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.

Take advantage of a new practice created by Bluewolf, an IBM company, to help clients rapidy deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities. Bluewolf will also develop new industry-specific accelerators to speed up adoption of cognitive applications.

This year, artificial intelligence has taken center stage as a technology to watch. From Salesforce to IBM to Oracle to Microsoft, all technology providers have been honing some version of AI and machine learning technologies. Microsoft rolled out its latest iteration of services for AI at the Microsoft Ignite conference in September. At Ignite, the company outlined Microsoft artificial intelligence in four areas of technology: agents, applications, services and infrastructure. By bringing AI to these four areas, Microsoft is hoping to make applications like Outlook more intelligent, helping workers to find documents relevant to their meetings more easily.