Salesforce Releases AI Cloud And Doubles Its Fund For AI Companies, Bringing It To $500 Million

On Monday, Salesforce doubled the amount of money in its venture capital fund for generative AI startups, bringing it to $500 million. It also announced the AI Cloud service, which will bring together all of the company’s AI-powered products under one roof to attract businesses.

AI Cloud will have all of Salesforce’s tools, like the Einstein service, Slack, and Tableau, which is software for analysing data. The company said that its starter pack will cost $360,000 per year.

The move shows how fast tech companies are trying to add generative AI to their tools. This type of AI can create new text, images, and other material based on data from the past.

“AI is changing our world and business in ways we never thought possible,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. “Every company needs to become AI-first.”

Along with the company’s own services, AI Cloud will hold the large-language models (LLMs) from Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, and Cohere. LLMs are the core software of artificial intelligence systems.

Salesforce said it wants to protect the privacy of businesses that use these services by making sure that LLMs don’t keep personal information about customers.

In March, the company released the Einstein GPT service and said it was working with OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, to add the popular chatbot to Slack, which is software for working with other people.