Salesforce Einstein Proves that AI is Relative

At Dreamforce this week, Salesforce finally provided details about Einstein, its artificial intelligence technology that it touts as "AI for everyone." For the last couple of weeks, Mark Benioff has been teasing us about Einstein, and yesterday we saw the fruits of that labor. A series of speakers extolled the benefits of Einstein – from being able to predict the sports gear that a consumer might like, to medical uses such as being able quickly diagnose bleeding in the brain. The real impact of Einstein, however, is that it validates the larger trend of Artificial Intelligence or "AI" being applied across a wide variety of both enterprise and consumer tasks. One of my favorite comments from the keynote was that AI is like electricity, and that when it was first incorporated into appliances they were referred to by names such as "the electric toaster."