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Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Chatbots

Salesforce doubles down on personalization and chatbots with Einstein AI updates

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By Rebecca Stewart, Trends Editor

November 6, 2017 | 4 min read

Salesforce has made several updates to its Einstein AI platform one year after it introduced the technology; baking chatbot capabilities into the feature and making it easier for marketers to use AI to predict potential business outcomes.

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The first of the two new services it has added is titled Einstein Bots

As part of the update, announced at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, the company has rebranded the machine learning platform – which aims to make AI and deep learning more accessible to developers of all skillsets – to myEinstein.

The first of the two new services which sits under this umberella is titled Einstein Bots and it lets Salesforce clients build, train and deploy customized service bots with just a few clicks.

It’s understood that a small number of pilot customers like Hulu have early access to the feature before it is rolled out more widely by next summer.

The second tool, Einstein Prediction builder, allows users to create custom AI models on any Salesforce field or object. This means businesses can build predictive models to help understand how customers behave online, the learnings of which can be used to automatically alert brands to “high-risk” consumers who might unsubscribe from an email or switch to a competitor, for example.

According to the company, myEinstein already generates 475m predictions every day which business can then act on to reduce the risk.

​From Salesforce’s point of view, it is bringing AI technology directly to the people who are handling firm’s marketing and email efforts by letting admins use clicks, rather than code to enable complex functions.

John Ball, general manager and senior vice-president at Salesforce Einstein said: “Today, we are further democratizing AI by empowering admins and developers to transform every process and customer interaction to be more intelligent with myEinstein. No other company is arming customers with both pre-built AI apps for CRM and the ability to build and customize their own with just clicks.”

There’s no doubt Salesforce has been doubling down on its AI capabilities of late, with the timely announcement coming just months after an IDC study forecast that AI associated with CRM activities will create 800,000 direct jobs over the next two years.

The report suggested that two million indirect jobs would be created as a result of the rise of AI, and that Salesforce customers should account for $293bn of the total aggregated revenue and more than 390,000 of those jobs by the year 2021.

Earlier this year the company unveiled a partnership with IBM Watson to leverage the strengths of Watson's customer insight within the software.

The firm’s most recent announcement comes as its annual Dreamforce 2017 conference kicks off on Monday (6 November).

The Drum is on the ground covering the event in San Francisco, you can follow our coverage here.

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