Skills related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science remain in high demand, with companies scrambling to fill key roles in their pursuit of deep data insights to drive decision-making and to make the most of the promise of AI. For those companies where AI is the key to the future, the skills shortage is of particular concern. The company's Einstein platform is one of the most common ways enterprises deploy AI tools, as for most companies, AI built into platforms they already use is a key means for leveraging this emerging technology. According to IBM's global AI adoption data, the single biggest barrier to AI adoption is a lack of skills, even as 43% of companies say they're accelerating their rollout of AI as a result of the pandemic. For Salesforce, which this past year hit an earnings records, with growth of 24% to $21 billion in total sales, in some part thanks to its AI-powered Einstein platform, getting creative in pursuing AI and data science talent has been essential.

From Alexa and Siri to countless chatbots and automated customer support lines, computers are gradually learning to talk. The only trouble is they are still very easily confused. A research team at Salesforce has come up with a clever way to improve the performance of many modern language programs--teaching an algorithm to speak another language before training it to do other tasks. Teaching machines to hold a coherent conversation remains one of the big outstanding challenges in AI because untangling the meaning of spoken or written text so often relies on a broader understanding of the world, or commonsense knowledge (see "AI's Language Problem"). It turns out that training a machine-learning system to translate between two languages automatically teaches it useful things about the relationship and appropriate context of words.

Earlier in the series, we discussed Salesforce's (CRM) operating segments' performance in its recently announced fiscal 2Q17 results. In its earnings release, Salesforce announced the introduction of "Salesforce Einstein," an AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform, at its upcoming annual 2016 Dreamforce conference. According to Salesforce, Einstein is "the world's first comprehensive artificial intelligence platform for CRM." The Salesforce Einstein platform has its foundation in different acquisitions the company has made in the past like RelateIQ, MetaMind, Implisit Insights, PredictionIO, and Tempo, as the above chart shows. Salesforce stated, "We've been able to stitch all this together and focus on AI. AI is the next wave of our industry and has resulted in a machine learning team of more than 175 data scientists who have built this amazing Einstein platform."