IBM and Salesforce team up for AI solutions

IBM and Salesforce will be working together on artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. As part of the partnership announced yesterday (6 March), they will provide connectivity between IBM’s Watson AI platform and Salesforce’s Einstein, the AI that powers the Salesforce CRM.

“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.”

IBM explained how this might work in practice: “Integrating IBM Watson APIs into Salesforce will bring predictive insights from unstructured data, inside or outside an enterprise, together with predictive insights from customer data delivered by Salesforce Einstein to enable smarter, faster decisions across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.

“For example, by combining local shopping patterns, weather and retail industry data from Watson with customer-specific shopping data and preferences from Salesforce Einstein, a retailer will be able to automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers.”

And one assumes that the retailer could generated direct mail campaigns, as well as emails.

IBM said that the Watson and Salesforce Einstein integration is expected to be available in the second half of 2017.

IBM also announced that Bluewolf (a consultancy firm that belongs to IBM) has formed a new practice “to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities”.

To help get the ball rolling, the IBM Application Integration Suite for Salesforce is expected to be available by the end of this month (March 2017).