Marco della Cava

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Looks like Einstein is getting a little help from Watson.

Customer relationship management company Salesforce announced Monday an artificial intelligence partnership with IBM aimed at boosting the range of predictive analytics it can provide clients.

Salesforce Einstein, an AI platform that debuted last year that mines data to help salespeople close leads, will combine with IBM Watson to provide data-based insights for businesses.

For example, an insurance company running Salesforce could use real-time weather updates from Watson to warn customers about impending bad weather. Or Watson's retail industry data could combine with Einstein's customer-habit information to create targeted campaigns for shoppers.

"AI is accelerating," says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, adding that partnering with IBM was a natural given "how I respect how they have stayed true to customer values, and that admiration has turned into huge business opportunities."

As part of the agreement, IBM will begin deploying the Salesforce Service Cloud across the company. The combined Einstein/Watson platform integration is expected in the second half of the year. To date, Salesforce and IBM share roughly 5,000 customers, including Citibank and Farmers Insurance.

"We’ve been at (AI) the longest with Watson, but we’re at beginning of an era where AI will be able to make so much of what we do better," says IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. "There's so much data out there we can’t control. Studies show that of all the decisions we make, a third are OK, a third are suboptimal and a third are not correct. AI can help with that."

IBM Watson currently is used by roughly 1 billion people a day. Although talk of AI and robotics often is accompanied by concerns about everything from employment to privacy, Rometty expresses faith in the progressive side of the technology. "I prefer to call it augmented intelligence, because it's in the service of man," she says.

In fact, the storied super-computer manufacturer also announced Monday it is creating a new division, IBM Q, that will focus on the next generation man-made brain whose quantum computing skills will dwarf the data-crunching power of today's best machines.

"Quantum computing will us allow to take things much farther, to model things we couldn't model, and come up with drugs of materials discoveries that weren't possible because you couldn't model all the permutations fast enough," says Rometty, who has said the "decision-making market" will be a $2 trillion business by 2025.

The Watson deal with Salesforce comes at a time when IBM is struggling to reinvent itself on the heels of an industry pivot to cloud computing. Four years of declining revenues have also led to thousands of layoffs.

In December, Rometty wrote in an op-ed piece in USA TODAY that the company planned to hire 25,000 employees and spend $1 billion to retrain current staffers.

Salesforce, which was co-founded by former Oracle exec Benioff 18 years ago, recently posted fourth quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations. The company said it plans to reach its stated goal of $10 billion in revenue in the next year.

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