Salesforce.com Announces Artificial Intelligence Tools

Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Einstein, a release that brings artificial intelligence to its CRM offering, enhancing areas such as sales, marketing, and commerce and providing more predictive and personalized customer experiences. Furthermore, the platform will enable users to build AI-powered apps that adapt with new interactions, and artificial intelligence will be incorporated into fields, objects, and workflows.

Einstein’s capabilities will be incorporated into every Salesforce Cloud, with the Sales Cloud in particular seeing a number of new features, including predictive lead scoring capabilities, to assist sales reps in closing the best leads; opportunity insights, to alert reps as to whether a deal is trending up or down; and automated activity capture, which uses email and calendar events to enhance predictions.

The Service Cloud's new features include the recommended case classification feature, which automatically populates key case fields, and predictively routs cases to the right agents, with the goal of quickly resolving customer issues; the recommended response feature, which pushes the best responses to service agents; and the predictive close times tool, which estimates the time required to resolve an issue.

The Marketing Cloud will now be outfitted with predictive scoring, to measure each customer’s likelihood of engaging with an email; predictive audiences, which constructs custom audience segments based on predicted behaviors; and automated send-time optimization, which uses past customer behavior to determine the optimal time to deliver messages.

The Commerce Cloud now features personalized product recommendations; a predictive sort capability, which delivers personalized sort and search results based on likelihood of engagement; and the commerce insights tool, which utilizes product purchase correlations to assist retailers in merchandising and store planning.

The Community Clouds AI enhancements include a recommended experts, articles, and topics section; an automated service escalation feature, which automatically creates a case in Service Cloud if a customer post does not receive a timely response; and a newsfeed insights feature that emphasize the most relevant and popular content in every feed.

The Analytics Cloud will now feature predictive wave apps, which aim to identify future patterns for business processes; smart data discovery, which uncovers and explains insights from large numbers of data combinations; and automated analytics and storytelling, which prioritize upcoming insights that users should know.

Predictive device scoring is one of the key features of IoT Cloud Einstein, with scores assigned to streaming data from connected IoT devices. The platform will also recommend next best actions to users based on these scores, and automated IoT rules optimization actively updates the rules governing IoT data.   

"AI is going to transform every industry, unleash new levels of productivity, augment our personal and professional lives, and pose existential questions about the age-old relationship between man and machine. We believe there is huge demand for AI-powered systems that deliver greater intelligence as companies look to transform for the digital age," says Jim Sinai, vice president of marketing at Einstein, via email. "We are helping our customers connect with their customers in new ways, and AI is a big part of that strategy. What is most exciting for us is that the first people that will benefit from Einstein will be our customer's customers—and we think this will be a game changer for them."

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