Biggest AI Collaboration Ever: IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein Unified for Fast-Track Adoption of Cognitive Applications

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty via Salesforce

IBM has partnered marketing cloud specialist Salesforce to deliver a unified AI- powered solution, bringing together IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein. Both AI platforms will be deployed using a new integration practice formed by Bluewolf, an IBM company.

As part of the partnership, IBM will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to transform its global product support services and gain a single, unified view of every IBM customer. Bluewolf’s new Solution Accelerators for AI integration will develop new industry-specific functions used by enterprise clients to fast-track adoption of cognitive applications seamlessly.

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Get Started with Watson on Salesforce Einstein

It’s been a few weeks since IBM CEO Ginni Rometty attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. From that same event, her clarion call to innovators about building technologies around cognitive learning and artificial intelligence (AI) seems to have made its first visible impact. Marc Benioff, obviously wanted to be the first thought leader in the martech industry and realize this unified vision.

The unprecedented unification of two AI technologies – IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. The partnership has been forged with an objective of leveraging human intelligence for critical missions and not for time-consuming siloes management. AI will, therefore, make smarter, faster and ROI –specific decisions, freeing humans for ground-breaking innovations.

Currently, IBM is a strategic investor in Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce, helping the #1 CRM develop a new practice to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities.

Read Also: Salesforce Introduces Service Cloud Einstein AI to Transform Customer Service Interaction

Customers of both companies will be able to access advanced insights from Watson directly with the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform. It will combine deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson’s structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.

IBM and Salesforce to Apply Cognitive Technologies for Every Business

Apart from IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein integration, the two technology giants also announced the release of IBM Application Integration Suite for Salesforce and addition of Bluewolf Dedicated Consulting Services and Expertise for Cognitive Solutions into Salesforce’s existing CRM platform.

IBM Watson + Salesforce Einstein
IBM Watson + Salesforce Einstein

Ginni Rometty, chairman, President and CEO, IBM says, “Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies,”

“This year we expect Watson will touch one billion people—through everything from oncology and retail to tax preparation and cars. Now, with yesterday’s announcement, the power of Watson will serve the millions of Salesforce and Einstein customers and developers to provide an unprecedented understanding of customers.”

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce says, “The combination of Einstein and Watson will make businesses smarter and our customers more successful,” said “I’m thrilled to form an alliance with IBM—no company’s core values are as close to Salesforce’s as IBM’s. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Mission Critical Objectives of IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein Integration

Serve real-time predictive insights across organization

To bring predictive insights from unstructured data, inside or outside an enterprise, together with predictive insights from customer data delivered by Salesforce Einstein to enable smarter, faster decisions across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.

Combine customer data for campaign success

To combine customer behavior data from Watson with customer-specific shopping data and preferences from Salesforce Einstein, helping retailers automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers.

Enhance business reach of IBM Watson on Salesforce App Exchange

To extend the business reach of IBM Weather Insights for Salesforce. The Weather Company will power a new Lightning component on the Salesforce AppExchange to provide weather insights that inform customer interactions and business performance.

Unify Cloud and On-premise data

To bring together on-premise enterprise and cloud data with specialized integration products for Salesforce, surfacing that data directly within the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform.

Provide macroeconomic information for smarter decisions

To unify client data, such as individual investments and risk profiles, with financial trends and public macroeconomic information from IBM Application Integration Suite right within Salesforce to make smarter decisions for her customers.

The proliferation of AI into technologies for marketing, sales and customer service activities has been rapid. As Google CEO Sergey Brin puts it – “The revolution in deep nets has been very profound, it definitely surprised me, even though I was sitting right there. I feel like the Luddite in the room.”

By partnering with Salesforce, IBM intends to take away that “Luddite” feeling out of every CMOs mind.

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