Marc Benioff’s Dreamforce announcements kicked off with a bang when he teased Salesforce’s new offering, Salesforce Einstein, last week. The details of Einstein won’t be revealed until Dreamforce, but what we do know is that Salesforce has worked quickly to adapt the technologies from their recent artificial intelligence (AI) acquisition spree to deliver a suite of new capabilities. These purchases included: RelateIQ, which combs email data to glean insights into relationship strengths, BeyondCore for robust business analytics, PredictionIO for machine learning and intelligence, and MetaMind for deep learning capabilities.

An Intelligent Industry
Leaders in the AI and cognitive computing market, like IBM, have already demonstrated the incredible possibilities with “smart” technologies. Watson Health contains hundreds of billions of records and can read 200 million documents (such as medical journals) in seconds. On top of that, Watson’s unified data model allows healthcare environments to plug in and function without having to build and define their own individual data model. The possibilities already being realized with Watson Health exemplify an opportunity across all industries to enable humans to do their jobs better by empowering them with the processing power of cognitive tools that fit their needs.

Cognitive Systems are Shining the Light on Dark Data
“Data” is the ultimate IT buzzword right now. Increasingly, organizations are focusing on their data and placing new emphasis on quality. Despite all that effort, upwards of 80% of data remains "dark"— meaning the data is collected yet unusable— typically because it is unstructured. Cognitive systems help organizations widen the aperture on the data they are collecting through capabilities such as natural language processing. As a result, even through bad data remains a problem, cognitive systems help to unlock valuable insights hidden in unstructured sources.

Work Smarter with Intelligent Workflows
Salesforce has equipped its platform with helpful data dashboard tools such as Salesforce Wave. However, Einstein introduces the possibility of not necessarily needing a dashboard to make a data-driven decision. The integration of predictive analytics into a tightly woven workflow allows you to make every action a data-driven one. AI capabilities can reduce the reliance on dashboards as the sole delivery mechanism of insight. Imagine Einstein sending you a reminder to follow up on a service request, rather than needing a dashboard to give you visibility into customers in need of follow-up or at risk of attrition.

The Impact of Einstein, Now
Einstein will certainly offer a democratization of artificial intelligence. We’re very excited to see Salesforce mature towards realizing their full potential and provide the continued investment into more AI and cognitive capabilities that are native to the Salesforce platform. This is what customers are asking for. AI and cognitive solutions need to become more accessible for developers and business users to leverage data’s capabilities without being data scientists. With the explosion of technology, we are overwhelmed with data and now need smarter applications to process that data for us. Both customers and platform users are demanding AI and cognitive capabilities, which is why we’re seeing the market move in this direction. Einstein should provide predictive insights integrated into workflow capabilities over time. This will allow customers to better predict the behavior of their pipeline and implement responses that are built on data-driven decision making. We’re moving towards a point where machines will not only be able to build and read reports, but recommend and orchestrate the execution of action from them as well.

Learn more about the impacts of AI on customer experience in this top Dreamforce session by CEO Eric Berridge. Not attending Dreamforce? Speak to one of our data experts.