Artificial Intelligence in Practice

39Salesforce: How Artificial Intelligence Helps Businesses Understand Their Customers

Salesforce is one of the world's leading suppliers of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Its products and services are built to help businesses grow and track relationships with their customers.

When it was founded in 1999, Salesforce pioneered the concept of software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivered over the internet (now most commonly referred to as “in the cloud”).

Rather than selling or licensing software packages for customers to install and run autonomously on their own machines, SaaS providers charge a subscription fee for customers to access software running on their servers.

For vendors, this provides an ongoing revenue stream. For customers, it removes the hassle of having to maintain and update installations and deal with compatibility issues, while generally also lowering initial setup and deployment costs.¹

With the emergence of cognitive, smart computing platforms as a dominant trend in business IT, it is now using the same cloud delivery model to arm its customers – businesses – with artificial intelligence (AI), and help them in turn understand and better manage their own customer bases.

What Problem Is Artificial Intelligence Helping To Solve?

Today's businesses face the challenge of maintaining customer relationships across a plethora of channels – from old fashioned mail shots to social media and chatbots, often trying to acquire and retain customers across ...