Salesforce announces Einstein AI Platform to take on Microsoft and others

Last night, Salesforce announced Einstein, its artificial intelligence platform that delivers advanced AI capabilities into sales, service, marketing and more, allowing companies to deliver more personalized and predictive customer experiences. Salesforce is trying to embed AI capabilities across every Salesforce Cloud. Einstein makes use of all the data in Salesforce—customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and ecommerce; social data streams such as tweets and images; and even IoT signals—to train predictive models. Since Salesforce is a dominant CRM vendor, it has millions of users inputting information every day, so it is uniquely positioned to deliver the best models for sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.

Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein’s breakthrough innovations allow models to be automatically customized for every single customer. 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. Now every Salesforce user will be able to leverage AI capabilities to deliver more personalized and predictive customer experiences.

Apart from the Salesforce Einstein platform, they have several Einstein products such as Sales Cloud Einstein, Service Cloud Einstein, Marketing Cloud Einstein, Commerce Cloud Einstein, Community Cloud Einstein, Analytics Cloud Einstein and IoT Cloud Einstein. Salesforce Einstein Platform will empower developers to quickly build AI-powered apps using the tools that millions of Salesforce developers and admins already use every day. Salesforce is also forming a new Salesforce Research group that will accelerate AI innovation in the enterprise. 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.

Microsoft already has its own machine learning platform for developers to build intelligent apps. But what they lack is the Salesforce Einstein like features in their CRM solutions for various verticals. There are few features in Dynamics CRM like the Microsoft Social Engagement, Power BI integration which takes advantage of machine learning, but I hope they come up with more AI powered CRM solutions soon to take on Salesforce Einstein. Apart from the machine learning space, Microsoft is now in the process of acquiring LinkedIn. Once the acquisition is completed, Microsoft Dynamics team will have access to treasure trove of data to integrate into their solutions which might become a huge advantage over Salesforce. I’m looking forward to hear more about Dynamics from Microsoft at their Ignite conference later this month.