The platform is built on the customer relationship management software company’s existing Einstein 1 platform and includes features to transcribe calls for contact center workers and assist caseworkers with generating reports and documenting information.

“This is the kind of work that requires a lot of expertise and there’s never enough people to handle it,” Casey Coleman, senior vice president of global government solutions at Salesforce, told FedScoop in an interview on the sidelines of the company’s conference in Washington. 

Coleman said the system will cut down administrative time for government employees and “leave the experts to do the job of really interacting with people and making sure that the answer is provided to them.”

The announcement came during the company’s “World Tour D.C.” event, which included panels with multiple government customers from agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Internal Revenue Service. 

Other software companies — such as IBM and Microsoft — have also announced new AI tools for government in recent months, as interest in the technology continues to grow in the public sector. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is working to create guidance for procurement of those tools. The Office of Management and Budget is planning action on federal procurement of AI later this year and released a request for information on that work.

Coleman said interest in AI from public sector partners has “spiked up,” particularly for uses related to administrative work and things that can be tested quickly.

“Every conversation we have with public sector customers, or prospective customers, includes AI to some degree,” Coleman said. “Everyone is thinking about it — everyone is looking for use cases to test it on.”

Also on Wednesday, Salesforce announced that its Field Service, Privacy Center and Security Center tools are authorized for FedRAMP’s “high” impact level and the Department of Defense’s “Impact Level 5,” which means they’re cleared to be used with the government’s most sensitive unclassified data. GovSlack also achieved FedRAMP “high” authorization in February. 

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The companies — Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability — join an initial seven that convened at the White House in July to sign on to the set of voluntary commitments overseeing how the emerging technology is developed and used. Representatives from the cohort met with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, and other senior administration officials at the White House on Tuesday.

The first companies to accept the commitments were Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

The Biden administration says these commitments are an “immediate step and an important bridge to government action,” according to a fact sheet, as the White House develops an upcoming executive order and lawmakers consider legislation focused on AI. The fact sheet acknowledges the in-the-works executive order, saying the Office of Management and Budget will “soon release draft policy guidance for federal agencies to ensure the development, procurement, and use of AI systems is centered around safeguarding the American people’s rights and safety.”

“These commitments, which the companies have chosen to undertake immediately, underscore three principles that must be fundamental to the future of AI—safety, security, and trust—and mark a critical step toward developing responsible AI,” the White House said in the fact sheet. “As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, the Biden-Harris Administration will continue to take decisive action to keep Americans safe and protect their rights.”

In total, the companies agreed to eight commitments, which range from opening their algorithms to security testing and sharing information across industry on them prior to launch to a variety of measures that put security, transparency and responsibility at the forefront of their products.

“We applaud the Administration for making this a priority — open discussions between industry and policymakers like today are foundational to enacting safeguards without stopping AI development,” Akash Jain, president of Palantir U.S. government and an attendee at the meeting, said in a statement. “Today, Palantir, along with other leading AI companies, made a set of voluntary commitments to advance effective and meaningful AI governance, which is essential for open competition and maintaining US leadership in innovation and technology.”

These commitments complement the actions of the U.S.’s allies, such as Japan’s G-7 Hiroshima Process, the United Kingdom’s Summit on AI Safety, and India’s leadership as Chair of the Global Partnership on AI. 

Short of forthcoming policy or legislation, the Biden administration in the past year issued its foundational Blueprint for an AI ‘Bill of Rights,’ which is meant to work in tandem with the AI Risk Management Framework published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. However, some policy and tech experts say those leading frameworks are inherently contradictory and provide confusing guidance for tech companies working to develop innovative products and the necessary safeguards around them.

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Salesforce’s first price hike in seven years comes at a time when the company, like many other tech giants, has significantly increased spending on generative artificial intelligence (AI) products and services.

“Salesforce will be increasing list prices an average of 9% across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries and Tableau,” Salesforce said in a press release on Tuesday.

“In just the last few months alone, Salesforce has introduced AI Cloud, Einstein GPT, Sales GPT and Service GPT, and more,” the company said regarding its recent $20 billion investment in research and development.

