Salesforce, Snowflake, and More Share Data Secrets to Solve $1T AI Problem

In hopes of fixing what executives have called “AI’s biggest bottleneck”, Salesforce, Snowflake, Tableau, and more than a dozen other technology companies have developed a universal standard for how business data is defined and shared across platforms.

Dubbed the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), this initiative will bring together competitive parties to help them share data to iron out inconsistent data definitions across enterprise systems.

What Does This Initiative Really Fix?

The urgent emergence of agentic AI is putting more pressure on enterprises and businesses to organize their data and provide agents with clear business metrics that an agent can work with. 

VentureBeat uses the example of defining an “active customer” – whilst a sales platform may define this as someone who’s made a purchase in the last 90 days, a marketing team may classify this as someone who has engaged with any particular content in the last month. The probability that an agent would then return with unreliable responses based on this data is heightened significantly.

The time it takes for Data and AI teams to reconcile this data can cost the enterprise millions of dollars, and, right now, take up a lot of human resources to fix all the inaccurate data. 

This persistent universal problem is impacting all enterprises, which has encouraged the companies to come together to help the overall standard across the tech industry. 

Speaking to VentureBeat, Southard Jones, Tableau’s Chief Product Officer, said: “This initiative is transformative because it’s not about one company owning the standard – it’s about the industry coming together. The future of AI depends on trust – and trust starts with consistent, reliable data.”

OSI targets the semantic layer, which means the tool will focus on the business meaning of data rather than the technical properties. It will also include AI-specific features such as natural language synonyms and business terms. 

One of the biggest roadblocks to Agentforce adoption has been inconsistent data, so working towards this initiative gives Salesforce a seat at the table and the power to shape the standard for AI. 

For Agentforce specifically, having standardized data definitions will make AI agents smarter and more reliable. Instead of wasting time reconciling whether “customer” means one thing in Marketing Cloud and another in Sales Cloud, Agentforce can plug into a shared standard and deliver better, faster insights. This will go a long way in making Agentforce feel like the productivity tool it’s being defined as.

Final Thoughts

With these competitive parties now joining forces, it would be fair to assume the battle for enterprise supremacy would grow less intense – but it could prove to be quite the opposite. 

Executives have argued that this standardization of data will only elevate the competition, moving the fight from data definitions to a focus on user experience and AI capabilities.

This is a big area that Salesforce is continually looking to improve on, and mitigating these data issues will only accelerate what they’ll be able to do with AI going forward.

The post Salesforce, Snowflake, and More Share Data Secrets to Solve $1T AI Problem appeared first on Salesforce Ben.