Smart CRM - Salesforce Einstein

The goal of Salesforce Einstein is to give sales and marketing departments more comprehensive and up-to-date views of customers and sales prospects. To bring AI to the Salesforce clouds, the company made a series of purchases that made it possible to enhance Salesforce cloud products with machine learning and deep learning analytics. Customer data insights gained from Einstein integration can proactively help companies avoid customer service headaches; they can also help improve the bottom line by helping to predict where a potential customer is in the sales cycle and which communication channels they will respond to.

As customer relationship management (CRM) becomes more data-driven, the role of predictive analytics has grown and become more important. To that end, Salesforce has partnered with IBM to take better advantage of unstructured data. Salesforce Einstein’s structured customer data can be combined with IBM Watson's ability to analyze weather patterns, for example, and so potential customers for seasonal products can be targeted more accurately. Artificial intelligence has already infused much of our everyday use of technology — from predictive search results, to email filters, to speech recognition, and autocorrect. Aspects of AI — like machine learning, natural language processing, sentiment analysis and others — have independently been in development for years. So why does it feel like we’re on the cusp of a major landslide past AI assistants into full-fledged computer cognition?

Part of it is, no doubt, hype. As we noted in a recent article, the phrase ‘machine learning’ reached the crest of the Gartner Hype Cycle last year, indicating that our expectations of AI may soon encounter the clear-eyed pragmatism of reality. On the other hand, we have voice-activated home assistants, media platforms with smart recommendations, and cars with collision-detection (which will soon drive themselves) while drones fly around the sky. CRMs are rolling out machine learning features and leading platforms have announced integrations with the aforementioned digital home assistants. Why shouldn’t we be excited for the future?

In the past decade we’ve seen incredible growth in computational power, data production, and neural networks. AI functionality already defines the leaders in CRM. Much the way industry tech was defined in the past between analog and digital, then on-premise and cloud, CRMs will also be ‘dumb’ or ‘smart’, utilitarian vs. forward-thinking. Why spend time setting rules for your own automations when another CRM will create them for you? In coming years, I believe all CRM vendors will offer AI functionality, because the ones that don’t will have disappeared, while the largest vendors battle it out with all-inclusive platforms for enterprise clients.