AppExchange, as it’s known, features more than 3,000 products, some from companies that have built billion-dollar businesses on top of Salesforce.
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The company is announcing a layer of artificial intelligence (AI) that is branded with the name of the world’s most famous smart person, in an effort to embed a new level of smartness into all of the company’s clouds – Sales, Marketing, Internet of Things, Community, Service, Commerce, and Analytics.
Salesforce will be offering the new AI capabilities so that customers may make new AI-powered apps using clicks or code, making existing apps smarter or just allowing smarter and personalised customer experiences – without the huge time or resource burdens organisations would face if they tried to do it on their own. The CRM giant on Sunday announced Einstein, a set of artificial intelligence capabilities it says will help users of its platform serve their customers better.
Of course, Salesforce has yet to prove that it does possess the expertise needed to apply AI and deep learning technologies to business processes successfully. Facebook’s deep learning facial recognition algorithm can instantly identify a person with almost 98 per cent accuracy.
The addition, named Einstein, is a suite of online AI solutions built to support salespeople by automating tasks, predicting behaviours and highlighting relevant information.
Rather than mimicking Oracle and trying to do everything, Salesforce has enabled scores of niche software developers to plug their apps into the platform and get instant access to many thousands of prospective customers.
Salesforce will be rolling out training for Einstein features, but most customers will be able to benefit straight away simply by using it. Ball said: “In Sales Cloud a customer will instantly have the ability to focus their sales with opportunity insights and lead scores”.
The company says that specialised predictive models require massive investment in data science, infrastructure and DevOps to keep machine learning processes running, as well as complex integrations, which is something most organisations also can not afford to do.
Salesforce is being coy in terms of pricing, saying that some capabilities will come with existing cloud licenses and editions, and some coming at a premium.
John Ball, senior vice president and general manager of Einstein, said the company won’t have a separate AI product.
Some of the capabilities Salesforce said that Einstein can deliver include predicting potential leads for sales, pre-populating fields and routing cases to the relevant agent without human interaction. With Recommended Responses service agents will be pushed the best responses, and Predictive Close Times will predict the time needed to resolve an issue, helping improve agent productivity. Those who opt to give more data to Einstein and use the tools for a longer period would then get better results.
Commerce Cloud Einstein includes Amazon-style product recommendations, predictive sort and commerce insights.
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New Einstein features will start arriving from next month. It will even help predict the best times to deliver messages based on customers’ past behaviors. Socher heads up the new Salesforce Research group – made up of a team of researchers and data scientists – which is focused on “delivering cutting-edge, breakthrough AI research across deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision to Salesforce’s product and engineering teams”.
