mouse.
The following video from Salesforce talks more about what Einstein Discovery is and what it does.
What Can You Do with Salesforce Einstein Discovery?
In essence, Einstein Discovery uses available data to answer the following questions concerning your business:
- What happened?
- Why did it happen?
- What could happen in the future?
The answers to these questions provide detailed insights into your business and help you make more informed strategic decisions going forward.
Descriptive Analytics: Understanding What Happened
To better understand what has happened in the past, Einstein Discovery performs a deep dive into your company’s historical data. You specify a key performance indicator (KPI) and Einstein Discovery analyzes the data and displays the results in the form of a “story.” Einstein’s stories use text descriptions and graphs to convey the patterns in your data that have the most impact on the chosen KPI.
Diagnostic Analytics: Understanding Why It Happened
Knowing what happened is only one part of the equation. It’s also important to know why something happened, for which Einstein Discovery uses diagnostic analytics. Einstein uses advanced AI technology to analyze the previously identified patterns and trends to pinpoint the most important factors that contributed to the outcome. You can dive even further into the analysis with Einstein’s interactive waterfall charts that help you understand the impact of specific variables or combination of variables.
Predictive Analytics: Predicting What Could Happen in the Future
Now that you know what happened in the past and why, Einstein Discovery learns from those insights to extrapolate future results. The platform’s predictive analytics let you change key variables to see what impact – both positive and negative – they will have on the identified trends. Einstein Discovery even goes so far to provide recommendations for changes you can implement that will positively influence the given outcome.
How Does Salesforce Einstein Discovery Work?
Einstein Discovery is fully integrated into the Salesforce platform, which means its operation should be familiar to you. There are three key steps involved in the process, which we will examine in turn.
Prepare the Data Set
The first step is to identify and prepare the data you want to analyze. You can use data already present in the Salesforce system as well as other data located elsewhere in your organization. Einstein Discovery can link data from a variety of sources, including:
- CSV files
- Hadoop
- Microsoft SQL Server
- MySQL
- Netezza
- Oracle
- Postgres
- SAP
Creating the Analysis
Once the data set has been prepared, you can now initiate an analysis of that data, which requires zero technical expertise on your part. All you have to do is select the data source within Einstein and click Create Story.
This opens the Story Setup Wizard. From here you select which field you want to minimize or maximize and the type of story you want to create – insights only or insights and predictions. You can opt to have Einstein select fields automatically or let you choose them manually. Once you’ve configured these options, Einstein Discovery begins analyzing the data.
Gaining Insight
After Einstein Discovery completes its analysis, it displays the insights in the form of what it calls a story. Each story contains several text and graphical elements that describe what Einstein has discovered.
The key areas of an Einstein Discovery story include:
- Headline – the name of the story and selected goal (1)
- Toolbar – tools you use to perform various tasks, such as viewing predictions (2)
- Variable panel — a list of variables in your story and how they correlate to the outcome (3)
- Summary – an overview of key insights (4)
- Insight summary panels – key variables that impact the story (5)
- Top insights – the top insights impacting this story (6)
To see more detail about a given insight, hover over a bar in a graph or click the hyperlink in a text description.
Let Rainmaker Help You Integrate Salesforce Einstein Discovery Into Your Business
Salesforce Einstein Discovery is a powerful tool for any type of business. Rainmaker can help you set it up and get the most out of it. Our Salesforce experts will integrate Einstein Discovery into your existing systems and educate you on how to best use it. We also offer a wide variety of Salesforce Managed Services to help your company accelerate growth, overcome critical business challenges, simplify sales operations, and achieve greater success.
Contact Rainmaker today to learn more about Salesforce Einstein Discovery!
