Einstein Search is RAD!

I’ve had Einstein Search in my backlog for MONTHS. I finally got the chance to set it up and play with it and OH MY GOSH its amazing. It took just a few minutes to set up (all it takes is a permission set) and then just a few more minutes to discover all the benefits we’re going to get from it. I walked my laptop around to no less than four people to show them how cool it was. I can’t wait to roll this out to our end users so they can all share the benefits of Einstein!

So… What’s Einstein Search?

Besides one of the coolest tools I’ve seen in a while, Einstein Search personalizes your search experience and serves up recommendations on the records that it thinks are most important to you. It uses machine learning (Einstein, duh) to refine the recommendations over time based on what you’re searching and viewing. It does some really cool things… so let’s dig in.

Previews and Links and Actions… oh my!

The biggest thing you get with Einstein Search is the record preview. Your search panel is divided into 2 sections. On the left are your search results divided into three sections: recommended conversational queries, recommended records, and recommended list views. Hover on any of those, and the right pane fills with an actual preview of what that is (with some object limitations). Example: I can hover on an Opportunity record and in the preview pane be able to see the first 10 fields from the record, all Quick Actions from my page layout, and all my Related List Quick Links. And its all clickable! So I could search for something, hover on it and then jump right into a related record or launch a Quick Action all from the search bar without ever even having to actually open the record. That’s DOPE. Can you imagine how many minutes of just mindless clicking we’ll be saving? And I love that the search also recommends List Views. This really saves time from having to click on a tab and then jump to the list view I want to see.

Did you say conversational queries?

I sure did. This feature is marked as Beta still, but is super neat and reminds me of the conversational capabilities within Einstein Analytics. If I type “my opportunities this month” or even something like “my team closed cases yesterday” and hit enter, my search results are going to be filtered by just that. And it shows you the query it pulled, for example opportunities where you are the owner with a last modified date of this month. Or cases owned by your case teams where closed equals true and a last modified date of yesterday. I’m not sure how crazy advanced you could get with that at this point, but think of all the simple reports that people pull every day to see these types of things. This will be such a huge time saver!!

I’m really interested in seeing what else they do with this particular feature in the future, and especially since there is a similar feature in Analytics – will they be tied together eventually? Could you talk to your Analytics data through the federated global search? Or be able to group results and aggregate them somehow? That would be crazy cool. I’ll definitely be watching this one!

Not so limiting limitations

Einstein Search isn’t GA yet and its new, so of course there are some limitations. Previews aren’t available for all objects yet. I don’t really mind that actually. And its only available in Lightning. I’m totally on board with this. I’m of the mindset lately where I don’t want to develop anything for Classic anymore, so why should Salesforce? The future is with Lightning and the more tools we can push to that user experience, the more people will want to adopt it. At least that’s my opinion :).

There are a couple more things about the product that are really neat but these are definitely my favorites. I’ll put together a walk-through video when I’m done with it, but I was just so excited about it that I WANT TO TELL EVERYONE!

Einstein y’all….!

**I should mention that this is still a Beta release and we got early access as part of a pilot program.