Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff creates Artificial Intelligence for anyone
BY NADINE PELZER
Artificial Intelligence is creating new ways for people to engage with technology and with one another. Various forms of AI already power for many years some of the world’s most popular consumer experiences, such as Apple’s Siri or Facebooks deep learning facial recognition algorithm.
The US company Salesforce has also been one of the world’s most innovative enterprises for several years now. The fact that this has been the case year on year is above all down to co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff who is considered a pioneer in cloud computing. He established Salesforce in the late 1990s with the vision of creating a new kind of enterprise software company with cloud technology. Since then, he has developed the business from a revolutionary idea into a Fortune 500 company. Today, Salesforce is the largest CRM enterprise and one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Marc Benioff unveils a new product at his in-house Dreamforce Conference at least once a year, which brings thousands of interested individuals from all over the world to San Francisco. This is also the case with the latest innovation which has been given the impressive title of ‘Salesforce Einstein’. “With Salesforce Einstein, we are delivering the world’s smartest CRM,” says Benioff. And now, with Salesforce Einstein, any company will be able to deliver more predictive and personalised customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.
And this is how Einstein works in detail: AI capabilities will be embedded across every Salesforce Cloud. Einstein leverages all the data in Salesforce – customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and ecommerce; social data streams, such as tweets and images; and even IoT signals – to train predictive models. And because there are millions of users inputting information every day, it is uniquely positioned to deliver the best models for sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. It is a breakthrough innovation that embeds advanced AI capabilities in the Salesforce Platform – in fields, objects, workflows, components and more – , so everyone is able to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction, using clicks or code. “Einstein is now every customer’s data scientist, making it easy for everyone to take advantage of best-in-class AI capabilities in the context of their business,” says Benioff.
The technical expertise and infrastructure required to develop AI solutions are beyond the reach of most companies. They must bring together massive and diverse data sets, which requires significant engineering resources to manage complex data integration processes. Specialised predictive models must then be built to extract value from the data and continuously learn from it, requiring extensive data science expertise. And infrastructure and development support are required to maintain these models and keep all of these processes up and running. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bringing results, insights and recommendations from the models to users within the context of their business requires complex integrations.
Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein’s breakthrough innovations allow models to be automatically customised for every single customer. These models learn, self-tune and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data. Einstein will automatically discover relevant insights, predict future behaviour, proactively recommend best next actions and even automate tasks. Now, every Salesforce user will be able to leverage AI capabilities to deliver more personalised and predictive customer experiences.
This article was published in The Produktkulturmagazin, issue Q4 2016. Picture credit © Salesforce
