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.

Google lashed out at the Department of Justice’s threat to break up the company, calling the proposals “radical.” Among other things, Google says the proposals would threaten users’ privacy, stifle innovation and break Android and Chrome. Given the appeals process, it will likely be years before we know whether Google will stay in one piece.