For anyone who’s getting their first introduction to Einstein AI features, now rapidly being deployed in the Salesforce platform, two questions may arise. Why is this different from past cycles of AI excitement and disappointment? Why is an integrated layer of AI capability so crucial to a modern CRM?
Six decades of research, development, and sci-fi hype have followed the first famous “Dartmouth memo” – which naïvely proposed “a 2 month, 10 man study” as being enough to make “a significant advance” in “how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.” The challenge was clearly much greater than first realized: most observers agree that people had vastly underestimated the portion of our intelligence that comes from what we know, rather than how cleverly we think.
In laboratory settings and research universities, the focus was on making software smart. The challenge of making an overall system knowledgeable was harder to address, in a world of limited connection – with international bandwidth availability at a slow drip of less than one Terabit per second as recently as 2010. At that time, we began an extraordinary surge of new connectivity, already moving into tens of Tbits/second on major routes such as US/Europe and US/Asia (with global capacity growing at order of 40 per cent per year).
In such a massively connected world, it becomes attractive to flip the AI process: to move from a model of “knowledge engineers,” slowly structuring human expertise into unwieldy collections of brittle and soon-outdated rules, to a far more scalable and sustainable model of dense and rich networks of representation built quickly by machine-learning algorithms.
Machine learning would be only a laboratory curiosity, in the absence of readily accessible sources of relevant knowledge to feed the beast – but the raw bandwidth of connection, already discussed, becomes a cornucopia of insights when it is fed by the stream of situational and personal data that arises in a world of smartphones.