The price hike will affect key products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries and Tableau. 

The new Salesforce list prices will be the following: Professional Edition will go up $5 to $80, its Enterprise Edition will increase $15 to $165, and it’s Unlimited Edition will jump $30 to $330. Similar price increases will go into effect for Industries, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement, CRM Analytics and Tableau products as well.

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But when it came to online transactions with external customers, NIST officials recognized the agency needed to modernize the user experience for its customers, according to Hannah Brown, acting director of NIST’s Business Operations Office.

Like many federal agencies, NIST oversees a wide range of government services and operating divisions within the Department of Commerce. Its 3,400 scientists, engineers and technicians play a crucial role in keeping the nation’s atomic clocks, electric power grids, computer systems and manufacturing standards up to date. It also partners with more than 1,300 manufacturing industry specialists and works with another 2,700 associates from academia, industry and other government agencies.

Unlike most agencies, though, NIST generates income — from manufacturers, power grid operators, scientists and research institutions — by offering for purchase an extensive catalog of standard reference data and materials in chemistry, physics, engineering, computing and other sciences along with highly specialized calibration services.

“We’re very proud of what we do,” said Brown. “We offer world-class calibration services and standard reference materials … that are critical to commerce and make a big difference for a number of different industries. So we want the customer experience to reflect the value that we’re providing,” she said.

Rethinking the customer service equation

As far back as 2014, Del Brockett, NIST’s CIO at the time and now chief operating officer, recognized the need to modernize how NIST handled its products and services orders. Up until then, NIST’s various departments relied primarily on a paper-based system, email and faxes for taking orders.

Brockett, however, believed that NIST needed more than an e-commerce solution. NIST would also benefit from a broader, enterprise customer relationship and case management platform to improve the agency’s “insight into its customers and partner interactions,” recalled Brown.

“If you really want to have a sense for the work that you’re doing, and the customer you’re providing services to — and if you want metrics around that to understand what you’re doing to make real improvements — then you’re going to need a platform that gives you that overall view. That’s really the point of a good CRM,” said Brown. “The nice thing too, is that it offers a higher level of accountability into the work we do, and transparency into how we’re providing those services.”

That belief was fueled in part by a series of successful deployments of a cloud-based, enterprise workflow management platform at that time.

The deployments gave NIST employees real-time insights into the progress of internal projects and resulted in a wave of improvements in customer service internally. That sparked a search for something similar to support NIST’s external customers and ultimately, a modern enterprise CRM and case management platform, according to Brown. NIST decided in late 2015 to begin work with Salesforce’s Service Cloud platform.

One factor that contributed to that decision, beyond the continuous updating software-as-a-service can offer, was its availability within the government’s FedRAMP-approved cloud environment, meaning it has to keep meeting the government’s detailed security requirements.

“Security and privacy are a big deal for us. We have an extensive process that we take to make sure we are guarding the data in our systems as well as we possibly can,” Brown noted.

Once the CRM system was deployed and ready for testing, the operations and IT team chose a low-pressure rollout, letting NIST’s products and service team leaders experiment with it.

“That was an important decision,” said Brown. “We knew the system itself was a great tool to use. But it was something we wanted people to use NIST-wide, so it was important to give people an opportunity to try it out. Like every new tool, it’s not about the technology, but the people and the approaches they use that really make the difference.”

Having a robust case management component also provides an important dimension of accountability, Brown said.

“It’s not just a way to gather data. You have a way to follow through on promises made,” she said. “And that’s a big deal. When you’re a private company, that’s really critical because you have a bottom line to meet. When you’re in federal government, that’s really critical because that’s your constituency — that has everything to do with our mission.”

Expanding e-commerce front-end

After getting the CRM system in place on the backend, NIST then began to tackle the work of improving the e-commerce interface experience for customers on the front end.

“There were early versions of e-commerce spread all over the place on our internal legacy systems, but there wasn’t a way for customers to go online and request quotes and purchase products directly and in a unified way,” Brown explained.

