These sensationalist headlines are kind of ridiculous. Salesforce and Microsoft are not trying to "kill" each other. The Salesforce - IBM partnership is a major challenge to many other companies from a competitive perspective. Microsoft owning LinkedIn is a major challenge to Salesforce and many other companies from a competitive perspective. 

Email marketing is not, never has been and never will be sexy. Year in and year out we hear about its eventual demise.  Yet, each year retail marketers are reminded that email marketing drives the highest ROI of all digital marketing channels and that shoppers prefer email above all other channels for direct communication from brands.

More than 1.2 trillion photos will be taken in 2017 according to InfoTrends, changing the way we communicate with the world and unlocking new potential for business. These photos contain important insights-- on everything from inventory level and product quality, to consumer trends and customer preferences-- and leveraging these visual clues allows companies to enrich sales leads, automate service case resolution and optimize marketing campaigns.

Spreading yourself thin on spreadsheets? Most small business owners that track their customer information still rely on outdated tools and processes, such as email (44%) and spreadsheets (41%). They start out on them because they are easy, familiar, and quite frankly, free — and we all know free agrees with any new business! But as your business grows, as you add folks to the team, spreadsheets become a difficult, cumbersome way to track your sales, service, and business functions. With a growing team and faster pace of sales, information gets easily lost, quickly outdated, and irreparably siloed. In the end, growing your company on spreadsheets becomes much more costly to the business.

The Salesforce flavor of artificial intelligence, Einstein, is trying to bring practical productivity to everyday tasks, but can it prevail over long-standing competition?

Artificial intelligence has become a battleground for major technology providers. But some vendors are trying to leapfrog their competition by making AI more practical, bringing intelligence to workers' daily tasks.