Salesforce.com Inc.’s plans to enhance its sales and marketing software with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities were first leaked by company CEO Marc Benioff several weeks ago. But yesterday’s unveiling of Salesforce Einstein still caught everyone by surprise, stealing the show from rival firm Oracle Corp. just hours before its annual Oracle OpenWorld tech conference kicked off with Larry Ellison’s keynote.

Salesforce has managed to upstage Oracle in spectacular fashion with the announcement of Einstein, a new deep learning platform that the company says will become the foundation of all of its future Software-as-a-Service offerings. The platform, which was years in the making and supposedly cost hundreds of millions of dollars through a combination of acquisitions and in-house development, will be baked into just about every Salesforce product there is, with packages available for Sales, Service, Marketing, Analytics, Commerce, Community and IoT. Einstein will be added to some products for free, while others will be charged as add-ons, the company said.

Exactly what Einstein will do depends on the kind of service, but the gist of it is that it will add predictive and analytics capabilities to Salesforce’s existing tools. For example, with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Einstein will be able to predict which leads are more likely to become sales, and it will also alert users to things such as which contacts might be considering a rival service. In the Marketing Cloud, Einstein can do things such as analyze images posted to social media, gauge customer sentiment and make suggestions about targeted marketing. The Service Cloud will gain new capabilities such as case classification and predictive close times, while the Analytics Cloud and IoT Cloud will gain predictive analytics, smart data discovery, recommendations and automated rules optimization.

The announcement is the culmination of several years of planning — and big spending. Salesforce has splashed out more than $650 million in the past years acquiring an assortment of AI and machine-learning oriented startups, including companies like MetaMind Inc., RelateIQ and PredictionIO, among others, before cobbling all of that technology and expertise together to create Einstein.

According to Al Hilwa, program director of software development research at International Data Corp. (IDC), the launch of Einstein shows that Salesforce is embarking on an extremely ambitious and extensive strategy aimed at delivering cognitive computing functionality to business users for the first time.

“Salesforce is painting quite a comprehensive vision to inject AI capabilities into business applications,” Hilwa said. “By baking these features into the apps, Salesforce maximizes the chances of customer adoption. To the extent that these functions are effective and well-implemented, I think we will also see independent software vendors produce interesting applications based on these capabilities.”

Alongside Einstein, and related to those acquisitions, is the news that Salesforce is forming a new Salesforce Research group. It will research deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision and other aspects of AI that can be baked into the company’s products. Leading that effort will be Richard Socher, co-founder and former CEO at MetaMind, who will be backed by a 175-member team of data scientists.

Democratizing artificial intelligence

Salesforce will now make a concerted effort to get as many of its customers to use Einstein as possible, and the company is confident they will, as it believes that AI is just what they’ve been hankering for.

“For the vast majority of companies, [AI] is too hard, they can’t apply it to their business processes,” Salesforce Senior Vice President of Product Strategy John Ball said in a statement. “This is democratizing AI so that every company can benefit.”

Of course, Salesforce has yet to prove that it does possess the expertise needed to apply AI and deep learning technologies to business processes successfully. Einstein is its attempt at doing so, but the company admits that its effectiveness will depend a lot on the amount of data it can access, which is something customers will be able to decide for themselves. The pitch is simple enough, though: The more data you provide Einstein with, the better the results will be.

But how much value those insights deliver remains to be seen. It’s not yet clear whether Einstein ends up pointing out the obvious, or delivers truly competitive insights.

One thing that is clear, however, is that Salesforce has taken a massive step forward — or at least is claiming so — compared with AI services from others such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and IBM, which are largely aimed at data scientists and developers rather than actual business users.

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