Dive Brief:
- Salesforce's board has gotten a lot more familiar with the company's artificial intelligence program, Einstein. CEO Mark Benioff told a World Economic Forum panel that Einstein sits in on executive meetings every Monday morning and tells him what it thinks, reports CNBC.
- The software recently pushed back against one employee's reports and helped Benioff and the rest of the team identify an unknown problem, according to the report. Einstein has been "sitting in" on meetings for over a year.
- Salesforce and IBM recently extended their partnership to bring Salesforce services, including Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein, to the IBM Cloud and Watson IoT platform, according to an IBM announcement last week.
Great to be in Atlanta with Salesforce Einstein and Astro! We're taking AI and CRM to a new level today! pic.twitter.com/7b2jfcYSQ0
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) December 1, 2016
Dive Insight:
Benioff's announcement shows that robots and AI are invading every level of business, from assembly line workers to the C-suite.
AI, ML and deep learning can assess a situation more holistically than its human counterpart and oftentimes make better recommendations. But carrying out conclusions ultimately falls to humans — at least for now.
The average company still has a long way to go before AI starts sitting in on upper level meetings, but this reality is not far off for many major companies. Leading organizations touch the lives of millions, sometimes billions of people.
As machines begin making more decisions, companies and regulators need to decide where to draw the line of accountability and ethics.
