CRM Salesforce Inc

By Jay Greene and Ted Greenwald 

International Business Machines Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to mingle their artificial-intelligence technologies in a bid to boost sales of the powerful data-analytics offerings.

The companies Monday announced plans to offer integrated AI services that weave the broad humanlike conversation and learning capabilities of IBM's Watson with Salesforce's more sales-oriented Einstein technology. The new offerings, available in the second half of the year, are aimed at helping a wide variety of companies better target products and services at customers.

IBM and Salesforce believe the partnership will work because their AI technologies have different capabilities. Einstein is designed to understand information collected by Salesforce's customers that fits neatly into specific categories, such as the number of purchases a specific customer has made.

Watson specializes in interpreting information that hasn't been categorized, such as the text of research papers or social-media posts. Much of that information comes from public sources, as well as from data sources IBM has purchased. Its capabilities are largely available as a set of cloud services customers can program into their own software.

Together, for example, Watson's predictive services could weave predictions about local buying patterns and weather with Einstein's customer-specific data about recent purchases and shopping preferences. That could help retailers automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers, the companies said.

The companies aren't sharing revenue, but rather plan to continue selling their AI services independently. The bet is that both IBM and Salesforce will reach more customers as those capabilities interoperate than they would have independently.

IBM already had a relationship with Salesforce through Bluewolf Group, a consulting service specializing in Salesforce's services IBM bought in 2016. That acquisition led to the AI partnership between the companies.

"When IBM acquired Bluewolf, I realized the door had really opened," Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff said in an interview. "That provided the foundation."

The agreement with Salesforce is IBM's latest step to stitch Watson -- a linchpin of its effort to reinvent itself for the cloud-computing era -- into the fabric of business. Since debuting on the quiz show "Jeopardy" in 2011, IBM has made Watson available as a broad AI programming platform while extending it to health care, automotive, financial services and other industries.

It has also forged partnerships with information-technology companies including Apple Inc., SAP SE, and Slack Technologies Inc.

"2017 is the year when you'll see AI enter the enterprise at scale," IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said.

Salesforce is a more recent entrant in the AI race, debuting Einstein in September. Salesforce is the leader by a wide margin in sales-automation services, but it is facing increasing competition from deep-pocketed competitors Microsoft and Oracle Corp.

Finnish elevator maker Kone Oyj already is using the combined AI service, IBM and Salesforce said. Kone uses IBM's Internet of Things service, the Watson IoT Platform, to monitor the status of its elevators to notify customers when they need servicing. It also uses Salesforce's Service Cloud to provide customer-service functions to help Kone obtain necessary parts for its elevators.

Combining those could help Kone customers repair elevators more quickly, or even detect and resolve potential problems before they emerge.

"The real value is when you link these processes together, not just apply AI to an individual one," Ms. Rometty said.

In addition to integrating their AI technologies, IBM is also developing a service that provides insights from the IBM-owned Weather Company. For example, an insurance company could use forecast data in its Salesforce app to automatically send safety and policy information to customers at risk of losses from severe weather.

As part of the deal, IBM agreed to use Service Cloud companywide, giving Salesforce a marquee customer for its customer-service software.

Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com and Ted Greenwald at Ted.Greenwald@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 06, 2017 16:30 ET (21:30 GMT)

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