NIST’s development team opted to build on Salesforce’s B2B Commerce platform, deploying a foundational e-commerce platform in the spring of 2019 that supports NIST’s calibration services. The platform captures online orders for calibrations and funnels them into an order management process. If customers have questions, they’re able to initiate a request via email that becomes a trackable case and can be associated with every potential order, according to Brown.

Within a matter of months since then, NIST had digitally processed about $5 million in orders from about 900 different customer accounts, giving NIST officials confidence they were headed in the right direction.

“One of the factors that has everything to do with our success and, or, failure — and I mean both of those words intentionally— is having the right team, selecting the right tool, and the vendor you choose to work with who will do your development and manage the project,” Brown said.

Based on the initial positive reviews from customers, NIST is currently seeking information on a new round of development projects to expand on the capabilities offered through the e-commerce platform.

Next up on NIST’s development list are plans to make the agency’s standard reference materials and data references also available online, as well as training resources, according to Brown.

Longer-term, NIST has set its priorities on expanding e-commerce functionality for all of its products and services across the agency and creating a simpler, more unified experience for its constituents, said Brown.

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But to anyone who’s not a full-time research expert seeking NSF funding, the platform hardly lived up to its name. For entrepreneurs and startups in particular — who are typically unfamiliar with the process of applying for government grants and often the most in need of them — it was cumbersome and difficult to navigate, according to Ben Schrag, NSF program director of Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer.

“They are not experts. They’re almost by definition new to the process of government funding,” Schrag said. “And for entrepreneurs, generally grant-writing is not a standard skill set for them. Their skill set is pitching investors and things like that. So we don’t necessarily even want them to become experts, because that’s a lot of time that they could be spending building their companies.”

But it’s those innovative, bootstrapped entrepreneurs and small businesses that NSF aspires to reach through the program, which is also known as America’s Seed Fund,  because they tend to overperform in terms of return on investment and driving meaningful, transformative outcomes.

It was clear NSF had to create a more modern front-end process to better connect with this community. To do so, the foundation decided, it needed to help entrepreneurs get a quick “yes” or “no” before requiring them to enter the official grants submittal portal.

That’s where the idea for Project Pitch came from: A quick submission portal that sits in front of FastLane catered to entrepreneurs and startups, who, if they are a good fit, get an official invitation from NSF to submit a full proposal and help along the way.

Project Pitch allows NSF to “help them through it,” said Kelly Monterroso, a communications specialist at NSF. “So we know that if we invite them to submit a proposal, because they’ve gone through the project pitch process, we know who they are, we can hold webinars just for them, we can just really help them through their registration, all the paperwork that they need to submit. So it’s a way that we can help them through our process.”

The need for startup speed

Schrag himself spent the first part of his career at a startup. Before joining NSF, he became quite familiar with FastLane in search of funding. During that period, he learned just how impenetrable, in fact, the FastLane process can be.

Because NSF uses the scientific peer review process to review proposals, there’s “a lot of technical detail in the documents, and then the [back-end, review] process happens and there’s not a lot of feedback. You would go through Fastlane,  you submit a proposal, and then you wouldn’t hear anything for months, because you would just be waiting for the process to happen,” he said.

But that doesn’t reflect how the entrepreneurial community works. For startups, speed is the name of the game.

In comparison, the Project Pitch gives startups a response in less than three weeks.

Monterroso said Schrag and NSF’s small business program directors recognized this incongruity given their own experiences. “They are former entrepreneurs, they’ve started companies, they know what it’s like to need money to survive. And having lived that experience, they knew the need for speed and having a really quick ability to get back to a startup… They recognize that startups will often fail if they don’t get funding right away.”

On top of that, Schrag saw the need to treat grant applicants as customers and give them the best experience possible. “We want the best entrepreneurs to apply.”

The move to a modernized CRM

That prompted NSF staff to investigate what other government agencies were using and talk to their advisory committee about different products.  At the end that review, the decision was made to test a customer relationship management platform offered by Salesforce, already in use elsewhere in small business innovation research programs across government.

