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IBM and Salesforce Will Apply Artificial Intelligence to CRM

“Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies.”

Written By

Sue Walsh

Mar 8, 2017

IBM and Salesforce have announced a new partnership that will see the two companies working together to develop new AI applications for customer engagement and decision making.

The partnership will bring together IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein to enable a new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, marketing, commerce service and more. IBM announced it is also investing in a new practice to assist clients in rapidly deploying the new joint Watson and Salesforce capabilities.

“Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies,” said Ginni Rometty, chairman, president and chief executive officer, IBM. “This year we expect Watson will touch one billion people—through everything from oncology and retail to tax preparation and cars. Now, with today’s announcement, the power of Watson will serve the millions of Salesforce and Einstein customers and developers to provide an unprecedented understanding of customers.”

The partnership will initially deliver IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein integration to enable predictive insights from unstructured data inside and outside the business, along with predictive insights from Salesforces’ customer data. For example, IBM said, combining local weather and shopping habits from Watson with customer specific shopping data from Einstein will enable companies to create highly personalized email campaigns.

The partnership will also bring IBM’s The Weather Company and its insights to Salesforce through a new Lightning component on the Salesforce AppExchange. IBM’s Application Integration Suite will also come to Salesforce customers, and they will also deploy Salesforce Sevice Cloud across the company.

The Watson/Einstein integration and IBM Weather Lightning Component are expected to be available in the second half of 2017. Pricing will be announced at that time. IBM Application Integration Suite will be available by the end of March 2017.