• by Jess Nelson , March 7, 2017

Salesforce's artificial intelligence product, Einstein, is now available to all Salesforce customers.

Salesforce announced Einstein’s release out of beta on Tuesday, the company’s 52nd major product release in its 18-year history. Einstein is a layer of artificial intelligence built into Salesforce’s cloud-based software, powered by a combination of machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural-language processing and smart data discovery.

Einstein is now available to customers of any of the company’s customer success platform solutions, including the Sales and Marketing Clouds. Salesforce originally unveiled Einstein at its annual San Francisco-based conference, Dreamforce, last year.

In the Marketing Cloud, Einstein Journey Insights can analyze millions of data points to optimize marketing campaigns with predictive intelligence and recommendations. Marketers can also target related customer audiences for more relevant campaigns with the Einstein Segmentation tool available in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Both products are available to any customer with a Marketing Cloud license and a license from Krux, the data management company Salesforce acquired last year.  

Three Einstein products are also now available in the Salesforce Sales Cloud: Einstein Opportunity Insights, Einstein Account Insights and Einstein Activity Capture. Available together for an additional $50 per user per month in the Sales Cloud Enterprise Edition, the Einstein products incorporate intelligence from sentiment, engagement and competitor involvement to help make predictive recommendations to sales representatives on the best next steps to close a deal.

Einstein capabilities are also available in the Commerce Cloud, Community Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud and Analytics Cloud.

Salesforce also announced Einstein Vision on Tuesday, a suite of APIs that allow developers to incorporate image recognition to CRM and applications. Developers can utilize pre-trained image classifiers, such as product or brand identification, or create their own.

As an example, Salesforce discussed how Coca-Cola leverages Einstein in the Commerce Cloud to power more intelligence merchandising across its millions of retail partners. Salesforce executives including CEO Marc Benioff discussed Einstein’s capabilities and Salesforce customer use case scenarios in a live-stream conference and keynote presentation on Tuesday in conjunction with the product release.

A single photo taken of a display case was able to accurate identify the type and number of Coca-Cola soda drinks available. Since Einstein correlates purchase history with global marketing data, the artificial intelligence product was then able to deliver order recommendations to restock inventory.

Einstein also understands that March Madness is on the horizon, so the product recommended more drink inventory ahead of promotions for the NCAA basketball championship.

Tuesday’s Einstein announcement comes on the heels of a partnership with IBM announced Monday that aims to deliver join solutions that integrate Einstein with IBM’s Watson for more powerful A.I.-powered communication.

Data collected by Watson can be added directly into the Salesforce platform, adding new information that can be combined with customer insights to develop more engaging campaigns. Watson and Einstein will coordinate to ingest available data to make predictive recommendations that aim to drive better consumer engagement and sales revenue.

As part of the partnership, data from The Weather Company will power a new Lightning application on the Salesforce AppExchange to provide weather information that might influence customer interactions. For example, a retailer might want to sell umbrellas on a rainy day, but bathing suits on a sunny day.

IBM will also deploy Salesforce’s Service Cloud internally across the company.

The IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein integration is expected to be available in the second half of 2017, with pricing announced upon release.