Salesforce Targets Einstein AI Developers With Updates

Salesforce has step up its efforts to appeal to developers to build intelligent apps for its Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) platform.

It comes after Salesforce in May bolstered Einstein AI with tools to help retailers provide their customers with personalised, AI-driven shopping experiences.

Salesforce is heavily promoting its Einstein AI platform at the moment, and to this end it also recently signed a partnership with IBM’s Watson.

AI Future

Now the CRM giant said it is seeking to ’empower’ its 4 million developers with new Einstein Platform Services and Trailhead learning paths

The firm said it would showcase any innovations at TrailheaDX, its second annual developer conference.

“There has never been a better time to be a Salesforce developer,” said Sarah Franklin, SVP Developer Relations and GM Trailhead. “Developer success leads to customer success, and we are on a mission to enable everyone to skill up for the AI revolution with the smartest tools and training.”

It cited research from IDC, which predicted that 80 percent of all apps will have an AI component by 20201.

Salesforce said it is “democratizing AI” with Einstein, as well as “democratising learning with Trailhead, empowering everyone to build apps faster and advance their careers.”

Three Steps

So how exactly is it hoping to do this?

Well, firstly it has introduced new Einstein Platform Services for building AI-powered customer experiences. Indeed, Einstein Platform Services apparently allows developers to quickly build custom AI-powered CRM apps.

Tools here include Einstein Sentiment, which will allow developers to classify the tone of any text as positive, negative or neutral so that companies can quickly gain insight into customer attitudes and then take appropriate actions.

Einstein Intent meanwhile helps developers to train a model to classify the underlying intent of customer inquiries, and Einstein Object Detection enables developers to train models to recognize multiple unique objects within a single image.

Secondly, Salesforce said it has introduced new trails from Atlassian, GitHub, as well as itself. Trailhead is Salesforce’s online, interactive, gamified learning platform, and users are taking on free, guided learning paths to gain developer skills.

And thirdly it is offering Unified Platform Services, so developers can better collaborate across the business and build smart apps faster for sales, service, marketing and commerce.

The firm said that Einstein Sentiment and Einstein Intent are currently in beta and prices will be available when they APIs are made ‘Generally Available.’

Einstein Object Detection meanwhile is in pilot, but Platform Events is generally available, and prices are based on the volume of data processed.

Whilst all of the above is focused on the developer community, when Salesforce brought its ‘World Tour’ to London in May, it boldly proclaimed the ‘age of the customer’.

It rightly touted the power that customers now wield in this ultra-connected world where new competition can seemingly spring up at any moment.

Quiz: The world of cloud in 2017!