AI meets CRM and BI: 15 Salesforce Einstein and Einstein Analytics announcements from Dreamforce 2019 ZDNet

Nearly half of companies now say that they're using some form of artificial intelligence, according to McKinsey research that Salesforce shared at Dreamforce 2019, yet seven out of ten companies report they're seeing little to no value from their AI projects so far. This gap exists, Salesforce executives asserted, because too many companies are struggling to overcome data-management and data-science technical hurdles, so they have yet to put AI into production at scale. Salesforce's alternative is Einstein and Einstein Analytics, both of which offer prebuilt, CRM-embedded predictions and recommendations along with the ability to build AI apps and answer company-specific business questions without coding or data science expertise. There's no question that AI is of interest to organizations and that the Einstein and Einstein Analytics promise of pre-built capabilities and declarative, no-code/low-code app and model development is compelling. Yet Salesforce executives frankly acknowledged that Einstein and Einstein Analytics have only scratched the surface of potential adoption, with Sales Cloud use cases leading the way.