David Needle

Someday new technology will let consumers explore new virtual worlds and augmented reality wearing a simple pair of affordable glasses or even contact lenses. But Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the company’s F8 developer conference in San Jose, Calif. April 18 to declare that day is still years away. “I used to […]

A global survey of 4,100 executives and employees shows that most companies don’t have the management skills, organizational culture or technology in place to make collaboration pay off broadly. The study found that only 27 percent of executives place a priority on collaborative tools and yet 96 percent of executives blame ineffective collaboration and communities […]

The sales process is changing. In person meetings and traditional sales calls have been largely replaced by digital technologies. Sales professionals now typically spend six times more hours in front of a computer or mobile screen than in the field, according to Salesforce.com. Last September the CRM giant introduced Einstein, artificial intelligence technology designed to […]

A year ago Salesforce.com launched Financial Services Cloud for financial planners and wealth advisors. Now the Customer Relationship Management company has enhanced that service by adding elements of artificial intelligence designed to proactively inform financial advisors of their client’s overall “wealth ecosystem” and opportunities to sell more services. “Financial advisors have more data than they […]

LinkedIn bought PointDrive in the summer of 2016 with plans to integrate the content and presentation-sharing app with its Sales Navigator software for sales people. Now those plans have come to fruition with today’s announcement that PointDrive is part of Sales Navigator. LinkedIn also announced improvements to the way Sales Navigator integrates with customer relationship […]

SAN FRANCISCO—With most of its product news slated for day two of its Google Cloud Next conference here, the opening keynote March 8 focused mainly on new customer announcements and the growth of the Google Cloud Platform. Google is widely considered the number three player in the cloud and a relative late-comer, trailing Amazon and […]

Salesforce Einstein is gaining image recognition features. Salesforce.com has announced Einstein Vision a set of application program interfaces designed to help companies build customer relationship management apps with image recognition features. While image recognition and CRM may not seem like an obvious fit, Salesforce said the pairing has huge potential. For example, companies could use […]

In a move that promises to infuse Artificial Intelligence more broadly throughout the enterprise, IBM and Salesforce announced a global partnership that is essentially an endorsement of their respective technologies—Watson and Einstein. Specifically, IBM said the deal, announced March 6, is designed to bring the two companies AI technologies together resulting in joint solution that […]

Jumping aggressively on the artificial intelligence bandwagon, Zoho says its new Zia assistant will eventually be implemented across its suite of office productivity apps. On Feb. 28, the company unwrapped Zia for Zoho CRM, a proactive online sales assistant that suggests workflows and macros to streamline frequent procedures and gives salespeople advice such as the […]

SAP is greatly expanding its developer strategy via an alliance with Apple, and recasting the SAP HANA Cloud Platform as simply SAP Cloud Platform with new capabilities designed for developers, internet of things and big data projects.  The enterprise software giant is scheduled to make the announcement Feb. 27 at the Mobile World Congress in […]