IBM and Salesforce have announced a partnership that defines how Salesforce’s Einstein, the CRM specialist’s inchoate Intelligent Assistant, will work with IBM’s Watson. The two are now best of friends, dedicated to rapid, well-informed responses to questions from its end-users, i.e. sales, marketing and customer care professionals. According to the terms of the partnership, the two companies will initially combine resources along four categories:

• Technology – whereby IBM provides Salesforce with access to the entire Watson capability through APIs that serve up results based on its vast grasp of unstructured, “dark” data and industry expertise. In a press release, the two companies cite the ability to combine local shopping patterns, weather and retail industry data from Watson with “customer-specific data and preferences” from Einstein. The result will be “highly personalized and localized email campaigns for shoppers.” To this, Opus Research would add its wishes that it quickly morph to conversational and engaging interchanges with customers, in real-time, that better resemble assistance, rather than targeting.
• Weather Insights – Real-time access to the network of sensors that collect weather data from IBM through something called the “Lightening Connector” gives Salesforce the ability to offer rich, visual representation of natural occurrences that have dramatic impact on results for such industries as insurance, travel and transportation and financial services.
• Application Integration – Customers of Salesforce will be able to bring together data from in-house systems and “the Cloud” within the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform. A showcase use case for this capability exists for financial advisors who can take public macroeconomic data into account as they review a client’s portfolio and risk profile in order to promote smarter decisions.
• Dedicated Expertise – IBM’s BlueWolf has formed a new professional services practice specifically to help clients rapidly deploy services that combine IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities. BlueWolf has already taken responsibility for over 15 years of Salesforce implementations. It is expected to develop several “industry-specific accelerators” to speed up adoption of cognitive applications.

Oh yeah, although few details have been made public about anticipated increases and distribution of revenues, it was announced that “as part of the partnership, IBM will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to transform its global product support services and gain a single, unified view of every IBM customer.” If this massive transformation is accomplished successfully in short order, we can safely say that the two companies have dramatically buried the lede in the story of one of the greatest partnerships in cloud and premises-based computing.

(photo credit: Expovista TV)

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: IBM Watson, Intelligent Assistance, Salesforce, conversational commerce