Salesforce strengthens Mulesoft with AI tools to extract data, automate workflows

Mere days after launching Einstein Copilot for Tableau, Salesforce is buffing up another one of its core products. The Marc Benioff-led CRM today announced it is bolstering Mulesoft’s automation, integration and API management solutions with new AI tools.

The offerings, which are set to become generally available over the coming months, include an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) tool to extract and organize data from diverse documents and the integration of the Einstein assistant across the board to help users drive their workflows with natural language prompts.

Salesforce says that the new capabilities are expected to simplify work for developers and business teams, making them productive and accelerating the time to value. 

Intelligent Document Processing for business teams

Since acquiring Mulesoft, Salesforce has made significant improvements to the platform, focusing on both IT and business teams. For IT, there’s the Anypoint integration and API platform that allows enterprises to connect their systems and data sources with the company’s CRM. Meanwhile, for business users, there are automation solutions such as Mulesoft RPA and Composer.

Now, focusing on the latter, Salesforce is adding Intelligent Document Processing to its suite. The offering uses pre-trained AI models with pre-configured templates to extract and structure data from documents like PDFs and images, automating the entire document processing lifecycle. Other vendors also offer similar capability, including Snowflake which launched a Document AI offering last year.

IDP integrates with the Anypoint platform as well as automation solutions Flow and RPA, which enables users to automate the integration of the extracted data with downstream Salesforce systems. The company claims it can help with a variety of tasks, including budget reconciliation, order fulfillment or supplier onboarding. There’s also the option to keep a human in the loop, to keep an eye on the outputs being generated by the tool.

As of now, IDP is being piloted with select customers but Salesforce says it will make it generally available by the end of April. The company also plans to add its Einstein predictive and generative AI assistant to the offering, enhancing it with the ability to pull up relevant insights from documents when prompted with natural language. Beyond this, Einstein will also help with things like formatting the responses as JSON outputs and classifying and summarizing documents.

Einstein to power other Mulesoft solutions too

In addition to IDP, Salesforce confirmed that Einstein will simplify work across other solutions from Mulesoft, starting with Flow and Anypoint Code Builder. 

For Flow, Einstein will enable admins to create automated workflows, such as marketing journeys and data cloud-triggered automations, with natural language prompts. Meanwhile, users of the Anypoint Code Builder, which is MuleSoft’s IDE for designing, developing and deploying APIs and integrations, will be able to ask the assistant to generate new integration flows.

Salesforce says Einstein for Flow will launch in June 2024, while Einstein for IDP will become generally available a bit later in the third quarter of 2024. Einstein for Anypoint Code Builder, on the other hand, remains in beta but the company has not shared a timeline for its general availability.