Salesforce Transforms CRM with AI Technology
The global leader in CRM took the tech world by storm with its recent AI technology, Salesforce Einstein; it is Artificial Intelligence built right into the Salesforce platform, and it makes Salesforce the world’s smartest CRM. The birth of Salesforce Einstein is a concerted effort by the company to make life easier for customer service representatives and their managers, and in turn for all CRM users. John Ball, the General Manager of Einstein at Salesforce, says “What we’re really trying to do is transform the way people work by focusing on what matters and giving them time back.”
Einstein at a glance
Much like a data scientist, Salesforce Einstein helps companies discover insights and predict future behaviors and outcomes. It also helps them to recommend optimal next actions and automate tasks based on a company’s business processes. Einstein also benefits sales representatives by doing most of the work for them – sales representatives no longer need to spend time inputting data as Einstein will do it. With Einstein, “…you don’t have to prep data or manage models. Your CRM constantly grows smarter, making you more productive and your customers happier.” Salesforce’s Chief Scientist Richard Sochers says, “Einstein helps companies focus on what’s actually important and exciting instead of how to recover your email for the 50th time.”
Joint solutions with IBM
To help companies make smarter and faster decisions, in March of this year, Salesforce and IBM joined forces to integrate their AI platforms, Salesforce Einstein and IBM’s Watson. According to a press release, “The partnership will bring new insights from Watson directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, combining deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein’s with Watson’s structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services, and retail. Together Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over, and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.”
While actual products from the partnership will not be available until the second half of 2017, IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty commented that, “Within a few years, every major decision – personal or business – will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies.”
Another new product we can anticipate includes a new Lightning component on the Salesforce AppExchange that will provide weather insights. Marc Benioff, the Chairman of Salesforce, thinks that “the combination of Einstein and Watson will make businesses smarter” and Salesforce “customers more successful.”
The future of Salesforce
Salesforce is changing the CRM world with new Einstein technology. In its Spring 2017 release, it integrated Einstein across all its cloud services, including Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Analytics Cloud, and Community Cloud. With this new era of AI, some experts say that Einstein will begin to replace human workers in the future. Machine learning expert Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, said to Wall Street Journal, “Things may change in the future, but one rule of thumb today is that almost anything that a typical person can do with less than one second of mental though we can either now or in the very near future automate with AI.” He says that “there are a lot of jobs that can be accomplished by stringing together many one-second tasks.”
Salesforce’s move to incorporate AI into its platform will help the company continue to dominate the market and expand its business abroad.
