Salesforce at a Dreamforce 2017 conference this week extended the reach of its customer relationship management (CRM) cloud service to include tighter integration with the G-Suite productivity applications delivered as a cloud service by Google, including in some cases access to G-Suite licenses at no additional cost for one year.
In addition, the two companies announced that Salesforce CRM software will be integrated with the Google Analytics service that is widely used to analyze web applications and traffic. Beyond that, Salesforce also committed to making use of the Google Cloud Platform to host its applications in emerging international markets.
Salesforce announced that organizations can now also add their own brand to applications built using Salesforce low-code Lightning tools and that organizations can also now apply the Trailhead e-learning platform developed by Salesforce under their own brand to train and build their own communities.
Finally, Salesforce is making its Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) platform more accessible. An Einstein Prediction Builder makes it possible for the average CRM administrator to now build their own AI models without requiring any help from a developer. In addition, those administrators can train a chat bot using those models to handle specific tasks.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says AI technologies will soon be infused in every business process.
“AI is the future of all our applications and software,” says Benioff.
A big part of that strategy rests on making Einstein available as a service that can be called by both Salesforce and third-party applications in addition to integrating Einstein with other AI services such as Watson from IBM.
Of course, Salesforce isn’t the only provider of advanced AI services. But it may the furthest along in terms of making a consistent set of AI services ubiquitously available.
