Salesforce's MetaMind Buy Fuels CRM's AI Arms Race

The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft Dynamics CRM got AI-powered predictive marketing capabilities in March through integration with EverString's platform.