Left-hand enterprise customers, right-hand massive capital investment - "B-side champion" Salesforce, Sap's AI strategy

Global CRM service provider Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff exclaimed, "We are very eager to continue ensuring Salesforce's position as the world's largest customer relationship management (CRM) software supplier and leading customers into the AI era."

On August 31st, media analysis pointed out that Salesforce's confidence in this AI competition stems from its "unique approach" in the AI field since 2023, which can be summarized as: holding a strong grip on a massive enterprise customer base with the left hand, and seeking partners to establish its own alliance with the right hand.

According to statistics, Salesforce has established various partnerships with almost every well-known large-scale model company. Since May, Salesforce has invested in 11 AI startups, including the currently popular Anthropic and Cohere.

Similarly, the globally leading enterprise application software provider SAP, which has not been widely discussed in the market, has also adopted this "approach." SAP has invested in three well-known large-scale model companies: Anthropic, Cohere, and Aleph Alpha.

Therefore, the analysis believes that old-school companies in the enterprise service industry with a massive customer resource may gain considerable profits and have the opportunity to maintain their position in the industry by virtue of their strong distribution advantages in the generative AI wave.

To prove this point, it is only necessary to observe how many AI application software developers are willing to cooperate with these companies and sell their products or services to their own customers.

Seeking Partners and Making Huge Investments

In the large-scale model track, OpenAI, along with its backers Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and others, is engaged in fierce competition. However, looking at Salesforce's AI landscape, it has established various partnerships with almost every well-known large-scale model company and has invested in numerous AI startups.

In terms of cooperation with OpenAI, in March of this year, Salesforce launched a new product called "Einstein GPT," which adopted OpenAI's artificial intelligence technology to further assist salespeople, customer service representatives, and marketers in efficiently completing their work, including answering customer inquiries and writing marketing emails.

Google, which "meets on the battlefield" with OpenAI, announced its collaboration with Salesforce in June of this year. This partnership will allow the company to use its data and custom machine learning models to predict customer needs. The bundle includes products and services such as Google's BigQuery tool, Salesforce's Data Cloud and Vertex AI, and Google's fully managed AI platform. After the launch of the AI Cloud suite by Salesforce in June, AI Cloud began hosting and serving AI models from a range of partners, including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Cohere, and OpenAI, on the Salesforce cloud infrastructure.

On August 23rd, Salesforce led a new round of financing for AI startup Hugging Face, which is expected to raise at least $200 million and reach a valuation of $4 billion.

Analysis suggests that Salesforce's investment indicates that it may view Hugging Face as a potential acquisition target in the future. While Salesforce is known for its SaaS software and Slack chat application, it also provides a range of services for software developers.

According to the earnings report, as of July, Salesforce's net profit surged from $68 million in the same period last year to $1.27 billion, with revenue growing 11% from $7.72 billion to $8.6 billion, surpassing Wall Street's previous 10% forecast.

The company also raised its annual revenue forecast from $34.5 billion in the previous quarter to $34.7-34.8 billion, and increased the adjusted operating profit margin for the year from 28% to 30%.

Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Amy Weaver said on a conference call that the growth this quarter was mainly driven by robust sales and price and profit margin increases.

Expanding Customer Base

AI startups have turned their attention to providing technical services to B2B customers, as they need to attract new customers to keep up with the "ever-expanding" valuations, while tech giants like Salesforce, deeply rooted in enterprise software for many years, have a large customer base.

According to the minutes of a closed-door meeting leaked by OpenAI in early June, CEO Sam Altman mentioned that the mission of ChatGPT is to attract more businesses to access its API.

According to Ascendix data, as of April 2023, Salesforce has over 150,000 enterprise customers.

To attract a larger customer base, Salesforce has been continuously updating and iterating its artificial intelligence platform, Einstein. On August 4th, Salesforce announced the release of Einstein Studio and the ability to bring your own models (BYOM). Since the launch of the Einstein product, its goal has always been to make customers' workflows more intelligent. With the advent of the big model wave, Einstein has taken various collaborations to further enhance its intelligence capabilities and optimize the workflow of enterprise customers.