• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, March 7, 2017

IBM and Salesforce yesterday announced a global strategic partnership that will combine Watson’s AI capabilities in business with Einstein’s AI forte in CRM. The two entities “will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more,” according to a joint release presumably composed by a homo sapiens or two.

“The new offerings, available in the second half of the year, are aimed at helping a wide variety of companies better target products and services at customers,” write Jay Greene and Ted Greenwald for the Wall Street Journal.

“The agreement is IBM’s latest move to put Watson in front of a broad business audience,” they continue. “The company has tailored its artificial-intelligence system, a linchpin of its effort to reinvent itself for the cloud-computing era, for a variety of industries including health care, financial services and automobiles. The Salesforce deal potentially could make the system available to any company with a sales team.”

So what would they do with it?

“For example, an insurance company running Salesforce could use real-time weather updates from Watson to warn customers about impending bad weather. Or Watson's retail industry data could combine with Einstein's customer-habit information to create targeted campaigns for shoppers,” writes Marco della Cava for USA Today. 

In a phone interview with Fortune’s Andrew Nusca, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says: “We both have this incredible vision for artificial intelligence but we're coming at it from very different areas. [Salesforce is] coming at it from a declarative standpoint, expressed through our platform, for our customer relationship management system. IBM's approach, which is pioneering, especially when it comes to key verticals like retail or finance or healthcare — these are complements.”

Not that there aren’t skeptics. Here’s Jonathan Shieber’s lede for TechCrunch: “Two of the best-marketed names in artificial intelligence are coming together to pitch their wares to a ("sea of unwitting rubes" is crossed out) new customers with the announcement that IBM and Salesforce are going to partner.” 

“IBM Watson suffered some bad publicity in February,” Matt Rosoff tells us on CNBC.com, “when University of Texas auditors released a scathing report on a high-profile project involving Watson at MD Anderson hospital and placed the project on hold, although they cautioned that the decision ‘should not be interpreted as an opinion on the scientific basis or functional capabilities of the system in its current state.’”

But, ReCode’s April Glaser reminds us, Watson “conquered the television quiz show ‘Jeopardy’” back in 2011.

“Pricing for use of the new joint AI products was not disclosed,” Glaser continues. “As part of the agreement, IBM will start to use Salesforce’s cloud services to help organize its own customer support needs.”

In a related development, the technology research and analysis firm Gigaom announced Friday that it had launched Gigaom AI Labs “to work directly with our clients on projects that implement AI in ways that will deliver measurable results.” Gigaom was acquired by Austin-Tex.-based Knowingly in 2015.

“Within a few years, every major decision — personal or business —will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies,” IBM chairman, president and CEO Ginni Rometty says in yesterday’s release. “This year we expect Watson will touch one billion people — through everything from oncology and retail to tax preparation and cars. 

She ain’t kiddin’.

In his weekly Ad Age column, tech expert Shelly Palmer took a look yesterday at the five jobs that robots will take last. 

“Psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals will simply be the last jobs robots can take,” he writes. 

Last week, he predicted the five jobs they would take first: 1. middle management 2. commodity salespeople (ad sales, supplies, etc.) 3. report writers, journalists, authors and announcers 4. accountants and bookkeepers 5. doctors.

All this begs a big question. “Should robots pay taxes?” asks Daniel Gross in PwC’s strategy+business. After all, “It makes sense to have the entities performing the profitable work — in this case, robots — fund government operations,” does it not?

Back to this morning’s breaking news. 

“What do you make of Salesforce joining forces with IBM, Siri?”

“IBM was up 0.23% yesterday, at $180.47.”

Can you imagine how nuanced our news reports will not be when bot executives are handling calls from bot journalists and analysts?