Going so far as to gain rights to use the name and image of Albert Einstein from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Salesforce has taken huge steps to infuse its core, cloud-based CRM resources with an omnipresent Intelligent Assistant (IA). As described in this press release, Einstein starts with a Siri-like ability to recognize and react to spoken commands and queries in natural language. But that is a starting point or conversational front-end to the variety of flavors of Salesforce clouds. Behind the conversational user interface are resources spanning “advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery.”

Collectively the ubiquitous Einstein will be an intelligent assistant that provides a customized view of the world to each Salesforce customer or sales rep. The most relevant use cases include Sales Cloud Einstein, which uses predictive analytics of customer data and activity to score sales opportunities based on likelihood to buy. They call it “Predictive Lead Scoring” and Service Cloud Einstein, which puts artificial intelligence (AI) to use to accelerate the time it takes to resolve customer care issues, including Q&A and predictive assessment of the time to close a case.

Other flavors of Einstein address anticipated challenges associated with streamlining business processes, optimizing marketing efforts, scheduling meetings and managing development efforts. Einstein is the fruit of several investments and acquisitions carried out by Salesforce over the past 3-5 years. One can see how resources like ExactTarget influences marketing efforts; Tempo AI (which grew out of the same research initiative at SRI International that launched Siri) helps groups coordinate calendars, PredictionIO (acquired in Feb 2016) brought machine learning and MetaMind (acquired April 2016) brought with it both the core “AI for Everyone” approach and Richard Socher, MetaMind’s founder, an aquihire who now serves as Salesforce’s Chief Scientist.

To make sure that Einstein got maximum play in the Twittersphere and technology press, especially during Oracle’s massive customer conference OpenWorld, Marc Benioff dropped hints about Einstein at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference. Then, during Larry Ellison’s first keynote, the initial press release dropped. This was clearly the product of well-planned predictive analysis for maximum messaging impact. Einstein at work already.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: CRM, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Intelligent Assistance, Salesforce