Artificial Intelligence at Salesforce: An Inside Look

Optimus Prime--the software engine, not the Autobot overlord--was born in a basement under a West Elm furniture store on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Starting two years ago, a band of artificial-intelligence acolytes within Salesforce escaped the towering headquarters with the goal of crazily multiplying the impact of the machine learning models that increasingly shape our digital world--by automating the creation of those models. As shoppers checked out sofas above their heads, they built a system to do just that. Scott Rosenberg is an editor at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. They named it after the Transformers leader because, as one participant recalls, "machine learning is all about transforming data."