It's no secret that customer experience has become critical for all businesses across the board. But these days customer experience goes well beyond sending out an email blast, addressing the customer by their first name, and showing them a plethora of products that they might be interested in.

Customer experience is about giving customers highly-personalized and contextualized interactions that speak directly to their wants and anticipate their needs. In other words, they want VIP treatment at each touchpoint with your business.

Increasingly, businesses are turning to new AI technology to help them achieve this. For example, Black Diamond, an online retailer of high-end skiing and hiking equipment, actively predicts the needs and wants of their customers. They rely on a sophisticated analysis of their customers' past purchases, current weather conditions, and other insightful pieces of data to decide which products to suggest to each customer.

With AI becoming more prominent in customer engagement strategy, IT teams are now moving from the pure tech to the business realm of customer experience, collaborating with marketing, sales, and customer care teams to help them deliver the best customer experience possible.

AI and machine learning have been around for over 20 years. Why does it top the CIO’s priority list today? 3 things happened that made AI more powerful and real than ever: proliferation of data, better algorithms, and more powerful compute power. These 3 factors combined have created a precedent for AI to rapidly accelerate and take the world of tech and business by storm. In fact, according to CB Insights, AI startups received more than $5 billion in venture-capital funding in 2016, and the global market intelligence firm IDC projects that worldwide revenues from cognitive systems and AI will reach $47 billion by 2020. With Accenture forecasting that AI will double annual economic growth in 12 countries by 2035, you don't need a crystal ball to know that the future of AI is bright.

Implementing AI With Lean Teams

Many people believe that intelligent, data-fueled technology such as AI will require large teams of data scientists to sift through huge amounts of data to glean useful nuggets of information. Problem is, there's a severe shortage of data scientists equipped to do this work, even though demand for them is increasing exponentially. A McKinsey study predicts that the number of data science jobs in the United States alone will exceed 490,000 in 2018, but there are fewer than 200,000 data scientists available to fill these positions.

The good news: large teams of data scientists aren't needed to implement AI, thanks to technology like Salesforce Einstein. Your business can now leverage sophisticated AI built right into your CRM because customer intelligence platforms can bridge the gap between IT and non-tech teams. Our point-and-click tools make adding AI apps and experiences intuitive and easy to implement — even for traditionally non-tech teams.

With Salesforce Einstein, we do the data prep, we have built the models and the predictions and calibrated those models and we have plumbed it directly into the system. This tool democratizes AI and puts it in reach for all.

The advantage of a customer intelligence platform like Salesforce Einstein is that a low-code environment frees your employees, including IT, from low-level tasks so they can instead focus on creating authentic, personalized customer experiences.

When it comes to customer engagement strategy, Salesforce Einstein helps make your IT team an integral part of creating and implementing the customer journey. In this new environment, IT acts as a coach for traditionally non-tech teams. This collaborative approach, coupled with the capabilities of Salesforce Einstein not only gives your customers the highly-personalized, contextualized experience they seek, it also enables IT to take on a more active role in customer-engagement strategies.

Would you like to learn more about how Salesforce Einstein can empower your IT team? Download the whitepaper to find out.