Constellation Insights

Salesforce is continuing its steady stream of Einstein AI announcements, unveiling three new platform services that developers can inject into applications for sales, support, marketing and commerce.

The services include Einstein Sentiment, Einstein Intent and Einstein Object Recognition. They are derived from Einstein capabilities Salesforce gained through last year's acquisition of MetaMind.

Sentiment identifies positive, negative and neutral messages about a company or its products on social media, message boards and other sources, while Intent can classify and route cases or leads, or personalize responses in sales service and marketing scenarios.
 
Einstein Sentiment and Intent are pre-trained on words commonly used in front-office communications, including common B2B and B2C support scenarios, but they can also be custom-trained with as few as 50 to 100 examples, Salesforce says.
 

Salesforce had already introduced Einstein Vision, an image recognition service based on MetaMind capabilities in February, but Object Detection goes a level deeper, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

For example, a seller of solar panels could use the Vision Service to differentiate between images of flat-roofed homes and pitched-roof homes, but the Object Detection can differentiate multiple objects within a single image, he notes. Coca Cola did a pilot project with the service, whereby retailers could simply take a picture of their Coke coolers. The Object Detection Service was trained to count the number of bottles or cans of Coke versus Diet Coke versus Sprite and so on and then automatically trigger a restocking order, Henschen says.

Overall, it's important for Salesforce to continue adding not only depth but granularity into its AI services when it comes to developers. "Generic smart applications can only go so far," Henschen says. "I think companies and their developers are excited by the prospect of building custom smart apps."

However, as is often the case with Salesforce, the new platform services aren't yet generally available and no firm dates for that status were provided. Einstein Sentiment and Einstein Intent are now in beta, while Object Detection is in pilot.

The news comes as Salesforce holds its second annual developer conference, TrailheaDX, and seeks to dramatically expand its developer community through an expansive online training platform called Trailhead. Other news announced this week includes Trailhead partnerships with Atlassian and Github, as well as an open beta for Salesforce DX, the company's new developer experience which combines its core Force.com platform with Heroku.

Business Research Themes

Tech Optimization, Data to Decisions, Marketing Transformation, Matrix Commerce

Roles

Chief Information Officer, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Marketing Officer