Salesforce is really laying on the jargon when it comes to Einstein, an artificial-intelligence addition to the CRM giant’s entire product line set to be announced Monday. “Einstein’s models will be powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery,” according to a Salesforce press release.
But AI is red-hot right now, and it must be said that Salesforce has paid dearly for the right to use such language. It has spent $650 million buying a dozen companies to acquire their staff and technology, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said last week.
The word “Einstein” will be appended to each of Salesforce’s eight product offerings. Details will be fully shared at the annual Dreamforce users’ conference Oct. 4-7 in San Francisco, but for now, here’s a partial list of what Salesforce says that will mean in practice.
- Analytics Cloud will uncover future patterns for every business process, find and explain data patters and automate creating charts and widgets.
- Commerce Cloud will use customer data to provide personalized product recommendations and will help retailers merchandise better.
- Service Cloud will populate key fields for each case based on history and trends.
- Community Cloud will suggest posts, articles and experts related to members’ interests will automatically create a case in Service Cloud if posts don’t get a timely response.
- IoT Cloud will predict the need to take action in connected devices and recommend the “best next action” for streaming IoT-device data.
- Marketing Cloud will score every customer’s likelihood to respond to an email or to make a web purchase.
- Sales Cloud will analyze all data related to leads and generate predictive scores for each lead.
Benioff has stressed that the new capabilities will be usable both by developers and by the myriad of point-and-click non-developers Salesforce has helped emerge as a major force supporting and promoting its products.
Richard Socher, recently aqui-hired from MetaMind and now Salesforce’s chief scientist, will lead a newly created research group to further explore AI, the company said.
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