Tag: Salesforce

Salesforce Boosts AI Partnership with $1.5 Billion Genesys Investment | Small Biz Trends

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Small business owners navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of customer expectations may want to take note of a significant development in the AI customer experience (CX) space. Genesys, a leader in AI-powered experience orchestration, has secured a $1.5 billion investment from enterprise giants Salesforce and ServiceNow. This funding underscores a growing industry shift toward smarter, more autonomous CX systems—and it could shape the tools available to small and midsize businesses in the coming years.

Each company, Salesforce and ServiceNow, is contributing equally to the investment, which will be used to repurchase shares from existing equity holders. While that financial restructuring won’t directly impact small businesses, the strategic implications of these partnerships might.

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Hugging Face raises $235M from investors, including Salesforce and Nvidia | TechCrunch

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AI startup Hugging Face has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round, as first reported by The Information, then seemingly verified by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X (formerly known as Twitter). The tranche, which had participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures, values Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. That’s double the startup’s valuation from May 2022 and reportedly more than 100 times Hugging Face’s annualized revenue, reflecting the enormous appetite for AI and platforms to support its development.

Hugging Face offers a number of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models and datasets, as well as web apps to demo AI-powered applications. It also provides libraries for tasks like dataset processing and evaluating models in addition to an enterprise version of the hub that supports software-as-a-service and on-premises deployments.

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It’s Official: Salesforce Buying Slack For $28 Billion, Taking On Microsoft With Benioff’s Biggest Deal Yet | Forbes

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After nearly a week of speculation, Salesforce confirmed its intent to acquire popular workforce chat platform Slack in a deal valued at $27.7 billion on Tuesday, marking the enterprise cloud giant’s largest-ever acquisition and positioning it to compete more forcefully with the nation’s second-largest tech firm by market capitalization, Microsoft.

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Twitter to cut jobs as revenue growth slows | BBC News

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Twitter is cutting 9% of its workforce – about 350 jobs – after reporting a sharp slowdown in revenue growth.

In the three months to September, revenues rose 8% to $616m. That was better than forecast, but lower than the 20% rise in the previous quarter.

The number of average monthly active users rose 3% to 317 million.

Last month, Twitter hired bankers ahead of a possible sale, but bids from potential suitors such as Google and Salesforce failed to materialise.

Shares in Twitter fell 7% earlier this month after Salesforce – considered to be the most likely bidder – said it had walked away from talks.

Jack Dorsey, chief executive, said he saw a “significant opportunity to increase growth” as the company improved the platform.

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