Salesforce Einstein deploys AI across the cloud suite

Salesforce has been talking about building AI into its wide-ranging cloud portfolio for the last couple of years, and teased the Einstein brand more recently. After acquiring a long list of startups developing cognitive computing or AI technologies and assembling a team of 175 data scientists, it's ready to demonstrate what Einstein looks like beyond a cartoon version of the world's most famous German scientist. With the release, Salesforce is bringing to its CRM and other line of business software tools the AI layer that others in the industry are also looking to provide. Putting rapidly-scalable cloud computing power towards crunching huge data sets seems to be a focus for many vendors, as John Ball, senior vice-president and general manager of Einstein at Salesforce says. "Everyone and everything is connected. All those connections are generating vastly more data than ever before and thanks to the cloud, we have access to vast computing capability," he says.