Salesforce
- The tech industry believes it is on the cusp of another big boom driven by AI tech.
- Salesforce could be leading it, with a giant list of new AI products in the works.
- Should this work, it could become the example of how AI will shape all of our work lives.
After Salesforce released its second-in-a-row killer quarter with revenue and profits beats, an ebullient Marc Benioff, founder and CEO, joined the quarterly conference call.
And he told tale after tale of planned AI products. Execs, and the analysts questioning them, mentioned AI a whopping 51 times during the hour-long call.
The company had already cemented separate partnerships with OpenAI (announced in March) and Anthropic, a rising-star AI startup that says it its chatbot Claude is safe and trustworthy. Salesforce Ventures participated in Anthropic's $450 million funding Series C round last month.
And on Wednesday, Salesforce announced a deal with Google Cloud that will allow Salesforce customers to build custom AI apps to work with their Salesforce apps using Google's tools.
Goldman Sachs analyst Kash Rangan (who rates the stock a buy and predicts its stock is headed to $325 over the next 12 months, from $215 today) applauded Salesforce's partnership approach.
"We are pleased to see the company embracing other vendors, such as OpenAI (integrated with Einstein GPT) and Google (for data mobility and integration), to allow for a wide range of data models to be used within the CRM ecosystem," Rangan wrote in a June 7 research note.
And Rangan isn't the only Wall Street analyst that feels gung ho on Salesforce's AI plans. Morgan Stanley's Keith Weiss believes Salesforce's claims that AI has the potential to "spark a massive new buying cycle." Weiss also rates the stock a buy (or in his bank's parlance, an "overweight") albeit with a much less enthusiastic target price prediction of $251.
Rangan tallied up 15 pending AI products from Salesforce. For instance: Salesforce's homegrown AI product, Einstein, is getting upgrades for Salesforce's Sales, Service, and Marketing clouds that will automate email writing/meeting scheduling for salespeople; conduct smarter product support chats; generate personalized marketing content, respectively.
A developer's tool is planned for Einstein to let customers add their own customized AI chat.
Einstein will be embedded into the Slack service that is part of Salesforce's Customer 360 apps (which includes a bunch of the company's services). It will automatically summarize info, such as sales opportunities, and can create tasks lists.
There will be GPT tools added to Slack and Tableau that will allow users to do tasks via natural language chats or commands.
There will be five new AI products incorporated into the Marketing cloud to automate tasks ranging from personalized emails to analyzing engagement.
And Salesforce's Commerce cloud, a service that helps enterprise-sized customers sell wares over the internet, has three new AI products planned including a chat bots for shoppers, and personalized recommendations.
Products are slated to be released between this summer and February, 2024, though a host of them have no planned release date so far, Rangan notes.
Should Salesforce be successful in building AI products into its wares that are not just gadget-y but actually useful, it could set the standard for how AI weaves its way into our work lives.
That is, admittedly, still a big if. But, Wall Street believes that Salesforce will pull it off and become the shining example of how AI changes everyone's work lives.
As Weiss puts it: "Generative AI = Entering the Next Tech Super Cycle. Similar to cloud, mobile and social, AI will be a new revolutionary innovation cycle that will spark a massive new tech buying cycle, in management's view."
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/trywSpM
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