Salesforce and IBM Corp. announced a partnership to integrate IBM’s Watson‘s structured and unstructured data with Salesforce’s Einstein’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
Expected to be available in the second half of 2017, the partnership will bring new insights from Watson directly into the Salesforce platform with custom APIs, according to both companies.
Salesforce customers will be able to leverage Watson data, such as weather, healthcare, financial services, retail and additional information to make marketing and sales decisions, the companies said.
“Data is truly changing every profession in the world, and AI is the only way to turn this into actionable insights for better business decisions,” said Ginni Rometty, Chairwoman, President & CEO of IBM, (pictured above with Mark Benioff, Chairman & CEO of Salesforce) via a live webcast, detailing the announcements. “Working together, we’ll give customers the benefit of combining data from inside—and outside—their business to begin a cognitive era in the marketplace.”
IBM also announced that Bluewolf, a global business consulting firm the company acquired a year ago, has formed a new practice designed to help clients deploy combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities.
In addition to these announcements, Salesforce debuted the general availability of Einstein AI, enabling all customers to leverage AI throughout its marketing, sales, service and commerce clouds. Introduced in September at its Dreamforce conference for its core CRM cloud, Einstein incorporates AI capabilities into the company’s products. It has since incorporated Einstein into its marketing, services, community, analytics and commerce clouds.
For Salesforce Marketing Cloud, in particular, the company stated that Einstein Journey Insights can help marketers analyze hundreds of millions of data points to understand what events and sequences lead to buying decisions so they can optimize campaigns and journeys. The Einstein Segmentation tool can also help marketers uncover relatable prospects and target entirely new segments with personalized campaigns.
