M+E Daily

IBM and Salesforce executives touted the advancements that have been made in artificial intelligence (AI), as well as their visions for the technology, at the IBM InterConnect conference in Las Vegas March 21.

Earlier this month, the companies announced a pact combining their respective AI platforms, IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein.

The partnership is expected to enhance customer engagement for companies that use the services of IBM and Salesforce, David Havlek, Salesforce EVP of finance, said at the time.

“With Einstein and Watson coming together, we can do things we haven’t done before,” Ginni Rometty, chairman, president and CEO of IBM, said at InterConnect March 21. Salesforce’s clients have a “huge amount of their own data” about customers and IBM has a lot of data outside the customer relationship management (CRM) arena, including weather via IBM’s purchase of The Weather Company last year, she said.

AI and related technologies “will have an impact on how people live and how they work, and they will have some impact on jobs,” she said, but added: “They will also solve many more problems than they will create.”

She went on to cite three main principles governing the use of AI going forward: That the “goal is augmented intelligence” in which AI is used in the “service of mankind,” there must be transparency when AI is used for clients, and it’s important to help build skills for the “new collar” jobs that will be created as a result of AI and related technologies.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO and chairman, then stressed the important role that education will play. “There’s an acceleration going on” with AI technology, he told the conference. “It’s honestly surprised me. I can’t believe how fast artificial intelligence is evolving and changing,” he said. Benioff added that it’s crucial for the U.S. workforce to be “ready for the changes that are coming based on” AI because “there’s a lot of shifts that are going to really unfold.”

Benioff went on to say: “I don’t think anyone really knew five years ago, three years ago, that we would be there today” when it comes to the abilities of software and optics used in deep learning technology. “So, I don’t think we can completely understand where we’re going to be five or 10 years from now.”

AT&T and IBM, meanwhile, partnered on a new Internet of Things (IoT) analytics capability powered by IBM Watson. The pilot collaboration between the two companies was designed to help AT&T’s enterprise customers “transform their industrial IoT data into analytic insights so they can take immediate action to improve business operations,” they said in a news release.

AT&T and IBM will offer AT&T’s enterprise customers insights from their industrial IoT data by “tapping into,” among other things: the IBM Watson IoT portfolio for connecting, building, launching and managing IoT apps and devices, including analytics capabilities such as predictive maintenance that provides insights to improve asset performance; the IBM Watson Data Platform; and the IBM Machine Learning Service, the companies said.

Previously, in 2016, AT&T and IBM announced plans to integrate the AT&T Flow Designer cloud-based development tool with the IBM Watson IoT Platform and IBM Bluemix, IBM’s Cloud Platform.

Stressing the value of owning content and responding quickly to changes in the industry including advertising and mobile device usage, AT&T CEO and chairman Randall Stephenson told the conference that his company was buying Time Warner because “we want” all the content owned by Time Warner – including CNN, HBO and Warner Bros. – “curated, formatted, developed for a mobile environment, and we think that by owning the content, we can move this innovation much faster.” He named Time Warner after mistakenly identifying the company AT&T was buying as rival telecom T-Mobile. Quickly catching his error, he joked: “We tried that once. It didn’t work.”

IBM’s Rometty also told the conference that her company’s new cloud data center in China was its 51st to date, in its 21st country. The data center is part of an agreement announced March 20 with Wanda Internet Technology Group that calls for the formation of a new Wanda Cloud Company built on IBM’s Cloud Platform.