IBM, Salesforce To Share AI

IBM and Salesforce announced their global strategic partnership on Monday (March 6), allowing both companies to deliver joint solutions leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

Through the partnership, IBM’s natural-language AI program Watson will be integrated with Salesforce’s Einstein to “enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more,” a press release stated.

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

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

New insights from Watson will be delivered directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, bringing together deep customer insights from Einstein with the structured and unstructured data from Watson, which spans various sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail.

“The combination of Einstein and Watson will make businesses smarter and our customers more successful,” Marc Benioff, founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, 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.”