Artificial Intelligence Coming to Salesforce

Salesforce is bringing artificial intelligence to its cloud platform to help customers interpret a wide array of data.

The customer relationship management provider on Sunday unveiled Salesforce Einstein, AI capabilities that include predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery.

Einstein General Manger John Ball said the proliferation of connected devices and people has led to an explosion of data, which most businesses have not yet been able to synthesize using AI.

“The problem is that for businesses, AI is too complex. AI is just out of reach for the vast majority of companies, and it’s because it’s really hard,” he said.

But Salesforce executives say each one of the company’s end users will be able to use and customize Einstein to fit their business objectives.

“A couple years ago, we embarked on a journey … to democratize AI just like we democratized CRM,” Ball said.{ad}

Ball said Einstein works with four different types of data: CRM, communication-related, interaction and social.

The company announced eight different functions for the AI. Sales Cloud Einstein will allow users to capture data to analyze leads, prospect and customers interactions, and Service Cloud Einstein and will give recommendations on how to respond and service customers and predict the time it takes to resolve a particular issue. The other functions include marketing, commerce, community, analytics, IoT and app-building.

Some of new Einstein features will cost an additional charge, while other features will come alongside existing licenses.

Salesforce also announced a new group of data scientists and researchers that will work to deliver new AI capabilities. Richard Socher, Salesforce’s chief scientist, will lead the group.

“With Salesforce Einstein, we are delivering the world’s smartest CRM,” CEO Marc Benioff said. “Einstein is now every customer’s data scientist, making it easy for everyone to take advantage of best-in-class AI capabilities in the context of their business.”