Following in the footsteps of other Bay Area biggest tech giants, Salesforce is rolling out its own suite of generative AI products.
San Francisco-based Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) partnered with OpenAI on Tuesday to launch EinsteinGPT, a generative AI tool that will allow users of its core CRM product to ask a chatbot to draft emails, respond to customers and generate marketing material.
EinsteinGPT will use a combination of Salesforce's proprietary AI models in conjunction with third party generative AI models, which include OpenAI's GPT 3.5.
“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated and personalized ways,” CEO Marc Benioff said in a press release. “Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch.”
ChatGPT, OpenAI's buzzy chatbot, will also be integrated into Salesforce's other products, including Slack, where users can ask the bot to summarize and provide context to conversations and draft automatic replies. Salesforce purchased Slack for $27 billion in 2021.
On top of that Salesforce launched a $250 million generative AI venture fund under Salesforce Ventures. Its first investments will be in Anthropic, Cohere.ai, Hearth and You.com. Both Anthropic and You.com are Bay Area companies with Anthropic widely being considered a major rival to OpenAI.
Salesforce is following companies like Google and Microsoft in unveiling generative AI products in lieu of tremendous investor and media hype around the technology. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and is testing a ChatGPT integration to its Bing search engine. Google has demoed its own generative AI chatbot, Bard, to mixed results. The generative AI fever has even caused Meta to pivot from talk about building a Metaverse to assembling its own generative AI team to bring the tech into its own products.
