IBM and Salesforce Team to Speed Customers’ AI Adoption

IBM and Salesforce have teamed to help clients adopt artificial intelligence for customer relationship management.

The partnership, announced last week, is designed to help customers of the two companies accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) adoption while protecting their data.

“We see how the need to increase employee productivity while simultaneously elevating the customer experience with speed, personalization, and convenience has surged exponentially,” Matt Candy, IBM Consulting’s global managing partner for generative AI, said in a news release.

The collaboration, he added, can “help empower enterprise clients to scale and accelerate the adoption of generative AI that will support them to meet their business needs.”

According to the release, IBM Consulting will use its expertise and delivery models to guide customers as they adopt and deploy Salesforce’s AI technology.

“This approach is designed to help drive efficient integration across Salesforce’s AI technologies, including Einstein, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Slack,” the release said.

Clients can also get assistance via IBM’s watsonx, an AI and data platform “that embraces open standards” and “can reveal the data locked in backend systems to help create dynamic user and employee experiences.”

The announcement came one day after Salesforce’s CEO and co-founder said during an earnings call that the company sees AI as critical for improving productivity, promoting efficiency and enhancing customer experiences.

“Salesforce is the No. 1 CRM by market share based on the latest IDC Software Tracker, and now we are working hard to be the No. 1 AI CRM,” Mark Benioff said. “Our transformation drove our second quarter results.”

To reach that goal, Salesforce has been integrating AI in its products, especially predictive and generative AI, executives said, arguing this commitment has helped it become the world’s third-largest enterprise software company by revenue.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS research has shown that many companies are uncertain of where they stand in regard to generative AI, even though they still feel a pressing urge to adopt it.

Sixty-two percent of executives polled by PYMNTS do not believe their companies have the expertise to employ the technology effectively, according to “Understanding the Future of Generative AI,” a collaboration with AI-ID.

“Part of that uncertainty is due to the fact that, as a result of generative AI’s far-reaching potential, there is no silver bullet for how to govern the use of the technology and no easy-choice decision for which department or team should take the lead with developing and implementing compliance decisions,” PYMNTS wrote last week.