AI integrated into Salesforce platform

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is now embedded in the Salesforce Platform
• Salesforce Einstein delivers advanced AI capabilities into sales, service, marketing and more
• Salesforce Einstein will also enable everyone to build AI-powered apps—using clicks or code—that get smarter with every interaction
• New Salesforce Research group will accelerate AI innovation in the enterprise

Salesforce, the customer relationship management (CRM) company, has unveiled Salesforce Einstein, bringing the power of AI to deliver more predictive and personalised customer experiences. Salesforce Einstein embeds advanced AI capabilities in the Salesforce Platform—in fields, objects, workflows, components and more—so AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction can be built using clicks or code.

Source: Salesforce website.

“With Salesforce Einstein, we are delivering the world's smartest CRM," said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce. "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.”

Few companies have introduced such capabilities because of the challenges involved. Companies must bring together massive and diverse data sets, which often 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 DevOps support are required to maintain these models and keep all of these processes up and running. Finally, bringing results - the 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 innovations allow models to be automatically customised. These models learn, self-tune and get smarter with every interaction and datum. Einstein can automatically discover relevant insights, predict future behaviour, proactively recommend the best next action and automate tasks.

Salesforce Einstein has the added advantage of leveraging all the data in Salesforce: customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and e-commerce; social data streams such as tweets and images; and even Internet of Things (IoT) signals to train predictive models. Salesforce has millions of users inputting information every day, making it uniquely positioned to deliver the best models for sales, service, marketing, and commerce.

Sales Cloud Einstein will include Predictive Lead Scoring that enables sales reps to focus on the best leads, Opportunity Insights that alert reps when a deal is trending up or down, and Automated Activity Capture which seamlessly logs email and calendar activity with the right Salesforce record, and analyses them to deliver predictions.

Service Cloud Einstein will include Recommended Case Classification which will automatically prepopulate key case fields enabling predictive routing of cases to the right agent and enabling agents to resolve issues faster. Recommended Responses will push the most likely responses to service agents and Predictive Close Times will predict the time needed to resolve an issue.

Marketing Cloud Einstein now includes Predictive Scoring which will score every customer’s likelihood to engage with an email, Predictive Audiences which will build custom audience segments based on predicted behaviours and Automated Send-time Optimization which will predict the optimal time to deliver messages based on past customer behaviour.

Commerce Cloud Einstein includes Product Recommendations to personalise product recommendations to shoppers, Predictive Sort which will sort personalised search results based on likelihood to engage, and Commerce Insights that will help retailers understand product purchase correlation to power smarter merchandising and store planning.

Community Cloud Einstein now includes Recommended Experts, Articles and Topics to suggest posts, articles, experts and topic pages, Automated Service Escalation which automatically creates a case in Service Cloud if customer posts do not receive a timely response, and Newsfeed Insights which highlights the most relevant and popular content in every feed.

Analytics Cloud Einstein customers will be able to access Predictive Wave Apps to uncover future patterns for any business process, Smart Data Discovery which will help users find and explain insights from millions of data combinations in minutes, and Automated Analytics & Storytelling which will automate and prioritise the next insight users need to know.

IoT Cloud Einstein will include Predictive Device Scoring which will score data from connected IoT devices, Recommend Best Next Actions for service processes and marketing journeys, and Automated IoT Rules Optimization which will actively update the rules that govern how IoT data is managed.
 
For data scientists and developers, there are also Predictive Vision and Sentiment Services which will enable developers to train deep learning models to recognise and classify images and sentiment in text; and PredictionIO in Heroku Private Spaces, which will empower developers to build custom predictive models and put them into their apps.
 
A new Salesforce Research group brings together a team of researchers and data scientists under the leadership of Richard Socher, Chief Scientist at Salesforce and a well known data science researcher. Salesforce Research will be focused on delivering breakthrough AI research across deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision to Salesforce’s product and engineering teams.

"​Salesforce Einstein gives us a smart, personalized and predictive way to connect millions of sports fans to hundreds of thousands of their favorite team and player items across more than 300 offline and online stores that we operate across our platform," said Chris Orton, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer for Fanatics, the licensed sports merchandise provider. The Fanatics e-store ships to over 100 countries, and supports call centres incorporating 11 languages.

"The combination of AI and Salesforce CRM has been a game-changer, empowering our marketing organisation to intelligently engage with fans through timely campaigns and relevant recommendations that transform the customer experience."

Interested?
 
Pricing for each Einstein feature will be announced as it is made generally available. Some new Salesforce Einstein features will be available at an additional charge while others will be included as part of existing licenses and editions:

• ​Community Cloud Einstein's Automated Community Case Escalation and ​Recommended Experts, Files and Groups are generally available and included as part of the Community Cloud license.
• Analytics Cloud Einstein's Smart Data Discovery is generally available. Pricing ​is based on the volume of data and number of users.
• Commerce Cloud Einstein's Product Recommendations are generally available and included as part of the Commerce Cloud license.
• PredictionIO is an open source Machine Learning Server available for free through the​ Apache Software Foundation.

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