Industry clouds give CIOs on-ramp to gen AI

Cloud offerings tailored to their verticals have given IT leaders industry-specific features and an expedited route to the cloud. Now they are enabling easier experimentation with generative AI.

Greg Beltzer has been beta testing key generative AI technologies for the past six months and is eager to capitalize on them when released this spring. As head of technology for the US division of RBC Wealth Management, Beltzer says one feature in particular, Prompt Builder, will enable more than 2,100 advisors in RBC US’s private client group to “request and retrieve the most compelling data on topics of interest to clients.”

“We’ve been on the beta the entire time and we’ve been able to see how it has developed and what it can do,” says Beltzer, who is based in Minneapolis. “It’s the first easy-to-use tooling I’ve seen that allows you to do prompt engineering at this stage.”

And that’s all thanks to Beltzer’s decision to give RBC private equity advisors a vertical industry cloud that offered financial services out-of-the-box that are both customizable and extensible.

The choice to implement Salesforce Financial Services Cloud has subsequently given Beltzer’s team a head start in delivering generative AI capabilities and core industry services to RBC US advisors while still working on the company’s overall cloud migration.

“My strategy was to put Salesforce at the center,” says Beltzer, who helped launched RBC US’s journey to Microsoft Azure and AWS in 2018 when he joined the company. “That’s when we were looking for a new CRM and Salesforce for us is much more than a CRM. It is an operational platform.”

Predominantly a Microsoft shop, the US wealth management arm of Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada had been searching to replace an antiquated CRM system for advisors spread across 190 locations in 42 states. Beltzer had consider Microsoft Dynamics, among other full-suite CRMs, before settling on Salesforce’s industry-focused offering. Now, thanks to advances and integrations, Beltzer is positioned to bank on Salesforce’s Einstein AI platform to build more sophisticated services — if regulators give the nod.

Going vertical

While seemingly providing commoditized feature sets, industry clouds have been proving their business value in part by laying the foundation for innovation at companies across a range of industries. Going vertical with cloud solutions gives many companies advantages they would not have had otherwise, analysts say, including a quicker route to the cloud and purpose-built features that cater to their specific needs.

“For RBC, they’re utilizing key capabilities like client interaction, information and data management, and Slack alongside as a communication platform that facilitates collaboration and information sharing within RBC Wealth and externally with clients,” says David Mario Smith, founder and principal analyst of Inflow Analysis.

And, with access to features such as Einstein, CIOs choosing industry clouds may be able to accelerate innovation further.

Salesforce, which launched its first industry offering — Financial Services Cloud — in 2016, boasts 14 industry clouds “developed in close partnership with industry experts and leading customers to provide industry-specific functionality, data models, and applications,” says Jeff Amann, EVP and GM of Salesforce Industries, who co-founded industry cloud pioneer Vlocity, which Salesforce acquired in 2020.

The company, which generates roughly $5 billion in revenue from its industry cloud offerings, claims that 45% of its industry cloud customers are new to Salesforce, and it competes against the likes of Oracle, SAP, and ServiceNow across a growing range of verticals, along with hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

IDC analyst Nadia Ballard says enterprise software vendors such as Salesforce were the leading vertical cloud providers in 2022 but lost some share in 2023 to large cloud service providers, which have boosted their industry-specific offerings and financial incentives to existing cloud customers. SaaS vendors ended up in second place, with 41% of respondents to IDC’s Industry Cloud Path 2023 survey saying they use an industry cloud from an enterprise software vendor, Ballard says.

“Some of the reasons why is that the hyperscalars also have been building up their industry-specific offerings and they have the larger global footprint overall,” Ballard says. “Many enterprise buyers are also very happy that their spending on industry cloud services with the CSPs [cloud service providers] typically counts directly towards their committed spend with them. That consumption convenience is very important for some organizations.”

Sandboxing for the future

Like RBC’s Beltzer, Jason Marlowitz, segment CIO of the senior care division at Humana, saw selecting an industry cloud as a way to jumpstart the division’s shift to the cloud with features tailored to its vertical needs.

Marlowitz selected another one of Salesforce’s industry clouds — Health Cloud — to get to market quickly and lower the cost of ownership, says Marlowitz, whose division services 300 patient care centers across the US.

“Health Cloud came with a set of workflows that were really geared toward our industry,” he says, adding that Salesforce also developed one missing component Humana needed — patient care assessments — and his team participated in the beta program on that. “We did a buy versus build process,” he says. “It seemed pretty common sense” to adopt the Salesforce addition than to build it themselves.

Humana corporate runs multiple clouds, including Salesforce CRM. Its primary care organization provides care to more than 300,000 senior clients under two brands — CenterWell Senior Primary Care and Conviva Care Center. Marlowitz was hired by Humana to “help support the growth of CenterWell PCO, which also included several acquisitions,” he says.

For Marlowitz, compliance and industry data standards are paramount — and proved important to the decision to opt for an industry cloud, as Salesforce Health Cloud supports Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), an industry standard for exchanging electronic health care data, providing interoperability between healthcare providers and payers and portability for the patient.

“That schema and structure existed in Salesforce, so we did not have to bolt onto some proprietary data model. They already had something that was compliant,” he says, noting that he has been able to consume other cloud capabilities supporting the FHIR standard.

And now, through Salesforce Health Cloud, Marlowitz and his team have access to Einstein for leveraging generative AI — though Humana’s primary care organization is taking a more cautious approach, Marlowitz says. Developers are experimenting with Einstein generative AI in a sandbox, but they are not ready to deploy them.

Of most interest to Marlowitz’s team is applying the tools to patient care to surface insights that may help physicians and caregivers better diagnose and treat patients. But Humana and all verticals are being mindful that there are governmental regulations and policies being developed to provide safety guardrails on AI.

“We are leveraging the tools that are coming out and will assess which [AI tools] make the most sense to move on and put into a production setting,” he adds. “But we are not in production.”

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