For the last year or so Salesforce has been on a rampage acquiring startups that utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help employees (especially Sales professionals) see the right information at the right time. With the clock clicking down to Dreamforce 2016, Salesforce has starting dropping hints that AI will be the big theme this year... for example this week's announcement of SalesforceIQ Inbox Calendar. (see image below)
SalesforceIQ Inbox was launched at Dreamforce 2015, and is the result of the acquisition of RelateIQ, an intelligent email client that helps Sales professionals manage their customer relationships right within their inbox. This week's announcement adds calendar functionality, which comes from Tempo.AI, a smart calendar application Salesforce acquired last year.
The new SalesforceIQ Inbox Calendar examines meeting invitees and shows connections to Salesforce CRM records for the attendees and their organizations. By providing information in context of the meeting invite, people don't need to copy/paste and manually switch between multiple applications to access the information and actions they need.
As the number of tools people use to get their job done grows... for example: email, calendars, social media, tasks, file-sharing, CRM records, and on and on... it becomes increasingly difficult to link together all of the relevant people, content, and conversations. By providing a more seamless experience, Salesforce is taking the right steps to helping people become more efficient and perform more effectively. The integrated email, calendar, task and CRM experience is just the beginning of what Constellation Research expects to see from SalesforceIQ. The next steps involve leveraging AI to help people be more proactive and to automate many of the manual processes employees currently follow.
