There is a big focus this week in Salesforce Briefs on AI with Einstein Platform being released for Developer’s, with several new tools being announced.  Also in this week’s brief, how AI can help Sales Enablement, ‘CRM‘ stock to double in 3yrs and finally did you ever think you would see Oracle and Salesforce agree on something?!  I know I didn’t…

Salesforce introduces Einstein Platform (AI tools for developers)

The slow and steady release of Einstein across the Salesforce multiverse continues this week, with Einstein Platform being unveiled to the world.

After Salesforce announced the Account Based Marketing AI suite last month and attention has now turned to helping out platform developers.  Who can now have access to some cool new additions such as Intent & Sentiment Analysis!

This means developers can now start use AI to analyse comments/text to understand if it is positive/neutral/negative in sentiment or also use Einstein to analyse the intent of a request (to then help route to the correct queue as an example).

Forbes has an article around the dawn of the ‘data developer’ here, and a quick look into where this trend might end up.

How AI can help Sales Enablement

Firstly, the term Sales Enablement isn’t very common outside of North America.  So what are we talking about here?  Ultimately the function of sales enablement is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

So it is a domain that is ripe for AI to help drive insights about the buying process.  We saw previously how Marc Benioff is using AI to empower Salesforce’s forecast meetings.

The insights and trend analysis that machine learning can deliver will help to unleash productivity within any sales organisation.  And this article looks at how it will support Sales Enablement in this push towards the future.

Salesforce (CRM) stock to double?

One of Salesforce’s major shareholders is making bold claims about the share price having room to grow.  To watch the video, click here.  This is in no way financial advice, but interesting if it proves true…

We all know Salesforce has been flying along recently.  But from my point of view the competition in the CRM space is about to really heat up.  Microsoft is starting to slowly find its feet, Oracle is not to be underestimated and SAP is also in the pack…  Not to mention all the yappy upstarts like Pipedrive, Zoho, etc.

The CRM playing field is about to get very crowded.

Oracle, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce finally agree on something…

(I loved this headline from The Register!  It really hit the nail on the head…)

The High Tech Innovators Alliance (HTIA) a lobby group which has been formed and is backed by eight tech giants (the above mentioned, alongside Adobe, Cisco, Intel and Dell).  Why is this interesting?  They have formed this lobby group to try and get politicians to fix problems that surround patent law currently.  Because at the moment it seems anyone can sue anyone.  With the aim to make it more difficult for patent trolls to sue them and others.

Hopefully this doesn’t stifle innovation, but instead affords innovators correct protections for their ideas.