IBM and Salesforce announce AI pact

IBM and cloud CRM software leader Salesforce.com have announced a deal to couple IBM's AI - Watson's ability to make sense out of data unique to fields such as health care, retail and financial services - with Salesforce's Einstein AI platform to deliver industry-specific insights, predictions and recommendations.

The companies point out that the deal would for example, make it possible for Salesforce's Marketing Cloud apps to plug into Watson programming interfaces (APIs).

This would allow weather, local shopping and retail industry data analysed by Watson to be paired with customer-specific shopping data analysed by Einstein to "send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers."

IBM will also build tools to integrate data from its own on-premise and cloud apps with Salesforce's apps, and a solution from its Weather Company unit that would allow companies to access weather data that could be used by Salesforce apps. For instance, an insurance company using weather forecast data with Salesforce's Service Cloud (customer support software) could alert customers who could be affected by severe weather events.

Though the Salesforce tie-up is one of the more prominent Watson partnerships announced by IBM, Big Blue also had other notable partners including BMW, which uses  Watson to analyse driving data, Medtronic, which uses Watson to analyse data from medical devices for diabetes research, and many others.

With the new offerings to be available in the second half of the year, a wide variety of companies would be better able to target products and services at customers.

According to commentators, the move comes as IBM's latest to pitch Watson to a broad business audience. The company had customised its artificial-intelligence system, to serve the needs of a variety of industries including health care, financial services and automobiles.