More than 1.2 trillion photos will be taken in 2017 according to InfoTrends, changing the way we communicate with the world and unlocking new potential for business. These photos contain important insights-- on everything from inventory level and product quality, to consumer trends and customer preferences-- and leveraging these visual clues allows companies to enrich sales leads, automate service case resolution and optimize marketing campaigns.  

Today, we’re happy to announce Einstein Vision, a set of powerful new APIs that allow force.com and Heroku developers of all skill levels to bring image recognition to CRM and build AI-powered apps fast. Now, everyone can leverage pre-trained image classifiers, or train their own custom classifiers to solve a vast array of image-recognition use cases, empowering end users across sales, service, and marketing to be smarter and more predictive.

With Einstein Vision the power of image recognition can easily be embedded in any app, with just clicks. For example:

• Visual search provides customers with visual filters to find products that best match their preferences and take photos of your products to discover where they can make purchases in-store or online.

• Brand detection allows marketers to increase marketing reach, brand integrity and ad campaign ROI by analyzing user-generated images in communities, review boards and social media. Now marketers can build a better understanding of customer preference and lifestyle to improve customer experiences.

• Product identification streamlines sales and service by giving reps the ability to evaluate product issues before sending technicians into the field, discover which products are out of stock or misplaced and measure shelf-share to optimize product mix and selling potential.
  

For example a leading retail and self-service wholesaler is using Einstein Vision’s image recognition technology to improve their lead qualification process for its hotel, restaurant and catering division. With Visual Search capabilities, the group’s 50-person sales team determines which leads are most likely to buy digital hospitality tools by classifying restaurants' interior, menu and layout. Augmenting leads with the right data used to be time consuming and expensive, but with Einstein Vision it’s done in a matter of minutes-- with just clicks, streamlining the sales process and delivering new levels of customer success.

Einstein Vision is based on Salesforce Research’s computer vision breakthroughs and is the first example of how Salesforce is leveraging cutting edge research to simplify the complexities of AI for our customers. These advances in image recognition are ushering in a new era of customer success by enabling companies to discover insights about their customers and predict outcomes that lead to smarter decisions. We look forward to the amazing products and features the  developer community will build with these AI-powered APIs.