IBM, Salesforce Ink Global AI Partnership

IBM and Salesforce announce a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence. With the partnership, IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein will connect to enable a new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce, etc. IBM is also strategically investing in its Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce with a new practice to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities.

The partnership will bring insights from Watson directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, combining deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson's structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations, which aims to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.

Salesforce and IBM will initially deliver the following:

• IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein Integration (expected to be available in the second half of 2017).
• IBM Weather Insights for Salesforce (expected to be available in the second half of 2017).
• IBM Application Integration Suite for Salesforce (expected to be available by the end of March 2017). 
• Bluewolf Dedicated Consulting Services and Expertise for Cognitive Solutions, Adding to IBM Strategic Services for Salesforce (expected to be available second half of 2017).

As part of the partnership, IBM will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to deliver global product support services and gain a single, unified view of IBM customers.