How Salesforce uses Writer to build AI apps that scale quality and deliver results

For over a decade, Salesforce has invested in using AI to build products that strengthen customer relationships. It also strongly believes in AI’s ability to improve employees’ productivity and accelerate time to market. “Our vision is to use generative AI to help teams scale what they’re great at. Writer augments what our people do daily, taking care of a large majority of the manual steps and grunt work in the middle of the creation process, so they deliver results faster,” said VP of Portfolio and Cross-Channel Marketing, Jessica Bergmann.

A generative AI solution built for the enterprise

Among the many AI solutions on the market, Writer stands out for its enterprise focus. In fact, the relationship with Writer originated from Salesforce’s venture capital arm, Salesforce Ventures’ investment in the company, specifically due to the belief that Writer uniquely understands how to harness the power of AI on behalf of the enterprise. At the time of investment, this was evident in the top-tier enterprises that already trusted the Writer platform, including Intuit, L’Oréal, Accenture, Vanguard, Prudential, and Qualcomm, and that roster now includes Salesforce.

“What sets Writer apart is how secure and enterprise-ready it is,” says VP of Content Experience Dean Atchison. “Salesforce has very tight security policies, and Writer’s ability to gain approval for use with confidential company and product information unlocked many valuable use cases.”

Key Writer features ensure outputs meet Salesforce standards. Knowledge Graph, its graph-based RAG, enables users to query and generate content based on company data, while brand governance features enforce Salesforce’s style guide and company voice. “Simple to use and quick to set up, Writer Knowledge Graph helps our employees easily tap into organizational knowledge,” says Bergmann. Writer’s multilingual LLMs support translation and content generation in over 30 languages, meeting the needs of Salesforce’s global teams.

AI Studio, a suite of no-code and low-code tools, allows users to build custom AI apps and workflows in minutes. “There’s a tremendous amount of engineering required to transform models into reliable business tools. Writer provides a refined, AI-powered solution that’s effective, easy to deploy, and has rapidly accelerated our workflows,” says Patrick Stokes, EVP of Product and Industries Marketing.

The freedom to innovate with AI Studio

Senior Manager of AI and Content Ops, Annemaria Nicholson, led the global rollout of Writer. She wanted the solution to go beyond incremental time savings on simple tasks. She wanted to deploy a collection of custom AI apps that would support the full breadth of use cases across the company. Without Writer, building just one app could require extensive developer support and months-long timelines. Luckily, AI Studio enables business users at Salesforce to create and launch apps in minutes, without technical expertise.

“AI Studio gives us the freedom to innovate at scale,” Nicholson explains. “We are empowering 50 champions across the organization to use its no-code functionality to build apps for their specific business processes and see immediate results.”

Atchison’s content experience team is among the most active AI Studio users. “AI Studio removes technical barriers,” he says. “It lets my team, who know their workflows best, build apps without writing code and deploy them to the broader organization to ensure consistent results across hundreds.”

Giving employees one work day back a week

Salesforce has deployed Writer to over 3,000 employees, and the company is using it to improve workflows, boost productivity, and access accurate internal knowledge. They sit across marketing, communications, content experience, product, customer success, product education, business strategy and operations, and more. Writer supports use cases like customer research, product launches, press releases, video scripts, executive communications, training modules, and help center articles.

The results have been significant: users report a 20% productivity boost — equivalent to saving one workday per week — and 78% say Writer positively impacts their work. “Writer has reviewed billions of words produced by our teams, showing the magnitude of usage,” says Bergmann. “There are many use cases where we would’ve previously hired a person or an agency, but now we can scale internally with Writer.”

Here’s a deep dive into a few of their highest-impact use cases:

Partners in AI strategy and operations

When Salesforce embarked on their Writer journey, there were no established playbooks for scaling AI adoption. Salesforce credits the Writer customer success team for helping them build up AI operations capabilities. Writer provided enterprise enablement through onboarding sessions, prompt workshops, tool trainings, and AI Studio hackathons. As usage scaled, Nicholson partnered with Writer to enable internal champions to become AI Studio app builders and to build workflows to prioritize use cases at scale.

“The Writer team really acts as strategic advisors for us. They are instrumental in helping us achieve high adoption rates and develop internal AI capabilities,” says Nicholson. “As a result, our users feel empowered to use Writer and AI Studio every day.”