Salesforce.com Inc. is the latest tech giant looking to capitalize on the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence among developers.

At an event in San Francisco today, the company unveiled a set of AI services designed to ease the creation of applications on top of its customer relationship management platform. They extend the Einstein lineup of machine learning and automation features, which Salesforce introduced last year to reduce repetitive work for users. Developers will now be able to provide the same benefit in their own applications.

Einstein Sentiment, the first of the new services, can automatically organize social media conversations and other natural-language text into one of three categories: positive, negative or neutral. It’s meant to provide the high-level view of user opinions that marketers depend on to measure brand perception. A developer building a Twitter monitoring tool, for instance, could employ the service to give companies an idea of what consumers think about a new product.

The second new offering is the complementary Einstein Intent. It’s geared towards applications that require more fine-grained language skills, such as the ability to infer the specific meaning of an email.

One of the main areas where Salesforce sees the service being used in customer support. A company could build a tool to analyze the nature of a user’s complaint and automatically route their message to the appropriate department. Even if some emails can’t be sorted automatically due to linguistic limitations, Einstein Intent could still save a lot of administrative work in a large organization.

Rounding out Salesforce’s new AI lineup is Einstein Object Recognition. It can be programmed to determine the presence of certain objects in an image — say, items on a store shelf — count them and even measure their size.

There’s a good chance that Salesforce will introduce more AI capabilities over time in a bid to address a wider range of use cases. The company certainly has plenty of incentive to do so. Besides opening a new revenue stream, the services also have the potential to strengthen its core value proposition.

The key lies in the fact that Salesforce relies on third-party applications to address user requirements that are not met by its services’ native features. Helping customers and partners build better services should enable the cloud giant to put forth a more competitive value proposition, particularly as rivals such as Microsoft Corp. also incorporate AI into their products.

Image: Salesforce