Salesforce has acquired deep learning technology start-up MetaMind with a view to embedding artificial intelligence within its services.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was a key backer of the tech company, which is less than two years old.
MetaMind CEO Richard Socher announced the deal in a post on his blog but did not reveal any financial details.
“Salesforce plans to integrate MetaMind’s technology into Salesforce services,” he wrote.
“With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we’ll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalise customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes.
“We’ll extend Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.”
He now describes himself on the blog as ‘chief scientist’ at Salesforce.
MetaMind is based in Palo Alto, California, close to Salesforce’s San Francisco HQ.
It creates deep learning technology that helps “simplify, improve and automate” decision making and was designed to predict outcomes for language, vision and database tasks.
CRM firm Salesforce, which acquired machine learning start-up PredictionIO earlier this year, is the latest technology giant to invest in AI after Facebook, Google and Microsoft all sank millions into the area this year.
Free users of MetaMind will lose access to it on May 4 before services for paid users are halted on June 4.
“We’ll delete any data we have stored for unpaid web users and monthly recurring users promptly after close,” wrote Socher.
“We plan to continue our AI research, so you’ll continue to see us publish groundbreaking discoveries that advance our deep learning platform’s accuracy and capabilities.”