Salesforce dives into the AI cloud

Salesforce Inc. is diving deeper into generative AI.

CONSTELLATION BRANDS, INC.

The company on Monday unveiled AI Cloud, customer relationship-management software that fuses AI software with data to auto-generate personalized content to customers and developers.

“AI is reshaping our world and transforming business in ways we never imagined, and every company needs to become AI-first,” company chief executive Marc Benioff said.

Additionally, Salesforce said its Generative AI Fund, part of the Salesforce Ventures VC that is backing startups developing “responsible generative AI,” is doubling in size, to $500 million.

Research from Salesforce concludes that nearly three in four employees believe generative AI introduces new security risks — and 60% of them don’t know how to keep data secure.

“This is the latest destination for our AI journey for the last seven years,” Jayesh Govindarajan, a senior vice president of engineering at Salesforce, said in an interview. “We are building a family of large language models that addresses questions based on specific data.”

In March, Salesforce launched the Einstein GPT service and said it is partnering with Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, to add the chatbot to its collaboration software Slack.

Google Cloud and Salesforce team up to bolster AI offerings

Salesforce and Google Cloud are teaming up to help businesses leverage data and AI via a new strategic partnership.

Announced this morning, the partnership will allow companies to use their data along with custom machine learning models to anticipate their customer's needs, execs from Google and Salesforce said. The tie-up spans products and services including Google's BigQuery tooling, Salesforce's Data Cloud and Vertex AI, Google's fully managed AI platform.

"This really allows us to democratize AI so that customers get choice on which AI they want to use," David Schmaier, Salesforce's chief product officer, told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

It's the second such major partnership between Google and Salesforce in recent years. The first, inked in 2017, was largely analytics- and big data-focused. The companies subsequently expanded that original agreement, deepening their data sharing collaborations and building AI-infused customer service experience and marketing tools.

The move makes sense for Salesforce on its journey to reposition itself as a "data company." Over the past several months, Salesforce has introduced new generative AI tools, including EinsteinGPT, an AI assistant for customer relationship management (CRM) tasks like drafting emails, and SlackGPT, which answers natural language questions about a company's Slack content, servers and channels.

Salesforce is also investing in the broader generative AI ecosystem, no doubt hoping to sniff out the next hit that might bolster its expanding product portfolio. Salesforce Ventures, the company's corporate investment arm, this March launched a $250 million fund aimed at what it calls "responsible" generative AI startups.

As for Google, the renewed partnership with Salesforce puts its big data analytics and AI services front and center -- which isn't insignificant considering Salesforce's customer base of over 150,000 organizations.

Story continues

Google Cloud's arguably in a position of strength, having just two months ago reported its first profitable quarter. At the same time, the company remains third in the U.S. cloud infrastructure market, behind Amazon and Microsoft.

"From our point of view, this partnership brings two very large ecosystems of data together and makes it much simpler and easier for customers to get value," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told TechCrunch in an interview.

In terms of what the new strategic partnership will accomplish concretely, Google and Salesforce plan to launch an integration between Data Cloud -- which is essentially a sophisticated data integration layer -- and BigQuery that'll enable companies to more easily create unified profiles of customers. The integration will provide companies with access across portions of Google and Salesforce's platforms and clouds, akin to having their data housed in a single location.

Elsewhere, new connectors between Data Cloud and Vertex AI will allow companies to bring any AI models they've trained or fine-tuned in Vertex across the Salesforce platform. Companies will be able to train and retrain models on customer data from Salesforce, ostensibly streamlining the model development process.

How might companies actually use the new integrations and connectors? Salesforce provided a few examples in a memo ahead of today's announcement.

A fashion retailer, for example, could connect CRM data like customer purchase history and service interactions with non-CRM data, such as social media sentiment, to deploy a custom AI model that predicts a customer's likelihood to buy certain types of clothing based on the data. Or a financial institution could combine CRM and non-CRM data with an AI model to anticipate a customer's spending habits and investment preferences.

