Salesforce has agreed to acquire enterprise analytics startup BeyondCore, according to a blog post from BeyondCore CEO Arijit Sengupta.

eBay announced it has agreed to acquire SalesPredict, an Israel-based predictive analytics company. SalesPredict is eBay’s latest acquisition intended to support its artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Upon the close of the transaction, some of SalesPredict’s employees will join eBay’s structured data organization, working from eBay’s Israeli Development Center in Netanya. SalesPredict Co-Founder and CEO Yaron Zakai-Or will serve as a Director of Product Management, Technology; and SalesPredict Co-Founder and CTO Kira Radinsky will become Director of Data Science & Chief Scientist, eBay Israel. Zakai-Or and eBay’s Abby Smith, Senior Director, Corporate Communications, would not comment on staffing levels at SalesPredict post-acquisition.

“The vision for SalesPredict is to mostly use it internally at eBay to improve the buyers’ and sellers’ experiences,” Zakai-Or said. He added that SalesPredict will not be sold “to new customers, but we’re committed to the success of our current customer base.”  

According to Smith, “Ebay has a major effort underway to better understand our inventory [and] our structured data process. This acquisition will help us have greater insights into the inventory. It will help us understand which inventory and product attributes we should emphasize,” she said.

Salesforce has acquired MetaMind, a startup company that focuses on using natural language and image recognition technology in artificial intelligence. The announcement was made in a blog post written by MetaMind CEO Richard Socher, but financial details were not disclosed. MetaMind was launched in 2014 with $8 million in funding from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm. 

San Francisco-based start-up YesPath, a company founded by two ex-Salesforce execs, announced its first product: an account-based marketing (ABM) tool powered by artificial intelligence.

Conversica is an artificial intelligence (AI) solution designed to help marketing, inside sales and sales organizations engage prospects with the highest propensity to buy.

Features/Functions

The solution’s artificial intelligence is positioned to initiate email conversations and analyze replies by automatically extracting information and interpreting the lead’s intention and sentiment.

Conversica is designed to optimize email marketing, enhance lead management and prevent lost leads to maximize sales and revenue.

Compatibility

Conversica is compatible with Salesforce, Eloqua and Marketo.

Pricing

Click here to request a quote.

Competitive Positioning

The solution intends to identify high-value prospects among thousands of inbound leads. Using text analysis, Conversica can nurture leads throughout the buyer's journey with minimal human intervention.

While the solution can continuously engage prospects, the AI technology can also measure intention and sentiment to identify leads that are uninterested and remove them from further campaigns.

Contact Information

Conversica
950 Tower Lane, 12th Floor
Foster City, California 94404
888-778-1004
info@conversica.com

Anyone who has chatted with me in recent months knows that I’ve added the impending domination of humans by intelligent machines to my usual list of obsessions. This most definitely applies to marketing, where I found many artificial intelligence-based solutions once I began looking for them.

My thesis was that AI-based systems already exist for most tasks that marketers perform, but are not yet connected into a single robo-marketer that (or is it who?) could do the job from start to finish. To test this, I listed the tasks that go into building a marketing program and matched these against my list of AI-based products.

Quite to my surprise, the machines haven’t risen so far after all. Of the three broad tasks I defined — planning, content creation, and execution — only content creation is served by what I consider to be strong AI solutions. (The term “strong AI” is used by AI experts to mean systems match or exceed human intelligence. I’m using it in that rough sense, although with the more specific meaning of “systems that perform tasks that otherwise require human marketers.”)

Some AI options are available for execution, but most are conventional predictive modeling products that I don’t count as strong AI because they still require humans to deploy their results. Marketing planning, which includes the all-important task of campaign design, is almost wholly untouched by AI.

Artificial intelligence is an important topic in our general society and seems to attracting increased attention, even though Google Trends suggests otherwise. Marketers in particular are thinking about it as they adjust to rapidly changing technologies that increasingly rely on predictive analytics and other automation for effective management.

Given the hype that accompanies pretty much every new technical development, it’s helpful to see that AI-based marketing isn’t as far along as one might expect. But don't take that as a reason to relax: While it’s not time to panic, it’s definitely time to prepare. AI marketing systems already present some significant opportunities and their scope can only grow — perhaps exponentially as key techniques become more widely distributed. Now is the time to start building a realistic understanding of how these systems work, what they can and can’t do, and how they’ll fit into your future.

David Raab is Principal of Raab Associates, a consultancy that helps marketers select and deploy marketing automation systems. Typical projects include needs definition, vendor selection, and performance measurement. The firm also offers industry vendors assistance in understanding customer needs and establishing thought leadership through white papers, surveys and presentations.

For more specifics on the artificial intelligence solutions available for marketing tasks such as planning, content creation and execution, see a full version of this post on Raab's Customer Experience Matrix blog.