Unlocking Operational Intelligence

At Salesforce, engineers built Engineering360 to manage operations at scale by integrating data from dozens of siloed systems. With 90 billion records integrated in real-time, they had a unified view but still took days to answer key questions.

The team drew an analogy with the invention of radar, which made echoes legible, turning something already present into a picture a person could act on. Similarly, most enterprises are 'living in the moment right before radar,' saturated with signal but lacking the layer that makes it legible.

They call this operational intelligence, which rests on two capabilities: proactive vigilance and reasoning over insight. The first watches continuously at machine scale, surfacing only what requires human decision-making. The second lets leaders have a genuine conversation about data, questioning and challenging insights like they would with a trusted analyst.