The Salesforce Einstein keynote kicked off this afternoon with a short preview video, but by the end of the hour it very much felt like we had just witnessed the "cherry on top" of this Dreamforce. John Ball, SVP of Salesforce Einsein took the stage first to state the mission behind this new product. 

"We're at the beginning of a revolution in AI," Ball said. "This is going to transform the way that we work." 

Next Ball explained artificial intelligence (AI) as the next logical step for Salesforce because as cloud computing has enabled more and more connected devices, which generate huge amounts of data, AI answers how to utilize that connectivity for real business value. The challenge of this comes in when you look at the complexity of AI and the requirements of its use. Normally you would need data science, data wrangling, an infrastructure to interpret that data, and then the ability to contextualize it for a business user. Salesforce's intention with Einstein is to remove all of that complexity and simply offer customers intelligence on the front-end of their software. "This is going to make the world's number one CRM, the world's smartest CRM," Ball concluded.

Shubha Nabar, PhD, Director, Data Science at Salesforce explained how Salesforce is democratizing AI. "We had to build AI to make AI." Meaning that Salesforce automated the processes that would normally need to be performed by a data scientist. Nabar's description of Einstein was "data science as a service." The automated actions of Einstein coded into the back end of the software automatically create the perfect data model for your business meaning Einstein knows how to leverage the data housed in Salesforce without the need for data scientists and highly trained developers. 

Salesforce obviously understands that there is always a case for customization. Ball promised that Einstein will have something for every level of Salesforce users, from admins who simply need their fields to be integrated into the AI to developers building smart apps on the Salesforce platform and data scientists who want to gain access to deep learning technology. 

The two demonstrations of Einstein focused on Sales and Marketing. For salespeople, Salesforce exhibited a typical day with Einstein looking like this: 
Waking up to a notification that you are going to miss your sales quota, using Wave to view Einstein's predictions on which group of leads will supply the most revenue the quickest. Next Einstein provides leadscoring so sales can focus on the best leads first, which led to a demo of Einstein's natural language processing (NLP) capability that allowed it to flag an e-mail associated with an opportunity where a customer had raised an issue they were having and needed an upgrade in their product. E-mail logging was also automated by Einstein. 

For the marketing demo, Einstein identified the correlations between e-mail clicks, opens, bounces, conversions and served up a smart segmentation of four key groups in the e-mail database. In Journey Builder, the process of nurturing the segment in need was as simple as dragging and dropping pieces of the e-mail process, from channel, to distribution, to time of send that were all recommended from Einstein's data processing. Next on display was Einstein's Predictive Vision service which could analyze photos posted on a social media platform and serve up clothing recommendations based on someone's hair color and length. These product recommendations were then automatically placed into a customer's e-mail. 

The grand finale was Richard Socher, PhD, and Chief Scientist at Salesforce announcing Salesforce Research, which is a research group dedicated to furthering the work being done in the AI space. Socher demoed some advanced functions of Einstein such as a dynamic memory network that can answer questions about text and photos with fairly complex answers and image training within the Predictive Vision service that allows a user to train the vision service on what to look for by simply uploading example photos. Socher indicated that these features are not ready for immediate roll-out, but they were certainly exciting to see. 

Throughout the week of Dreamforce 2016 conversations have centered around the fact that AI is the next move across the software space. Nabar summed it up best when she said that people used to talk about their electric toasters and ovens, but now just refer to them as toasters and ovens. The same thing will happen with our smart watches and phones, she said. Soon they will simply be watches and phones. The inference being that AI is going to quickly become more than just a "nice to have," it will be an expectation. 

AI facilitates and supports many of the key business focuses that we at Bluewolf have been discussing for years. For example, we say that the customer contract is that when a customer gives a company their data, that customer expects to be known across all channels by that company. In customer service, companies have been diligently working towards omnichannel experiences, marketers want to understand and connect with their customers better, and sales people want to offer solutions to their customers and prospects at a pace that makes them competitive. There is a use case for AI across every part of every business. That is why we are so excited to see Salesforce taking this step and investing in their customers through the introduction of AI to the platform. 

The capabilities and possibilities with AI are so wide that a crucial factor in leveraging intelligent technology is going to be deeply understanding and focusing on a bussiness's goals and needs. We are excited to rise to that challenge. As a part of IBM, we're already leveraging intelligent tools and witnessing the powerful edge they offer to our clients. 

What will you accomplish when your business is empowered by intelligence? We'd love to talk to you about your ideas. Come by the Bluewolf booth (1205) or connect with us here.