Salesforce Einstein celebrates its first birthday with the launch of new features

Salesforce Einstein

Just one year ago this week, Salesforce introduces Einstein, its artificial intelligence platform. The CRM giant is marking the occasion with the launch of several new features.

Einstein isn’t a product at all, even though Salesforce markets it like one. Instead, it’s a set of AI technologies underlies the entire Salesforce platform and attempt to add a smart layer wherever possible.

new features

Salesforce added two new capabilities today. The first is opportunity scoring, a tool designed for sales management to keep on top of the sales pipeline. It takes advantage of data mining and machine learning to surface the biggest deals most likely close in the pipeline.

Second feature specifically for sales staff, which helps manage their important emails. It essentially acts as a smart email assistant, using natural language processing to find the emails, and offers a suggested response to give an even bigger head start on conquering email.

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The company has gone from zero to 475 million AI-fueled predictions per day in the first year. Currently, they have 7000 developers working on AI programs on the platform, and announced a $50 million fund to encourage even more.

Salesforce says, Einstein enhances the employee and making their lives easier. Employees spend so much time in the sales, marketing and customer service functions on administrative overhead.

an intelligence layer

Salesforce added an intelligence layer with the goal of automating many of those administrative tasks, such as prioritizing important emails, entering information automatically from sources. For customer service or marketing, it could add smarts, to locate all the pictures related to an event or subject.

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Whatever the task Einstein tech is attacking, Salesforce is trying to reduce the friction and put the tool to work for the user, rather than the reverse, which is how software has worked from the beginning of computers. AI flips the typical software workflow on its head. At its best, manual data entry would reduce or eliminated, and the software would work for the employee. Salesforce isn’t alone in this goal, but it’s trying to take advantage of it to enhance its products.

At just a year old, there is still a long way to go for this set of tools and technologies to meet that lofty goal. But, in the first year Salesforce demonstrate the power of adding this kind of intelligence to its products.

More information: [Salesforce]