IBM and Salesforce announced they are building on their partnership by combining IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein. As part of the collaboration, IBM will build IBM Watson Quip Live Apps, merging the power of Watson and Quip. Using these apps, customers will be able to leverage Watson's cognitive computing abilities when using Quip's document creation and editing platform. According to the companies, the combination of the platforms will provide new AI-driven recommendations for next best actions. IBM and Salesforce originally announced they were joining forces in March 2017.

Watson and Einstein are becoming firm friends in business. Jointly acting to bolster their strategic partnership, IBM and Salesforce are leveraging each other's capabilities to provide deeper insights and connect with customers. IBM has named Salesforce its preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service, while Salesforce has named IBM a preferred cloud services provider. It is planned that IBM Cloud and Watson services will be combined with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein. IBM is set to build IBM Watson Quip Live Apps, bringing the Quip collaborative productivity software suite from Salesforce on board with IBM Watson.

Salesforce and IBM announced an expansion of their strategic partnership on Friday, with the firms combining the power of IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein, the firms announced in a joint press release Friday. Two top tech firms like Salesforce and IBM connecting their artificial intelligence (AI) platforms reinforces the growing value of AI and big data in the enterprise. AI, especially, is taking center stage as one of the battleground technologies for business, and this is a clear example of two CEOs making a move to reinforce that with their partnership. In the release, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said that the combination of Watson and Einstein will "help enterprises make smarter business decisions." Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff echoed this sentiment, saying in the release that the combo will "deliver even more innovation to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way, leveraging the power of the cloud and AI." SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) Specifically, the Watson/Einstein combination will provide actionable next steps in a given process, the release said.

The rapid advance in the relationship between IBM and Salesforce has largely been driven by IBM's acquisition of Bluewolf, one of the earliest and largest of Salesforce's systems integration partners. Corrine Sklar, CMO of Bluewolf, told CRN that the conversation between the CEOs resonated, and the channel also has a huge role to play in presenting artificial intelligence to customers the right way. Even if customers don't ask, "it is our responsibility to bring up those issues," Sklar said. The Russian manipulation of Facebook is a great example, she said. Big tech companies have lots of data, but often don't spot the problems they're not looking for.

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.

IBM is teaming up with Salesforce to make it easier for Salesforce customers to use data from IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform. As part of the partnership, IBM has signed a deal to deploy the Salesforce Service Cloud for internal use there. The value of the deal and proposed pricing of the joint products were not disclosed. The deal has several parts. Both companies, like many others in the tech industry, are making investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, by which computer programs attempt to connect data in new ways to provide new kinds of insights and assistance to users, and both frequently cite the importance of AI in their sales pitches to customers.

According to IBM and Salesforce, the answer to both of those questions is yes. The two Fortune 500 companies on Monday afternoon revealed a sweeping global strategic partnership that aligns one iconic company's multiyear turnaround effort with another's staggering growth ambitions. According to the terms of the deal, IBM and Salesforce will integrate artificial intelligence platforms (Watson and Einstein, respectively) and some of their software and services (e.g. a Salesforce component to ingest The Weather Company's meteorological data). Why not go it alone? Fortune spoke on the phone with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to get a better understanding of the motives behind the deal.