Company Updates

Artificial Intelligence to Deliver Unified Customer Experience

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Michael Dell and Marc Benioff have been known to be great friends and pretty competitive with each other – especially when it’s for a good cause like their past Fitbit challenge to raise funds for American Heart Association.

The two recently reunited on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” to discuss a new strategic technology agreement between Dell Technologies and Salesforce that will  expand the use Salesforce’s CRM tools – now with additional artificial intelligence features – to make customer interactions smarter and more predictive.

photo of the inside of an office through a fisheye lens

“At Dell Technologies, we are 100 percent focused on our customers and on delivering the best customer experiences in the world,” Michael Dell, chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies said in the official announcement of the deal. “Salesforce is helping bring together all of our customer interactions across our family of businesses, which is huge for us, and with the addition of Einstein artificial intelligence, we can make each of those interactions smarter.”

This comes less than two months after another announcement about how Salesforce is extending its use of a variety of Dell solutions , including VMAX All Flash and Isilon scale-out NAS storage arrays, Data Domain data protection products and PowerEdge servers. Salesforce’s 25,000 employees will also have access to our Dell Latitude laptops and their comprehensive encryption, advanced authentication and leading-edge malware prevention.

“Michael and Dell have been amazing partners contributing to Salesforce’s success. We’re thrilled to extend our relationship with Dell Technologies as we deliver the scale and innovation to support the needs of Salesforce’s growing global customer base,” Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce said at the time of that announcement.

In their joint conversation with CNBC, Dell also spoke about Dell Technologies’ cloud strategy and offerings, comparing the benefits of a multi-cloud environment to pure public cloud services. He emphasized that cloud is not a place but a way of doing IT, and noted that in the multi-cloud world, there are places for different cloud services, and Dell Technologies has an absolute advantage.

Click the image below to watch the full interview on CNBC.com:

screenshot of Michael Dell and Mark Benioff on CNBC in May 2017

About the Author: Laura Pevehouse

Laura Pevehouse was profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine and named an AdWeek’s TweetFreak Five to Follow. She has been part of the Dell organization for more than 15 years in various corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, marketing, branding, social media and online communication roles. From 2014-2018, Laura was Chief Blogger/Editor-in-Chief for Direct2DellEMC and Direct2Dell, Dell’s official corporate blog that she help launch in 2007. She is now a member of the Dell Technologies Chairman Communications team. Earlier in her Dell career she focused on Global Commercial Channels and US Small and Medium Business public relations as part of the Global Communications team. Prior to that, she was responsible for global strategy in social media and community management, as well as marcom landing pages, as a member of Dell’s Global SMB Marketing, Brand and Creative team. When she was part of Dell’s Global Online group, Laura provided internal consulting that integrated online and social media opportunities with a focus on Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. She managed the home page of Dell.com, one of the top 500 global web sites in Alexa traffic rank, and first brought web feeds and podcasts to the ecommerce site. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in the virtual world Second Life. Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.