Having been in the salesforce ecosystem for over 10 years, I always await their flashy marketing announcements. At times, I feel like products are announced too early and don’t quite have enough pop. See: Lightning Interface and Einstein.
This time around though, I feel that salesforce has thrown some weight behind their latest announcement. The way they shaped the announcement through TechCrunch is what makes it that much more enticing.
They’ve started to peel back the covers as to what Einstein is, and how it can benefit the masses. And from what I’ve read, I’m excited by the prospects. I’ll break them down with some opinions and thoughts.
What gets me the most excited about these tools are the possiblities to extend the platform’s power to outside applications leveraging the force.com platform. Coming up with sophisticated AI is no small task. While these will still require quite a bit of heavy lifting from experienced development teams, the fact that salesforce is packing this power as part of their platform is exciting.
Einstein Sentiment tool:
Essentially, what this tool claims to do is allow machines to understand misnomers in language, such as sarcasm, or awkwardly phrased sentences.
I can see this tool being powerful for being able to tell if a review or comment is positive or negative, weed out trolls in public message boards and forums, or even breaking down a long email, article or paragraph to a TLDR to be consumed in bite sized chunks.
Einstein Object Detection:
This tool claims to be able to recognize images through training by shape, color or number.
I can see this tool being useful in being able to take a picture of a stack of equipment for inventory purposes, grab the serial numbers and categorize them.
Another interesting use could be allowing people to take a picture of their newly purchased product with geolocation and the company understanding where their products are being used during a registration process.
At a minimum, I consider all this thought-provoking and got out of my seat by the lake on my vacation to whip up this article. I hope you find it as interesting as I did!
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