Salesforce Rolls Out Einstein AI For Social Marketers

Salesforce is making its Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) available to marketers who want to use its image-matching capabilities to keep track of brands and other images on social media.

The new offering, called Einstein Vision for Social Studio, is the company’s latest expansion of Einstein, which has recently been rolled out for the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Financial Services Cloud and the company’s field service product.

Twitter tracking

Last month the introduction of Einstein Vision for Field Service allowed repairmen, for instance, to take a picture of a part to instantly identify it.

Now the same AI-powered image recognition capabilities can scour millions of Twitter posts for brand logos, products, media scenes, foods and drinks.

Social media is no longer primarily text-based, and the Einstein Vision product is a recognition of this fact, Salesforce said.

Previously marketers might have missed a visual reference to a particular product if it wasn’t also mentioned in the text of a post – unless they manually sorted through thousands of images, Salesforce said.

“Social media has become a visually driven medium, with photos and video dominating news feeds,” stated Jen Forrest, director of social media at digital agency DEG, a Salesforce customer.

DEG said it plans to use Einstein to help its clients track how people are interacting with their brands over Twitter.

Food and drink

Einstein Vision is currently available for Twitter with three use cases in mind – tracking trending products and brands and identifying individuals who might benefit from a customer service response.

The product tracker could, for instance, allow marketers to advise a restaurant chain on the introduction of a new menu item by examining trending foods and drinks, while the brand tracker could help companies quantify how sponsorship of an event has exposed their brand.

Salesforce said the customer service offering could help companies identify and engage with those who are using a product that’s been recalled.

Developer APIs

The offering draws on archives of two million brand logos, 60 scenes, 200 foods and 1,000 objects.

Developers of any skill level can build Einstein-powered applications using application programming interfaces (APIs) for image classification and object detection.

Salesforce introduced Einstein with great fanfare last year, saying it planned to build AI into “every core of the platform”, but an analyst said at the time that Einstein was relatively unsophisticated compared to standalone offerings.

The company made an effort to bolster Einstein in March by combining its AI offerings with those of IBM, whose Watson has been applied to fields as diverse as medical diagnostics and winning the television quiz programme Jeopardy.

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