U.S. customer relationship management software developer Salesforce reportedly doubled the size of its generative AI startup fund to $500 million and launched an “AI Cloud” service, hoping to attract enterprise customers through this product.
In March, Salesforce launched a $250 million venture capital fund targeting generative AI startups, which Salesforce says is aimed at startups that are developing ChatGPT-like technologies that can be used with their commercial software applications.
Salesforce invested in four startups at the time: search engine newcomer You.com, AI startup Anthropic, natural language processing (NLP) startup Cohere and relationship management system startup Hearth.
In March, Salesforce also launched its Einstein GPT service and said it was working with ChatGPT developer OpenAI to add its technology to its collaboration software, Slack.
The so-called cloud service will include Einstein, Salesforce’s first all-inclusive AI platform, Slack, an office instant messaging app, and Tableau, a data analytics software that Salesforce says will cost $360,000 a year for an “AI Cloud” starter package.
Salesforce’s move shows the growing number of tech companies that are combining their tools with generative AI.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said of the move: “AI is reshaping the world and changing business models in ways we never imagined. In the future, every company will have to put AI first.”
In addition to its own products, AI Cloud will host big language models from other companies, including Amazon Cloud Services (AWS), Anthropic and Cohere, among others. Big Language models are the core software system for generative AI such as ChatGPT.
Salesforce says the AI cloud service will restrict Big Language Models from retaining sensitive customer information to protect the data privacy of businesses using the service.
