Like other enterprise tech giants, Salesforce.com Inc. is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to stand out from the competition.

The company is doubling down today with a new iteration of its flagship Sales Cloud that sports several features powered by its self-learning Einstein data-crunching system. The additions are designed mainly to automate the manual work involved in finding and interacting with prospects, which often takes up the bulk of sales professionals’ time.

One of the most taxing chores that the update aims to tackle is handling lead data. Salesforce.com has added a feature called Einstein Activity Capture that can automatically pull calendar entries, emails and other sales interactions from a user’s inbox to spare them the hassle of manually uploading the information. Moreover, the tool doubles as a scheduling assistant for managing follow-ups.

Once a salesperson has collected all the available data about a lead, they can use the other capabilities included in today’s update to start targeting them. Einstein Lead Scoring, the first feature, analyzes the role of prospects’ within their organizations, their location and other key details identify the ones most likely to become paying clients. Users can then employ the new Lightning Dialer added in conjunction to quickly initiate calls from the same window where they coordinate their deal-making efforts.

More specifically, the feature is part of the Lightning Sales Console, an app that Salesforce.com has created to centralize users’ work. It provides access to various Einstein-powered capabilities and lead data so to reduce the amount of tab-hopping involved in the sales workflow.

The new feature additions expand upon the AI capabilities that Salesforce.com has rolled out for its other services in recent months. The company’s Marketing Cloud, for example, harnesses Einstein to help companies glean consumer sentiment about their products from social media, while its help desk tools employ the system to provide insight into support operations.

Salesforce.com’s AI plans also include systems developed by third parties. In March, the company struck a partnership with IBM Corp. to make the capabilities of Watson accessible from its core services. The integration will enable organizations to perform advanced analysis on the records they keep in the provider’s platform. A retailer, for example, could correlate sales performance with weather data to measure how customer activity changes across seasons.

Image: Salesforce.com