IBM Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. today are building on a global strategic partnership around artificial intelligence that was announced last March.

The first of the new services is IBM Cloud Integration for Salesforce, which helps connect enterprise and external data that sits outside a company’s customer relationship management system for better insights. With the integration, users can now unify data from outside sources directly within Salesforce’s platform for a clearer understanding of the bigger picture.

“For example, a wealth adviser can unify client data, such as individual investment and risk profiles, with financial trends and public macro economic information using IBM Cloud Integration directly within Salesforce to make smarter, more informed investing decisions for her customers,” Ryan Aytay, executive vice president of business development and strategic accounts at Salesforce, wrote in a blog post.

The second new service is Weather Company Insights for Salesforce, which allows users to integrate weather data inside the Salesforce platform. The integration comes via three new Lightning components available on Salesforce’s AppExchange, which together provide weather-related insights that can better inform customer interactions.

For instance, the new Weather Focus Lightning component could be used by a shipping company to view weather forecasts and automatically update its delivery routes and schedules based on the expected conditions. The Weather Recorder component allows customers to save weather data from specific times and dates to a case record, in order to validate insurance claims, for example. Lastly, the Scheduling Assistant component (pictured) helps customers to schedule the optimum time for appointments based on weather forecasts. The companies said potential use cases include construction firms that want to optimize their work schedules based on the ideal weather conditions for each project they’re working on.

Besides the new services, the two companies said, they’re setting up a number of Salesforce customer engagement centers in key markets around the world. Called the “Salesforce Garage,” the new initiative is being led by IBM’s Salesforce consulting business Bluewolf, which it acquired back in March 2016. The companies said the idea is to combine Bluewolf’s expertise with IBM’s “cognitive and design thinking” to help customers drive their digital transformation efforts.

Image: IBM/Salesforce