Salesforce, the US Software as a Service giant is to build an Artificial Intelligence platform to be known as Einstein.
Speaking with Forbes, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed an Artificial Intelligence project that will integrate AI across the Salesforce product range. Mr Benioff said he plans to take his competition by surprise.
The Einstein move is being seen as development of its RelateIQ acquisition which it bought for $392m two years ago. And it follows the purchase of analytics firm BeyondCore two weeks ago for an undisclosed sum.
So far this year Salesforce has maintained a full shopping basket having bought Demandware for $2.8bn in June.and at the beginning of August the $6.6bn software firm acquired productivity and collaboration application firm Quip for $582m. Salesforce has issued revenue guidance of $8.8bn for fiscal 2017 and it has a market capitalisation of around $54bn. Salesforce second quarter earnings are expected on Wednesday 31st August. The firm had revenue of $1.92bn in its first quarter ended April 30th 2017 up 28% year on year and issued second quarter revenue guidance of $2.015bn
Full details of Einstein are expected to emerge in around five weeks time starting on October 4th when over 170,000 people will descend on San Francisco for Dreamforce, its annual tech conference.
Dreamforce is known for its big platform and products announcements. To date Salesforce has always announced new ‘clouds’ such as IOT Cloud, and new software development technology enhancements such as ‘Thunder’ and ‘Lightning’ which bring greater functionality to its core CRM platform, sales, marketing, analytics and other clouds.
Einstein and artificial intelligence is expected to take centre stage as this year’s event.
On a different stage, U2 are providing one evening’s entertainment at Dreamforce.
