IBM and Salesforce.com announced a strategic partnership to connect their respective artificial intelligence products, Watson and Einstein. What’s intriguing is the press release describes the deal as bringing Watson’s “structured and unstructured data” to the party, not any grand cognitive capabilities. They specifically mention exposing data from IBM’s Weather.com business within Salesforce. More evidence that AI is approaching a commodity but data is the new crown jewel.

Might as well stick with product news today. Pegasystems, which manages customer-related business processes, has announced new artificial intelligence features that will analyze “millions of actions taken every day on every desktop from any application” to uncover inefficiencies in sales and service operations. Examples include excessive toggling between different applications, time spent on unproductive activities, and productivity lost to slow system response. AI-based features don’t really qualify as news these days, but this item does illustrate how AI can be used for more than content recommendations.

Salesforce announced three enhancements to Salesforce Data Cloud at Dreamforce this week. There is an expansion of unstructured data types it can address including audio and video; there will be a sub-second “real time” layer for data from ingestion to activation; and the connector eco-system has been expanded. Salesforce also emphasized close collaboration between Data Cloud and its new Agentforce AI bots.