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Salesforce Research is the research arm of Salesforce, focusing on advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Salesforce research advances techniques for new AI research directions, trusted AI products, and applications that the company believes will have a positive impact on society. The division is made up of researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers working across pure research, applied research, and new product incubation. Research areas are divided into AI for society, AI for enterprise, and fundamental AI research:
- Science—biology, medicine, and sustainability
- Economics—equality, social welfare, and economic trade-offs using AI and data-driven simulations
- Environment—reducing harm to the environment
- Conversational AI—advancing how technology interacts with people in a humanlike way
- Natural language processing (NLP)—classification, summarization, translation, and generation
- Multimodal data intelligence—understanding content and generating personalized insights using various data types
- AI for operations—systems to improve operational efficiency
- Software intelligence—productivity and enhancing software quality
- Fundamental AI—representation, reinforcement, multitask learning, and human-in-the-loop
Salesforce regularly publishes academic research at NLP and computer vision conferences and posts more accessible research summaries, news, events, and behind-the-scenes content. The main hub for Salesforce's AI research is the company's Palo Alto office. The company also has a research center in Suntec City, Singapore. Salesforce recruits AI research personnel in the United States, Canada, India, Australia, and Singapore.
Key Salesforce Research projects include The AI Economist—an open-source framework for economic policy design, and Salesforce Einstein—an integrated set of AI technologies for customer relationship management (CRM). On March 7, 2023, Salesforce announced Einstein GPT (a generative AI system for CRM) and Salesforce Ventures' $250 million Generative AI Fund. The fund will invest in high-potential start-ups to help the development of responsible, trusted, and generative AI.
In March 2016, Salesforce acquired the machine learning start-up PredictionIO. This was followed by the company buying the deep learning start-up Metamind on April 4, 2016. Metamind was backed by Salesforce cofounder and chief executive Marc Benioff. Upon the acquisition, Metamind cofounder and chief executive Richard Sover wrote in a blog post:
Salesforce plans to integrate MetaMind’s technology into Salesforce services
These acquisitions came as Salesforce was also building up its data science team, with key members joining from LinkedIn.
Salesforce Research was founded on September 19, 2016, at the same time Salesforce Einstein was launched. The new research group brought together a team of researchers and data scientists headed by Richard Socher, formerly of Metamind and now chief scientist at Salesforce. Areas of focus cited at the launch of the group included deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. During a press briefing after the announcement of the new group, Socher declined to say how many people were part of the team, although he did say that some of Salesforce’s 175 data scientists were joining the newly organized division.
On April 29, 2020, Salesforce Research announced The AI Economist, a framework for studying how to improve economic design using AI. Designed to simulate millions of years of economies in parallel, the framework aims to help economists, governments, and other organizations when designing tax policies. In July 2020, Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher announced he was leaving the company to create his own start-up. While leading Salesforce Research, Socher oversaw the rise of Einstein cloud AI services in use cases such as computer vision, natural language models, translation, and personalized CRM search results. On March 7, 2023, Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, a generative AI system for CRM, and a new $250 million generative AI fund.
Salesforce Einstein is a set of AI technologies for CRM. The company's tools have a range of functionality, including anticipating customer needs, proactively resolving cases, and creating personalized marketing. Salesforce Einstein is available through Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Platform, Analytics Cloud, and Community Cloud.
In March 2023, Salesforce announced a new generative AI system called Einstein GPT, capable of producing personalized content across every Salesforce cloud (sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction). The system supports public and private AI models built for CRM and is trained on real-time data. Einstein GPT integrates with OpenAI for out-of-the-box capabilities. It combines Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, unifying all of a company’s customer data.
