IBM’s Watson and Salesforce’s Einstein to collaborate on AI, cloud platforms

Technology giants IBM and Salesforce are expanding their strategic partnership by bringing together their artificial intelligence and cloud computing platforms to help companies connect with customers and collaborate more effectively with deeper insights.

Salesforce has named IBM as a preferred cloud services provider and IBM has named Salesforce as its preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service, the companies said in a release.

“This expanded partnership builds on the combined power of Watson and Einstein to help enterprises make smarter business decisions,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chairman, president and chief executive officer.

Watson and Einstein are the artificial intelligence platforms of IBM and Salesforce respectively.

As a part of this extended strategic partnership, IBM will build newIBM WatsonQuip Live Apps, bringing the power of Watson and Quip together. Quip is a cloud-based word processing application.

“These interactive custom-built applications will be embedded directly into any Quip document to increase the effectiveness of sales teams across the lifecycle of an opportunity,” the statement added.

With Quip’s document creation and editing platform, customers are able to bring relevant content, for any project, into a centralised document, removing the need to toggle between multiple windows and apps to get work done.

Building on the first IBM and Service Cloud integration, the companies will bring together IBM Watson and Service Cloud Einstein to deliver new AI-driven recommendations for future actions.

With AI-driven predictive analytics, companies will be able to create personalised, customer-triggered interactions based on the latest call or messaging chat they had.

“The combination of IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Einstein and Quip will deliver even more innovation to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way, leveraging the power of the cloud and AI,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive officer of Salesforce.

Earlier, the companies had entered into an agreement to deliver joint solutions that leverage the power of AI and enable companies to make smarter and faster decisions.

“With more than 4,000 joint customers, the partnership has already helped companies, such as [design and engineering software] Autodesk, implement new Watson solutions to connect more deeply with their customers,” the companies said.

Earning $17 billion in annual cloud revenue, IBM has nearly 60 cloud data centres across 19 countries.