As such, it should be no surprise that many forward-thinking companies are already experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve their processes and service their customers better. Primarily, AI is currently being deployed in customer service as a means to either augment, or in some cases replace human agents. The primary goals of these initiatives are to improve the customer experience, and reduce costs associated with human service agents. While it is of course true that AI and automation technologies are not yet sophisticated enough to perform all of the tasks currently undertaken by human representatives, many routine consumer requests are simple enough for AI to handle without human input. Perhaps more importantly, AI can deliver a level of responsiveness to an influx of customer requests that isn't humanly possible – or at least isn't possible without spending a fortune on staffing.

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 has announced Service Cloud Einstein to deliver artificial intelligence solutions to customer service agents. Salesforce pushed Einstein, its AI platform, heavily at Dreamforce last year. It has a huge development focus on the product. This effort has culminated in the release of Einstein for Service cloud. It delivers artificial intelligence, arguably machine learning, to the service industry.

The implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for customer service are staggering and truly limitless. But until now, most customer service leaders have been unable to put intelligence in action. They lacked the army of data scientists needed to make sense of the data. And even if they were able to find and hire the data scientists - then what? How to integrate it with their existing customer service technology stack?

In a major initiative that has been in the works for two years, Salesforce is integrating artificial intelligence into all of its CRM cloud platforms. It enables any business to use clicks or code to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction. Their AI system learns from all of the data you enter about your customers and prospects (CRM data, email, calendar, social, ERP, and IoT), and makes predictions and recommendations on actions you should consider. Salesforce Einstein is designed to help their customers take advantage of the huge amounts of data produced by making sense of it and seeing trends before humans typically do. What Salesforce has done is to make the use of artificial intelligence possible for all businesses, without have to employ their own data science teams.