Salesforce will be using IBM Watson to make its Einstein AI service even smarter

The two artificial intelligence products from IBM and Salesforce, respectively, are being brought together as part of a new partnership between the tech companies. Besides creating a tag team named after two familiar characters from literature and science, the AI partnership is designed to help retailers crunch a broad variety of data -- including customer shopping preferences, weather data and industry information -- to boost business. By combining local shopping patterns, weather and retail industry data from Watson with customer-specific shopping data and preferences from Salesforce Einstein, a retailer will be able to automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers. IBM is also making weather data available to Salesforce customers as a service, to help them analyze how weather events impact their business. This new partnership comes after IBM acquired huge Salesforce partner Bluewolf Group, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's blessing, a year ago, reportedly spending $200 million on that deal.