Salesforce and IBM have agreed to partner and bring together Salesforce’s Einstein (AI that powers the world’s #1 CRM) and IBM’s Watson (the leading AI platform for business). IBM sharing its Watson AI platform with Salesforce is aimed at leveraging each company’s machine learning know-how to deliver deeper insights into customer behavior by the second half of this year, the companies said in a joint statement.

Salesforce’s strength is its customer database, but lacks problem solving capability. Watson specializes in interpreting information that hasn’t been categorized, such as the text of research papers or social-media posts. It has both structured and unstructured data, as well as great breadth in problem-solving that can be applied to real-world, real-time scenarios. Watson’s APIs will be introduced into the Salesforce CRM-enhancing AI platform. This in turn is expected to allow Einstein users to leverage IBM’s cognitive capabilities and derive value from unstructured data outside of their CRM.

The IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein integration is expected to be available in the second half of 2017. Pricing will be announced at the time of general availability.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said: “No company’s core values are as close to Salesforce’s as IBM’s.” “The power of Watson will serve the millions of Salesforce and Einstein customers and developers to provide an unprecedented understanding of customers,” said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty in a prepared statement. “Studies show that of all the decisions we make, a third are OK, a third are suboptimal, and a third are not correct,” she told USA Today. “AI can help with that.”