Salesforce jumps on the artificial intelligence bandwagon with a surprise acquisition

Salesforce acquired a smart calendar app called Tempo on Friday, joining the artificial intelligence space every big tech company seems to be competing for these days.

Tempo announced the deal through its website, saying the acquisition will "give us the opportunity to continue our mission at a much larger scale."

The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed. Tempo will shut down its service at the end of next month.

Tempo's calendar app integrates with your email, calendar, or social media to get data about you, and provides additional context to your scheduled meetings. For example, it can pull up the address of your meeting or the weather ahead of your appointment, serving as a Google Now-type assistant.

It's also worth noting Tempo was incubated by SRI International, the agency that created Apple's Siri software.

It's unclear at this point how exactly Salesforce will incorporate Tempo's technology into its CRM software. Salesforce has been making a huge push towards data analytics, with its Wave Analytics Platform released last year, and having this kind of insight would help Salesforce customers, who are mostly salespeople or marketers, to gain better insight into their daily schedules. One of its big acquisitions last year, RelateIQ, was also in the predictive analytics space.

Artifical intelligence has been a popular area in tech lately. Aside from Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, Google made a big announcement around its Google Now platform this week, including the "Now on Tap" function which provides relevant information instantly on your smartphone.

We'll get to learn more about it at Dreamforce, Salesforce big annual conference, starting on September 15.