IBM and Salesforce will start sharing their AI technology

Today, IBM and Salesforce announced they will connect their artificial intelligence platforms to help companies target and serve customers.

IBM’s natural-language AI program Watson — which conquered the television quiz show “Jeopardy” — will be integrated with Salesforce’s Einstein, the AI that helps mine its hugely popular customer relationship management software, to provide customer purchasing habits and shopping data for businesses that run Salesforce.

That means that an insurance company that uses Salesforce, for example, can also use Watson’s weather data to target customers before a snowstorm to help reduce potential damages. By combining Watson’s data on local retail trends with specific customer data from Salesforce, companies will be able to send highly targeted campaigns to shoppers, according to the companies.

Salesforce customers will be able to start using Watson’s smarts to refine their customer targeting starting in the second half of this year. Pricing for use of the new joint AI products was not disclosed.

As part of the agreement, IBM will start to use Salesforce’s cloud services to help organize its own customer support needs.

Other companies, like Facebook and Twitter, would probably love to provide that level of personalized engagement for businesses that target customers on their platforms, but this new partnership between Salesforce and IBM may prove hard to top.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Explanatory journalism is a public good

At Vox, we believe that everyone deserves access to information that helps them understand and shape the world they live in. That's why we keep our work free. Support our mission and help keep Vox free for all by making a financial contribution to Vox today.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $120/year

Yes, I'll give $120/year

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via