Salesforce Unveils “Einstein,” Giving Users and Developers Access to Artificial Intelligence

September 26, 2016

Ahead of Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled Einstein, bringing the power of artificial intelligence to every user.

With Einstein, Salesforce says any company will be able to deliver predictive and personalized customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. Einstein is a “breakthrough innovation” that embeds advanced AI capabilities in the Salesforce Platform—in fields, objects, workflows, components and more—so everyone will be able to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction, using clicks or code.

“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.”

Various forms of AI already power some of the world’s most popular consumer experiences. Apple’s Siri leverages natural language processing to recognize voice commands. Facebook’s deep learning facial recognition algorithm can instantly identify a person with nearly 98 percent accuracy. And Amazon, Netflix and Spotify all utilize machine learning to understand how each item in their massive catalogs relates to the other and each customer’s preferences.

However, the technical expertise and infrastructure required to develop AI solutions are beyond the reach of most companies. And bringing results—the insights and recommendations from the models—to users within the context of their business requires complex integrations.

With Salesforce Einstein, AI capabilities will be embedded across every Salesforce Cloud. Einstein leverages all the data in Salesforce—customer data; activity data from Salesforce Chatter, email, calendar and e-commerce; social data streams such as tweets and images; and even IoT signals—to train predictive models.

“We couldn’t be more excited to finally unveil Salesforce Einstein after two years of hard work and targeted acquisitions,” says Salesforce’s Jim Sinai. “As we continue to build out AI for CRM, we are committed to understanding the next generation of AI technology and how it can best be applied to Salesforce. This effort will be led by Salesforce Research, a new research group focused on the future of AI, under the leadership of Dr. Richard Socher, our Chief Scientist.”

Some new Einstein-powered products include:

Sales Cloud Einstein will include Predictive Lead Scoring that enables sales reps to focus on closing 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 analyzes them to deliver predictions.
Marketing Cloud Einstein will include Predictive Scoring which scores every customer’s likelihood to engage with an email, Predictive Audiences which builds custom audience segments based on predicted behaviors, and Automated Send-time Optimization which predicts the optimal time to deliver messages based on past customer behavior.
Analytics Cloud Einstein will deliver Predictive Wave Apps that uncover future patterns for any business process, Smart Data Discovery that helps users find and explain insights from millions of data combinations in minutes, and Automated Analytics & Storytelling which will automate and prioritize the next insight users need to know.
IoT Cloud Einstein will include Predictive Device Scoring which will score streaming data from connected IoT devices, Recommend Best Next Actions for service processes and marketing journeys based on the scoring of that device data, and Automated IoT Rules Optimization which will actively update the rules that govern how IoT data is managed.

As a core part of the Salesforce Platform, Einstein will empower everyone to build AI-powered apps. Admins will be able to build apps that include Einstein-powered fields in any object, page layout or workflow, making every business process smarter.