“What we really wanted was out-of-the-box software that we could just pretty easily turn on,” Monterroso said.

Salesforce’s Service Cloud Lightning Edition, a software-as-a-service platform that allowed the agency to design what it needed for entrepreneurs to submit a Project Pitch, offered the best path forward, according to Schrag. NSF also opted to pair the CRM platform with a cloud-based, email marketing tool called Pardot, also from Salesforce, to better engage applicants and keep track of those interactions.

“The lack of upfront cost is really important because this is a pilot. It’s still a pilot, honestly. We’re still changing things,” he said. But the ability to start small and move quickly was just as important.

“Again, we were all entrepreneurs in our former lives and the kind of calling card of current startups is the minimum viable product. So we have some questions we want to answer. Let’s get to those answers as quickly as possible. And we can always iterate and change and develop things later,” Schrag said.

“The idea was, what’s the smallest amount of money and time we can spend to just test whether this thing, this process works, whether the entrepreneurial community likes it, whether the program directors find it useful? And then you go from there.”

Once the system was set up, all NSF had to do was add the application to its website as a form and create new content and webpages around the process, Monterroso said. Training was fairly minimal and all-in-all, the process wasn’t major undertaking, she said.

But the results were meaningful, Schrag said. “We had almost universally positive feedback from the community, which we weren’t sure we would get. But again, the whole idea of having this on-ramp seems to be very appealing.”

It even paid added dividends when the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly started dominating everyone’s attention.

Schrag said NSF was able to use the platform to call for proposals from “small businesses who think they have innovative technology that can potentially and relatively rapidly impact the current situation.”

On the backend, NSF simply created a tag in the system that allows program directors to quickly find COVID-related research applications as soon as they’re submitted.

“And this ability to have them submit a small amount of information with a fast turn through,” Schrag said, has helped put the promise of fast back into FastLane. “The case management platform is really what makes it go.”

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Angerman will join Slalom as a client service partner Feb. 10, helping agencies migrate legacy apps to the cloud through key partnerships with Microsoft, Tableau, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Google. Slalom already has customers in the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Smithsonian, but Angerman will work to expand that portfolio.

Angerman told FedScoop she sees the new role as an opportunity to continue the work she’s done with the federal government but from the perch of private industry.

“I’m really excited to join Slalom,” she said. “This is a modern firm that has proven success with clients in technology, strategy and business transformation. Slalom has created successful frameworks rooted in data, customer engagement and digital experience that can help agencies with the hard problems they face today.”

In her role, she said she’s looking forward to “helping shape the federal market strategy at Slalom and building trusted relationships with agency partners.”

Angerman was most drawn to the company for its guiding principle of “placing the focus on people, above all else.”

“Change is hard, and the fact that Slalom prides itself on prioritizing the impact of change on people, both with clients and their own employees, is key to bringing the right solutions to problems,” she said.

Angerman left government in November after 15 years in a variety of roles, most recently principal deputy associate administrator of the General Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy. She also led GSA’s Shared Solutions and Performance Improvement Office, which is tasked with leading governmentwide adoption of shared services.

“Slalom is honored to have Beth chose Slalom as her next home.  Her collaborative approach and passion to bring change to government, as well as her commitment to modernization, will accelerate our vision and ability to have a positive impact on our partnership with the Federal Government, said Luanne Pavco, general manager of Slalom.

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Read the full report.

Salesforce commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact study to examine the potential ROI government organizations may realize by deploying the Salesforce case management solution. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed six government customers from national, state and local government with years of experience using Salesforce case management solutions.

Find out more.

Learn more about Salesforce and trailblazers in government.

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Ramani Vaidyanathan, SVP, Customer Experience, Salesforce

Currently, grants management processes involve high administrative burden throughout the lifecycle. Grantees today spend way too much time in the application process and, often, require technical assistance both during the application process and reporting their performance when needed.

And grantors engage in complex tasks to perform eligibility checks followed by award/post-award management tasks, many of which require integration to legacy systems and data.

