Salesforce.com Inc. has been busier than usual this week, acquiring a location-based intelligence software and services startup while adding new tools to its artificial intelligence-based Einstein Platform Services suite.

The startup concerned is MapAnything Inc., which is based on Charlotte, North Carolina, and had previously raised $84 million in funding.

MapAnything brings some interesting capabilities to Salesforce. The company sells a routing and scheduling engine that integrates GPS tracking atop of a location-based workflow platform in order to answer “complex spatial questions” and improve customer services.

MapAnything’s software has multiple uses. For example, sales managers can use it to view the locations of their customers and sales leads via a map-centric user interface. Hence, a sales rep who needs to meet multiple clients in a given day could use MapAnything to find the fastest route to each customer.

If a lead unexpectedly cancels, the service can quickly clear the allocated time slot in Salesforce.com and identify other nearby contacts who may be available to fill the gap. All the while, managers can track the activity of their personnel from a back-end monitoring console to ensure that everything is going smoothly.

The software is also useful for fleet management and logistics because it can visualize the whereabouts of company vehicles at any time. New work orders could then be triggered the moment a driver enters or leaves a defined geographic area.

MapAnything also provides application programming interfaces that can be used to manage logistical challenges in real time.

Salesforce’s decision to buy MapAnything was perhaps predictable, as the company’s products are tailor-made for Salesforce users and have been available to buy on the AppExchange store since its inception. MapAnything is also a Salesforce SI Partner and ISV Premier Partner.

“The addition of MapAnything to Salesforce will help the world’s leading brands accurately plan: how many people they need, where to put them, how to make them as productive as possible, how to track what’s being done in real time and what they can learn to improve going forward,” Salesforce officials said in a statement.

Salesforce acquired MapAnything on the same day as it announced an expansion of its Einstein Platform Services, which enable developers to integrate artificial intelligence functions such as vision, sentiment and intent with their apps.

With the update, Einstein Platform Services gains “low-code” capabilities that enable anyone – not just developers – to build apps for translation and optical character recognition.

For example, Einstein Translation is a new tool that enables automatic language translation. With it, admins can set things up so that customer queries are automatically translated into service agent’s native language. The service offers translation for 21 languages in total, which should be especially useful for multinational organizations.

Einstein Optical Character Recognition, meanwhile, relies on computer vision to scan documents and extract information. That makes it easier for sales reps to pull data from a business card and add it to their records, for example.

Image: Salesforce