IBM and Salesforce will start sharing their AI technology

Today, IBM and Salesforce announced they will connect their artificial intelligence platforms to help companies target and serve customers. IBM's natural-language AI program Watson -- which conquered the television quiz show "Jeopardy" -- will be integrated with Salesforce's Einstein, the AI that helps mine its hugely popular customer relationship management software, to provide customer purchasing habits and shopping data for businesses that run Salesforce. That means that an insurance company that uses Salesforce, for example, can also use Watson's weather data to target customers before a snowstorm to help reduce potential damages. By combining Watson's data on local retail trends with specific customer data from Salesforce, companies will be able to send highly targeted campaigns to shoppers, according to the companies. Salesforce customers will be able to start using Watson's smarts to refine their customer targeting starting in the second half of this year.