Salesforce’s “platform and other” business unit jumped ahead of the core CRM sales and service automation clouds during their FY21 Q1, highlighting how companies are finally getting their digital platform acts together.

The pandemic is no doubt an accelerator, but the essential truth is that we must all be platform companies today.

During the his Q1 earnings call, CEO Mark Benioff cited the platform play that new mega customer AT&T is embracing: “every customer touch point: the AT&T truck pulls up to my office or my home, that’s going to be Salesforce; I walk into the AT&T store and that’s going to be Salesforce. I’m getting an email from AT&T and that’s going to be Salesforce; and I’m on the phone with the AT&T call center and that’s going to be Salesforce. We’re going to make sure that they have that Customer 360-enhanced data, and when we’re integrating all that data MuleSoft is going to connect AT&T’s different back-end systems, Tableau is giving them the ability to understand customer preferences and Einstein is going to help them serve more intelligent recommendations and route service cases”.

AI is a big part of the Salesforce platform story. This good blog post explains how to make AI business use case.