Build Intelligent Salesforce apps

Dreamforce 2016 was buzzing with Einstein, Artificial Intelligence built into Salesforce CRM to make the CRM lot smarter. Unfortunately, it doesn't cover in detail on options left out for Salesforce App Exchange product vendors to fuse AI in their own apps.

The broader direction from Salesforce.com on this is to leverage Apache Prediction IO that can be run on Salesforce Heroku leveraging the data collected in Salesforce.com. A little deep dive on this throws a lot of possibilities in building custom Salesforce apps fused with AI.

To understand this, knowing what Apache Prediction IO offers is a must. Apache Prediction IO is an open source machine learning server built on open source technologies that can be run on Salesforce Heroku or any other equivalent. Apache Prediction IO provides a container to deploy intelligent predictive algorithms answering your AI queries.

It works on a simple principle that is well illustrated in the figure below (Courtesy: Apache Prediction IO)

The server is a container that can run multiple prediction engines (recommendation, classification, regression etc) operating on a simple framework of collecting and training the engines from all data it receives from your applications (could be from Salesforce, website, commerce etc) and providing answers to your AI queries in a given context. More the volume & variety of data, Better the results.

Though creating your own prediction engines/algorithms is hi-tech, Prediction IO library of engines made available by several open source contributors comes handy. A list of predictive algorithms available today can be accessed here

The simplest algorithm to understand is the Universal recommendation engine where the model recommends on basis of the data it is trained with. To give an example if the users in Salesforce add Item Y when they add Item X in a Quote, you can create an AppExchange recommendation app which can recommend a new Salesperson creating a quote with item X, to add item Y too.

The possibilities are unlimited and your creativity is the limit to explore on interesting AI based apps in Salesforce app exchange using several of the existing algorithms or building your own algorithms or customizing the existing algorithms.