- The tech industry believes AI technology is about to make another big boom.
- Salesforce could be leading the way in developing a huge list of new AI products.
- If done well, it could be an example of how AI will shape all of our work lives.
Vibrant founder and CEO Marc Benioff joined us for our quarterly conference call after Salesforce outperformed sales and profits and announced its second consecutive killer quarter.
And he rambled about planned AI products. Executives and the analysts who questioned them mentioned AI a whopping 51 times during the hour-long call.
The company had already forged separate partnerships with OpenAI (announced in March) and rising AI startup Anthropic, which claims its chatbot Claude is safe and reliable. Salesforce Ventures joined Anthropic’s $450 million Series C funding round last month.
And on Wednesday, Salesforce announced a deal with Google Cloud that will allow Salesforce customers to use Google’s tools to build custom AI apps that work with the Salesforce app.
Goldman Sachs analyst Kash Langan, who rates the stock Buy and expects the stock to head to $325 over the next 12 months from $215 today, said Salesforce’s Applauded the collaborative approach.
“We are pleased to see that we have adopted other vendors such as OpenAI (integration with Einstein GPT) and Google (data mobility and integration) to enable a wider range of data models within the CRM ecosystem. said Rangan. wrote in a research note on June 7.
And Langan isn’t the only Wall Street analyst to be optimistic about Salesforce’s AI plans. Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss believes Salesforce’s claims that AI could “initiate a massive new buying cycle.” Weiss also rates the stock as a buy (an “overweight,” in bank parlance), although he isn’t too enthusiastic about the price target of $251.
Rangan tallied 15 pending AI products from Salesforce. For example: Einstein, Salesforce’s homegrown AI product, has been upgraded for Salesforce’s Sales, Service, and Marketing cloud to automate email writing and meeting scheduling for sales reps. Conduct a smarter product support chat. Generate personalized marketing content for each.
Einstein plans developer tools that will allow customers to add their own customized AI chat.
Einstein will be built into the Slack service, part of Salesforce’s Customer 360 app (which includes many of the company’s services). You can automatically aggregate information such as business opportunities and create a task list.
GPT tools will be added to Slack and Tableau, allowing users to perform tasks through natural language chat and commands.
Marketing Cloud includes five new AI products to automate tasks ranging from personalized emails to engagement analytics.
And Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud, a service that helps enterprise-sized customers sell products over the internet, has three new AI products planned, including chatbots and personalized recommendations for shoppers. increase.
The products are expected to go on sale between this summer and February 2024, but at this time many of the products do not have a set release date, Langan said.
If Salesforce succeeds in building an AI product that actually works, rather than just a gadget, into its own product, it could set the standard for how AI integrates into our work lives. .
Admittedly, it’s still a big assumption. But Wall Street believes Salesforce can pull it off and become a shining example of how AI can change the work life of everyone.
Weiss said: “Generative AI = entering the next technology super cycle. Similar to cloud, mobile and social, executives see AI as a new game-changing innovation cycle that will drive massive new technology buying cycles. prize.”
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