The current maze of policies, procedures, systems and teams involved in grants management  drives the importance of delivering a transformed customer experience to those in the grants community. Hence a customer-centric approach to grants management requires collaboration and information-sharing amongst grantors and grantees to drive efficiency and more impactful outcomes.

A recent Forrester study cites savings of about $36M in taxpayer dollars that resulted from agencies’ ability to consolidate efforts and scale, using insights and improved collaboration, across a variety of use cases. Further, the same report highlighted an enterprise collaboration service manager from a national defense department that spoke to the fact that streamlined workflows enabled to increase the volume of casework they could take on thus significantly increasing program impact. 

Here are a few ways to align grantors and grantees for an enriching customer experience.

Establish communities

Seamless engagement means grantor staff and all types of grant recipients, from large organizations to individual citizens, access the right set of information and functions on the channels they prefer. Internal and external communities may be separately established to serve the program constituents. While internal community allows the grantor staff to see a consistent and holistic view of all interactions, service items, etc., the external applicant and recipient community would benefit from collaboration and exchanging best practices on how to fill out the grants application package or to submit performance reports. In a nutshell, establishing a grants community would drive more informed collaboration, expedite the submission application process, help organizations steer towards standardization of performance reports and ultimately elevate the customer experience.

Dissolve system latencies

Many grants processes take months, from designing and announcing grants to monitoring awarded contracts. Most current grants management lifecycle involve disparate systems for pre and post-award activities, ranging from planning grants budgets to measuring performance reporting. Wouldn’t gaining real-time visibility to grants data across the lifecycle increase grantor productivity by empowering them to make quick, data-driven decisions and help execute the program more effectively? That’s where API-led connectivity plays a key role in integrating legacy systems and CRM data; bridging gaps between activities and updates with real-time information, thus eliminating system latencies. 

Automate processes

On top of the ability to quickly develop new apps, the right cloud platform allows you to streamline and automate processes using out-of-the-box SaaS solutions. Grants staff may focus on higher value tasks and priorities by allowing the platform to:

• minimize manual time being spent to populate and validate forms
• expedite funding commitments
• streamline and automate necessary communications
• calculate and visualize costs and benefits

These practices are proven to lower administrative costs that, in turn, can help grantors translate taxpayer dollars into mission impact.

Finetune performance

Everyone involved in grants management wants to accomplish the mission goals set within the contract but mapping program outcomes back to funding allocations often proves difficult. Both primary and secondary recipients tend to lack clarity on performance measures and would benefit from a reporting template. Communication and data are key. With the advent of advanced analytics and technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing, grantors can now identify the most optimal KPIs culled from their best performing programs to measure against upcoming grant programs and further communicate them to the applicant community during the solicitation phase. Doing so early would help all constituents to anticipate, adjust, granularize and digitize program outcome metrics to measure milestones equitably and effectively. 

Conclusion

To comply with the CAP (cross-agency priority) GOAL #82 – “Results Oriented Accountability for Grants Management” – agencies must consider how best to leverage advanced technology platforms. Running the business functions of the grants management lifecycle on a cloud platform will help agencies to deliver program results with better transparency, accountability, effectiveness and, most importantly, drive better customer experiences. Choosing the right platform will:

• help align complex processes, systems, and data 
• bring automation and efficiencies to grants execution 
• ensure taxpayers’ money is being well spent and program outcomes are achieved as planned

Learn more about Salesforce and trailblazers in government.

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Read the full report.

Over the last couple years, more and more federal agencies have openly acknowledged their desire to transform and improve overall customer engagement and associated outcomes. Becoming more engaging requires a focus on the intersection between the provider of service and the end user. This intersection is what supports the overall customer experience.

The time is now to lower the barrier of entry for government agencies to deliver exceptional experiences. Although agencies understand the importance of CX, many still struggle with how to integrate it within and across programs. Utilizing a cloud platform that accounts for the many ways in which stakeholders interact with your agency is a sure way to deliver vital services.

Read the stories.

Learn more about Salesforce and trailblazers in government.

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Take the tour.

Learn more about Salesforce and trailblazers in government.

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