AI agents to automate sales

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

Salesforce is launching two AI agents that help sales teams autonomously engage with leads and provide personalized coaching.

With 24/7 support, automated repetitive tasks, and AI-powered insights, are we headed into a new era of sales? Let's get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

• Salesforce unveils AI agents for sales

• Nvidia and Mistral make laptop-ready AI

• Turn PDFs into interactive dashboards

• New AI breakthrough in solar tech

• 6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs

• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SALESFORCE

🧠 Salesforce unveils AI agents for sales

The Rundown: Salesforce just introduced two fully autonomous, AI-powered sales agents, Einstein SDR Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent, designed to help sales teams accelerate growth through automation and personalization.

The details:

• Einstein SDR Agent engages with inbound leads 24/7 to answer questions, handle objections, and book meetings.

• Einstein Sales Coach Agent helps salespeople rehearse pitches and offers real-time suggestions during calls.

• The agents both leverage Salesforce’s CRM data and external data uploaded via Data Cloud to generate accurate, contextually relevant responses.

• The agents will be generally available in October, with more details expected to be released at Dreamforce conference in September.

Why it matters: By integrating AI agents into existing platforms, Salesforce is lowering the barrier for AI adoption in business processes. These agents offer 24/7 support and automate repetitive tasks like qualifying leads and booking meetings, freeing human sales teams to focus on high-value tasks and potentially close more deals.

TOGETHER WITH LAMBDA

🧠 Use Hermes 3 for free with Lambda Chat

The Rundown: Trained on Lambda’s 1-Click Cluster, Nous Research’s free-to-access, open-source Hermes 3 is the first full-parameter fine-tune of Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B model with exceptional reasoning capabilities.

With Hermes 3, you can:

• Tackle complex tasks from strategic decision-making to creative writing

• Access the model through Lambda’s new Chat Completions API or Lambda Chat interface

• Run the model on a single node or scale to a multi-node 1-Click Cluster

Try Hermes 3 for free through lambda.chat or Chat Completions API.

NVIDIA

💻 Nvidia and Mistral make laptop-ready AI

The Rundown: Nvidia and Mistral just released Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B, a highly accurate small language model that can run efficiently on laptops and PCs.

The details:

• The model uses optimization techniques like pruning (removing certain weights) and distillation (retraining the pruned model on a small dataset) to achieve high accuracy with a smaller footprint.

• These optimizations resulted in up to 40x cost savings in terms of raw compute during training.

• Laptops and PCs can run the model locally for faster and more secure interactions with AI.

• Minitron 8B leads nine language-driven AI benchmarks for similarly sized models from language understanding to reasoning and coding.

Why it matters: AI models that are small enough to run locally on laptops and PCs means less reliance on cloud services, improved data privacy, and faster responses. As this tech evolves, we could soon see advanced AI in everything from smartphones and watches to home appliances.

AI TRAINING

📊 Turn PDFs into interactive dashboards

The Rundown: Using AI-powered coding and Replit (an online integrated development environment), you can transform any PDF into a dynamic, interactive dashboard with this simple AI workflow.

Step-by-step:

1. Upload your PDF to an AI chatbot (e.g., ChatGPT or Google Gemini)

2. Request a Python script for an interactive dashboard using Plotly Dash.

3. Copy the AI-generated Python code and create a new Python project on replit.com.

4. Paste the code into Replit and run the code in Replit to generate your interactive dashboard.

Hot tip: If you’re using Claude, you can enable the Artifacts feature and simply prompt it to “create an interactive dashboard from this PDF“ to get a similar result

PRESENTED BY ZAPIER

🫐 See, dream, achieve with Very Berry Visualizer

The Rundown: Very Berry Visualizer, ZAP’s sweetest flavor, helps you turn workflow diagrams into automated processes — making your automated visions a reality with minimal effort.

Leverage Very Berry Visualizer to:

• Create connected processes and transform diagrams into automated workflows

• Design and collaborate on workflows

• Enhance productivity with AI visualization

Bring your workflow visions to life with Very Berry Visualizer!

AI RESEARCH

☀️ New AI breakthrough in solar tech

The Rundown: Researchers just developed a new AI-based method called NES-VMC that can accurately calculate the excited states of atoms and molecules, a challenge in physics and chemistry that previously delayed improvements in solar tech.

The details:

• NES-VMC (natural excited states variational Monte Carlo) accurately predicted quantum excited states on systems ranging from single atoms to benzene-sized molecules.

• The method outperforms leading computational chemistry techniques, often achieving chemical accuracy.

• Excited states are crucial for understanding light-matter interactions, key to improving solar cells, LEDs, lasers, and more.

• NES-VMC overcomes long-standing challenges in physics and chemistry that have hindered progress in these fields.

Why it matters: This AI-driven breakthrough could lead to more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and more powerful lasers. The ripple effects could be dramatic: lower electricity costs, improvements in phone and laptop battery life and displays, faster fiber-optic internet, and so much more.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

Trending AI Tools

• 🇪🇸 D-iD AI Video Translate - Instant multilingual videos with lip synced translation

• 🎨 Ideogram 2.0 - AI image generation with state-of-the-art text details

• 🎥 EVF-SAM-2 - Prompt-to-segmentation in videos

• 🤖 AgentQL - Painless data extraction and web automation

• ✅ Eppo - Run advanced A/B tests seamlessly

• 📝 Life Note - Journal with the greatest minds in human history

New AI Job Opportunities

• ✍️ The Rundown - Writer/Editor

• 👩🏻‍🔬 Sanctuary AI - Expert Scientist - Dexterous Manipulation

• 🧠 DeepL - Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

• 🔬 Meta - Fundamental AI Research Scientist, NLP

QUICK HITS

Free event: Deploying AI in the Enterprise. Learn from NYU Stern Chief AI Architect Conor Grennan to learn how to roll out AI to a large team or organization. RSVP here.*

Boston Dynamics posted a new video of its Atlas robot doing push-ups, showcasing advancements in dynamic movement control.

AI21 Labs unveiled Jamba 1.5, a multilingual AI model series with 256,000 context length and permissive licensing for smaller organizations.

Krea AI added Flux 1, an advanced text-to-image AI model, to its platform with 3-minute free generations for non-subscribed users.

Perplexity AI is reportedly planning to introduce advertising on its AI-powered search platform by Q4 of 2024.

Anthropic launched LaTeX rendering support for Claude, enabling the AI chatbot to display mathematical equations and expressions consistently.

Google DeepMind employees urged the company to end military contracts, citing concerns over AI use in warfare and surveillance.

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