How IBM and Salesforce Are Challenging Traditional Business Models

 Since unveiling our partnership with Salesforce in March, we’ve worked together to champion the impact of AI across all facets of business, helping companies across all industries make smarter decisions, faster than ever before.

Today, at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, IBM’s Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty will join Salesforce Chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, on stage to address the future of business and discuss how AI, including IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein, and other emerging technologies are challenging traditional business models.

Our partnership is deeper than simply merging our technology – together, we’re enabling businesses to apply AI to a vast universe of data, turning smaller, private business data sets into actionable insights that enhance decision making.

Here are some of the ways we’re making this possible today:

Enhancing How Salesforce Users Build with Watson  

The combination of Watson and Einstein empowers companies to gain a deeper understanding of customers, whether in retail, finance or other industries. To help developers quickly integrate Watson services into their Salesforce applications, we recently launched the IBM Watson Apex SDK, significantly decreasing the amount of coding needed to embed these capabilities into Salesforce applications.

For example, Einstein can analyze all Salesforce data – customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and ecommerce; social data streams such as tweets and images; and even IoT signals. With Watson, companies can pull insights from data outside Salesforce, like news articles, market data, interactions on social channels, as well as different types of internal enterprise data sets and sources (that live outside of Salesforce) including NPS surveys, customer responses to emails, product reviews and focus group feedback.

For a marketer, this means being able to combine local shopping patterns and retail industry data from Watson with customer-specific shopping data and preferences from Salesforce Einstein, empowering them to automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers.

We’ve also enhanced our Cloud Integration for Salesforce offering to include new connectors for Watson services, allowing developers to tap into data – whether within your business or from a third party – no matter where it resides.

Getting Started with AI

Since Dreamforce debuted 14 years ago, Bluewolf, an IBM Company, has been an active part of the conference and has emerged as one of Salesforce’s top partners. In its annual The State of Salesforce report, Bluewolf found that in the next year, nearly 60 percent of C-level executives expect to purchase AI, or platforms that have embedded AI capabilities. As such, Bluewolf is helping companies get started with AI by combining the capabilities of Salesforce Einstein and IBM Watson into new industry-specific solutions.

There are 20 new AI Now solutions for industries including retail, financial services and healthcare, which quickly enable companies of all sizes to get started on their AI journey. For instance, AI Now™ Guided Selling leverages data-driven insights to shorten sales cycles, forecast at-risk customers and guide next best actions.

Strengthening Customer Engagement with Weather Insights

The Weather Company, an IBM business, is creating applications and solutions that utilize weather data and insights to make better-informed decisions. A new solution, Weather Shield for Salesforce, will provide improved situational awareness and insights for weather-driven events across the U.S. It will identify and monitor potentially impacted areas and property, enabling clients to take preventative measures and improve their customers’ experience.

For example, insurers in the U.S. regularly pay more than $1 billion in claims every year due to vehicles damaged by hail. Now, insurance agents can proactively identify assets in potentially impacted areas and alert clients to protect their vehicles – improving the customer experience and reducing the number of insurance claims.