While far from being a core feature of most CRMs, Gartner found that artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics have the highest interest from businesses across sales, marketing, customer experience, and digital commerce--the four major CRM services (full content available to Gartner clients). Salesforce is one of the earliest adopters of AI capabilities and technology and the largest customer relationship management (CRM) software vendor, owning 19.5% of the CRM vendor market. In fact, it's one of the first CRM vendors to have AI capabilities; it launched its AI tool, Salesforce Einstein, in September of 2016 for select modules. In this piece, we'll explain what Salesforce Einstein is, as well as provide an overview of the primary features it brings to the table so you can make a more informed decision when purchasing your next CRM. It uses data gathered on every user action to provide predictive analytics, natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, and machine learning to Salesforce customers.

Throughout the course of a day it's pretty common to speak to a number of colleagues and clients, yet we now have the ability to converse with an unlikely but familiar source: Salesforce's Einstein. Many Salesforce users will already have some experience with this artificial intelligence component, as it's been a central feature in Salesforce's cloud services, but Einstein now has become even more sophisticated. Unveiled at Dreamforce last week as one of the latest innovations, AI and voice-based functionality are now integrated into Einstein to give users a new way to access valuable information with voice control. Marc Benioff's opening keynote included a demo of Einstein's new voice capability, which was given an even greater focus during the Salesforce Einstein keynote led by Marco Casalaina, VP of Product Management. He shared a stat from Fortune that 7 out of 10 businesses using AI say they've achieved little to nothing from their efforts and investments.

At its annual Dreamforce mega-conference in San Francisco, Salesforce today introduced the next steps in its Einstein Voice project, which it first announced last year. Einstein Voice is the company's AI voice assistant. You can think of it as Salesforce's Alexa or Google Assistant, but with a more focused mission. During a briefing ahead of the event, Salesforce Chief Product Officer Bret Taylor showed off an Einstein and Alexa enabled Einstein speaker (Salesforce chairman and co-CEO Marc Benioff was supposed to be at the meeting, too, but for unknown reasons, he didn't show) -- and yes, it looked like Salesforce's Einstein cartoon figure and its voluminous white hair lit up when it responded to queries. The company isn't planning on making these devices available to the public, but it does show off the work the company has done with Amazon to integrate the service (though is by no means an Amazon -exclusive since the company is also working to bring Einstein to Google devices).

Move over mobile marketing: A little voice is whispering that your time as "the next big thing" is almost up. Actually, that whisper is more of a shout, and it's "Echo"-ing across the digital landscape, as voice-response technology is rapidly emerging as the most disruptive force to hit the industry since the internet became a visual medium. Just how loud will this sonic boom be? If your brand is starting to hear Siri's siren-like call to action, here are some insights and considerations you might find helpful: Research from OC&C Strategy Consultants projects that voice shopping will jump to $40 billion in 2022 (up from $2 billion today). However, the last-touch voice commerce experience has yet to reach the mass adoption levels that retailers like Amazon initially envisioned.