M+E Connections

Salesforce Sept. 19 provided more details about its Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) platform for customer relationship management (CRM), sharing that some Einstein features will be made available to clients at no additional charge as part of existing licenses and cloud editions, while “many” other features will carry a fee.

Specific prices weren’t disclosed, with the company choosing to announce fees for each Einstein feature as they’re made available, Salesforce said.

Einstein delivers advanced AI capabilities into sales, service, marketing and more functions, “empowering companies to deliver more personalized and predictive customer experiences,” the company said in a news release. Einstein will also “enable everyone to build AI-powered apps — using clicks or code — that get smarter with every interaction,” it said. Einstein “leverages all” Salesforce data: customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and ecommerce; social data streams including tweets and images; and even IoT signals, it said.

Various types of AI are already being widely used, Salesforce said, pointing to Apple’s Siri that uses natural language processing to recognize voice commands. Facebook’s deep learning facial recognition algorithm that can instantly identify a person with almost 98% accuracy. In addition, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify all use machine learning to understand how each item in their media catalogs relates to other media in their catalogs and each customer’s preferences, Salesforce said.

Einstein is powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, so its “breakthrough innovations allow models to be automatically customized for every single customer,” Salesforce said, adding: “These models learn, self-tune and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data. Einstein will automatically discover relevant insights, predict future behavior, proactively recommend best next actions and even automate tasks.”

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 that seamlessly logs email and calendar activity with the right Salesforce record, and analyzes them to deliver predictions, the company said.

Service Cloud Einstein will include Recommended Case Classification that automatically pre-populates key case fields, opening up predictive routing of cases to the right agent, and allowing agents to resolve customer issues faster. Predictive Close Times will predict the time needed to resolve an issue, helping improve agent productivity.

Marketing Cloud Einstein will include Predictive Scoring that scores every customer’s likelihood to engage with an email, Predictive Audiences that builds custom audience segments based on predicted behaviors, and Automated Send-time Optimization that predicts the optimal time to deliver messages based on past customer behavior.

Commerce Cloud Einstein includes Product Recommendations to personalize product recommendations to shoppers, Predictive Sort that will infuse personalized sort and 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 that automatically creates a case in Service Cloud if customer posts don’t receive a timely response; and Newsfeed Insights that highlights the most relevant and popular content in every feed.

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 that will automate and prioritize the next insight users need to know.

IoT Cloud Einstein will include Predictive Device Scoring that will score data from connected IoT devices, Recommend Best Next Actions for service processes and marketing journeys based on the scoring of that streaming device data, and Automated IoT Rules Optimization that will actively update the rules that govern how IoT data is managed.

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, it said. Analytics Cloud Einstein’s Smart Data Discovery, meanwhile, is generally available. Pricing is based on the volume of data and number of users, it said. 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.

Also announced by the company Sept. 19 was a new Salesforce Research group that the company said brings together a team of researchers and data scientists under the leadership of Richard Socher, chief scientist at Salesforce and data science researcher. “Salesforce Research will be focused on delivering cutting-edge, breakthrough AI research across deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision to Salesforce’s product and engineering teams,” the company said.

Attendees at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference next month will get more information about Einstein at the Einstein keynote Oct. 6, in San Francisco, the company said.