If you're like me, you're probably drowning in all the announcements from Dreamforce 2024 about generative AI (genAI) features under the Einstein and Agentforce branding. And you're probably asking yourself, as I am:
"How much is this stuff going to cost?"
These genAI features are going to be far from free. You're going to need the right kind of licensing and you're going to consume credits.
Licensing
The picture on licensing cost is starting to come into focus. Any user that is going to actually use genAI will need to have a proper license. Using genAI means sending a prompt to a generative pretrained transformer (GPT) and getting back results in the form of text, created or rewritten. Users that aren't the requester or the direct recipient of the AI answer should not need an AI license.
Licensing your users starts with two options:
Einstein 1 Edition
This is a rebranding of Unlimited Edition, with Einstein for Sales/Service bundled (see below), Data Cloud (presumably with more credits than the free allocation), and some other things. (You might recall how I feel about UE.)
With nonprofit discount these licenses are $3,600/user/year (down from list price of $6,000). So to summarize, my understanding is that if you're on Einstein 1 Edition then you pay for genAI features for all users, whether they send prompts to EinsteinGPT or not.
Einstein for Sales (or Einstein for Service)
This is an add-on license (probably a Feature License) that can be assigned to a user to enable genAI tools. It's my understanding that you can buy these add-ons only for the users that need them, which will save a lot of money. You're not going to need GPT for every person in your org, since some people will not send prompts. Your AE will probably imply that you should get one for everyone, but you should not. (Spoiler Alert: AEs are Salespeople.)
The Einstein for Sales/Service add-on is $900/user/year at list price. As of this writing, I have not yet seen a nonprofit discount price. Since Einstein 1 Edition for nonprofits, above, comes to 40% off list price, I expect the nonprofit discount for Einstein for Sales/Service will probably be similar (so perhaps $540/year).
[PS - I don't think there's really a huge distinction between the Sales or Service versions, they're naming that's meant to parallel the licensing naming. (Don't buy both Sales and Service if you're a nonprofit!) ]
Even if you economize as much as possible, it's looking like a minimum of more than $500/year to get AI features, for just a single user. Valid testing, let alone usage, is going to require at least the admin and one business user. That could become a significant additional annual cost to your "free" nonprofit software.
By the way, with all the announcements leading up to and during Dreamforce, I'm writing this without a clear understanding of whether "Agentforce" replaces the "Einstein for" branding or if Agentforce represents something entirely new.
GenAI Credits
Once you've got the licensing in place, you're going to consume "credits." This is where I really can't help much with specifics. I'm not sure anyone can yet.
First of all, I've asked around and have yet to understand which actions will actually consume a credit, or whether certain actions consume multiple credits at a time. If you read carefully in the nonprofit pricing guide PDF, you might have noticed that Nonprofit Cloud Einstein 1 Sales entitles you to "All features in Unlimited Edition plus Einstein for Sales (25K AI requests per user per month)..." I think that implies that 25K requests per month is also the allocation you'd get if you bought Einstein for Sales on its own. (But don't quote me on this.)
Twenty five thousand AI requests per person per month sounds like it could be quite a lot. But is it?
If the idea is to individually personalize fundraising emails to your entire list, that could soak them up pretty quickly if your list is large. It seems like it should cost a minimum of one credit per person on the list, since you would be asking EinsteinGPT to personalize to that potential donor. But at least you know exactly how many people are on your email list and how many email appeals you want to send.
The other commonly-discussed use for GPT is for something like a customer service chatbot. A university might want to have a registrar's chatbot that can answer students' questions about course add/drop, or a comptroller's chatbot to help them make sure their student account is paid. Estimating credits for those use cases seems a lot less straightforward to me. I would assume a credit is consumed with each response in the chat. (Surely it's not just one credit per conversation.) Deploy that chatbot where a lot of people might use it (kinda' the point!) and you could start soaking up credits fast.
We got at least one pricing clue in a September 12 press release from Salesforce. It's a rather long read for a press release, but at the very bottom you find, "Agentforce pricing starts at $2 per conversation; standard volume discounts apply." In some ways that generates more questions than it answers. Are "conversations" the same as the "requests" I was quoting numbers for above? Do you have to buy some bundle of conversations up front, or is it entirely based on usage? Does building and testing in a sandbox come free or still cost per conversations? What, if any, licensing is required to access Agentforce for Sales and Service? How will you know if you're going to get a huge bill?
Plus doing a lot of this this might also require that you consume some (or many) Data Cloud credits at the same time...?
Data Cloud
Which reminds me: I've heard several references to possibly "requiring" Data Cloud in order to use Einstein genAI features. I have little to no understanding of what that actually means or whether you would need to have something beyond the free Data Cloud that every org is entitled to. I can see why this would be required if you wanted to combine your Salesforce data with data in other systems (email marketing, web click tracking) before you send it to EinsteinGPT. But I don't know if Data Cloud would somehow be required if you only want to use Salesforce data.
If you have to purchase Data Cloud beyond the free allocation, my understanding is that it starts at $100,000/year! (Plus the cost of implementing, of course, which you're surely going to need a large consultancy for.)
Nobody Knows 🤷🏻
Let me be fair to Salesforce here, though: I don't think they know how consumption-based pricing is going to work either. Their costs to provide these services to customers are consumption-based, because that's how cloud computing services are priced, whether genAI or elastic web storage. So they have to balance a massive uncertainty in how much their costs could balloon if people adopt these features. They're trying to offer the fancy new features that they think people want while figuring out the cost, pricing, and revenue models all at the same time. It certainly seems like the wave of the future for Salesforce costs will be more consumption-based and less fixed-price license based.
But the actual outlines of that pricing are still pretty hazy.