How Salesforce is hitching its wagon to AI
A quarter century after pioneering software-as-a-service, Salesforce is now betting big on AI in a bid to keep up with Microsoft and Google.
Salesforce was created around the idea that software should be accessible on any computer at any time — what we now know as cloud computing. In becoming a US$200 billion ($317 billion) company, it's helped pioneer the software-as-a-service industry.
Now approaching its 25th birthday, the company is in an usual spot. Salesforce is tenured and lucrative: with hundreds of millions of net profit in most years, it's certainly a big technology company. But it's not a Big Tech company. In different ways it competes with Microsoft and Google, which as the 2nd and 4th biggest firms in the world have much deeper pockets.
To remain atop the SaaS industry, Salesforce is leaning heavily into artificial intelligence. Last month it announced new products in its Einstein suite of AI tools. First is Einstein Copilot, a generative AI chatbot that's embedded in Salesforce's apps. More ambitious is Einstein Copilot Studio, which allows customers to customise and create their own AI applications.
The following is an interview with Marc Mathieu, Salesforce's global SVP of AI, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
