Autodesk enlists Einstein AI to enhance customer service

Even as it designs 3D generative AI models for future customer deployment, CAD/CAM design giant Autodesk is “leaning” into generative AI for its customer service operations, deploying Salesforce’s Einstein for Service with plans to use Agentforce in the future, CIO Prakash Kota says.

Einstein for Service — Autodesk’s first use of Salesforce’s gen AI platform — has driven sizable efficiencies for Autodesk customer agents, says Kota, singling out AI-generated summaries of case issues and resolutions as a key productivity gain.

“Before we had this capability, every agent had to spend time post–customer call to document the issue and the resolution — the steps they took to close out the case,” says Kota, who will speak at a customer panel at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2024 this week.

Not anymore. The reduction in time Einstein has helped provide — freeing up agents to handle other customer calls — is a staggering 63%, Kota says.

“If we can take away the mundane tasks for our agents, it is a huge boost because they can spend much more time talking to customers and creating more customer satisfaction,” he says. “Agents want to spend more time with customers rather than sitting and documenting.”

Salesforce first launched Einstein in 2016, but the AI platform has evolved and expanded to address many common business tasks for specific audiences in the years since, including sales and marketing, e-commerce, and other routine but vital corporate functions. The company launched Einstein GPT in 2023, introducing generative AI into its product set, with Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant, following thereafter.

At Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce is launching its next-generation AI platform dubbed Salesforce Agentforce that will build on Einstein with more sophisticated generative AI capabilities, enabling customers to build their own AI agents. Kota says the capabilities will offer new insights into the AI-built case summaries the company is already capitalizing on.

“We are exploring multiple forms of Einstein and Data Cloud capabilities, and Agentforce is one of them,” Autodesk’s CIO says, noting the next-generation platform will collect all Einstein GPT data that reveals agent productivity and improvement possibilities. “These are all in early-stage experimentation mode and we are evaluating whether it makes sense for us. But at this point, we have not launched any of these capabilities.”

Autodesk is among the field of vendors building AI tools to make 3D visuals, including Nvidia and Adobe. Founded in 1982, Autodesk is the leader CAD/CAM modeling software maker, serving product designers, architects, and engineers. Autodesk’s Project Bernini is a research and development project under way to develop generative AI models for quickly generating functional 3D. A company spokesperson described Bernini as “strictly experimental and not available for public use.” 

Autodesk’s AI-infused journey to subscription-based sales

Like all enterprises, and software giants in particular, Autodesk is undergoing a “huge cloud journey,” Kota says. In the next three to five years, the $56 billion company will transform fully into a subscription-only software provider that delivers enhanced services, including AI, he says.

“We have been leaning into it and seeing how we can leverage AI capabilities,” Kota says. “Our R&D team is heavily focused on AI capabilities we want to bring to customers and my primary responsibility is focusing on the enterprise aspects enabling our employees to be more productive.”

As part of its digital transformation, Autodesk has been building a multicloud enterprise with AWS as its primary cloud provider alongside Azure. It is also exploring SaaS offerings to further modernize its infrastructure. On the AI front, Autodesk is experimenting with Microsoft’s OpenAI version of ChatGPT for internal purposes, Kota says.

The company’s current use of Salesforce’s Einstein is limited to service agents. Autodesk is experimenting with Einstein for Sales and other AI tools to bring the same efficiencies and added revenue opportunities to its sales teams. Kota’s overall AI plan involves introducing tools in a very targeted manner to various “personas” and roles within the company, he says.

“We want to increase the number of accounts each salesperson has, equipping them with knowledge and insights so that they are engaging with the customer in the moments that matter, which can convert into proper leads and follow through, upsell, cross sell, and other activities,” says Kota, noting that Autodesk must have solid sales intelligence from the internet and its own internal data so that salespeople can tap into the right opportunities at the right time to convert those leads.

“That’s how we see how AI can play a big part in driving these things to turn into more revenue as we scale,” he says.

As part of its digital transformation, Autodesk is also “experimenting with a data cloud” to create a unified view of its customers. The company is using Snowflake and several data tools to ensure the data hub it builds is comprehensive.

“We want to have the whole usage data and needs of customers today and anticipate future needs so that we can create the CBI — customer business initiatives — to support subscription renewals,” Kota says, explaining he is building and maintaining a unified, holistic view of the customer throughout their lifecycle to empower Autodesk employees to serve them through personalized experiences. “As part of this we’re experimenting with Salesforce Data Cloud and CRM Analytics amongst other software packages.” 

Autodesk’s enterprise data hub is for internal use only and is not connected to the Autodesk Platform or customer-facing product portfolio, including Autodesk’s three industry clouds, the CIO notes.

“This serves as a single source of truth for data analytics and AI/machine learning go-to-market and finance use cases. For example, a salesperson could use the data to understand their sales performance, and what their current pipeline is,” Kota says. “The goal is ultimately to enhance their work experience and help them to better serve customers.”