So, will Google and Salesforce customers actually bite? That's the perennial question. But Kurian and Schmaier seemed confident in the robustness of the new cross-platform offerings.

"Our general view is, these AI models are going to get richer and richer and much more sophisticated," Kurian said. "The result that we're trying to enable is productivity and efficiency for people doing work, and then, secondly, integrating all the information to make better decisions."

The Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI integration will be in pilot starting July 2023 and generally available in October 2023, Google and Salesforce say. As for the Data Cloud and BigQuery integration, it'll enter pilot in October 2023 and GA in February 2024.

Salesforce pledges to invest $500M in generative AI startups

Showing it’s playing for keeps in the generative AI race, Salesforce today announced that it’s growing its Generative AI Fund, the part of the company’s Salesforce Ventures VC off-shoot backing startups developing “responsible generative AI,” from $250 million in size to $500 million.

In a canned statement, Salesforce Ventures managing partner Paul Drews said that the expansion would enable Salesforce to “work with even more entrepreneurs … accelerating the development of transformative AI solutions for the enterprise.

“We’re already seeing AI change the way the world works, and we’re excited to build on the momentum of our Generative AI fund,” Drews continued. “We’re excited to support the next generation of innovative founders.”

Launched in March, the Generative AI Fund has already invested in several firms on the frontier of generative AI tech, including Cohere, Anthropic, You.com, Hearth.AI and newer additions Humane and Tribble. While far from the only fund investing primarily in generative AI, Salesforce aims to differentiate its tranche by prioritizing what it describes as “ethical” AI technologies.

For example, go-to-market function automation platform Tribble recently partnered with Private AI, a privacy-focused AI company, to use Private GPT, a product that redacts personally identifiable information before sending it through OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

The Generative AI Fund is also distinguished by the diverse range of technologies it’s financing. Humane, for instance, is creating a wearable, screen-less AI assistant, while You.com hosts an AI-powered search engine with generative art and text tools.

Salesforce Ventures has a number of vertical-specific investment funds, including funds aimed at particular geographies such as Japan or Canada and a dedicated AI fund. But the Generative AI Fund is among the VC arm’s largest tranches to date; previous funds ranged from $50 million to $125 million.

The expansion of the Generative AI Fund coincides with the debut of Salesforce’s AI for Impact Accelerator, the company’s second-ever accelerator program. AI for Impact will grant $2 million to a cohort of education, workforce and climate organizations to “advance the equitable and ethical use of trusted AI.”

“AI for Impact aims to close the AI access gap by providing flexible funding, pro-bono expertise and technology to purpose-driven organizations, empowering them to accelerate generative AI-based solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges,” Salesforce said in a press release. “AI for Impact [is a] philanthropic initiative to help purpose-driven organizations gain equitable access to trusted generative AI technologies.”

Bloomberg notes that investments from Salesforce’s accelerators and funds may become more important to the company’s bottom line as activist investors, like Elliott Management, discourage large acquisitions. To date, Salesforce Ventures, one of the most active corporate VCs in recent years, has participated in over 140 deals for AI and machine learning startups, particularly in the areas of AI insights for sales, natural language chatbots for service requests, targeted marketing content and personalized e-commerce experiences.

Generative AI — assuming it lives up to the hype — could be a massive market opportunity. Grand View Research predicts that the sector could be worth roughly $109 billion by 2030.

The C-suite in particular expects generative AI to have an enormous impact on business. According to a recent KPMG survey, almost two-thirds (65%) of execs believe that generative AI will have a “high” or “extremely high”” impact on their organization in the next three to five years — far above every other emerging technology.

Beyond the Generative AI Fund and AI for Impact, Salesforce is investing in generative AI technologies internally, piloting tools like EinsteinGPT (which lets Salesforce customers ask questions about Salesforce’s content and services) and SlackGPT (which answers natural language questions about Slack content).

In addition, Salesforce has previewed the ability to create landing pages on the fly, compose sales emails and write code in Apex, Salesforce’s programming language, to programmatically trigger certain actions in a workflow, among other tasks.