Salesforce Investing In AI, Deep Learning - InformationWeek

Salesforce has quietly been amassing talent in the artificial intelligence domain, most recently with the acquisition of MetaMind this week, a company working on deep learning for automated image recognition. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has backed the Palo Alto, California-based startup almost from the beginning, participating in an 8 million venture round in December 2014 along with Kholsa Ventures. The deal follows a number of other buys by Salesforce of companies including machine learning startup PredictionIO, data science for enterprises company MinHash, and a "smart" iPhone calendar app called Tempo AI that automatically added context such as contacts and documents to calendar items. Salesforce has also hired away some of LinkedIn's data science talent. Forrester Research principal analyst Mike Gualtieri told InformationWeek in an interview that Salesforce is keeping pace with consumer-focused Internet giants like Google and Facebook with these acquisitions.