💃 3 Reasons Why AI Success is Inevitable🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! In the early 1980s - when computers were the size of refrigerators, phones had cords, and the internet was just an embryo - Steve Jobs went all Nostradamus-

And if you’re picking up what we’re putting down, that’s about where we’re at with AI. Here’s what we mean ⬇️

STEP BACK

Inevitable…

40yrs ago, an internet-connected, tiny phone in your pocket was said in the same breath as time travel. Purely science fiction. And now our phones are an appendage like an arm or leg.

AI will be that way…it’s just not yet. It’s closer to how Steve Jobs referenced phones as the “little friend inside the box” than it is the ubiquitous slab of $1000 aluminum.

Today, we reference AI as a gimmicky, hallucinating, novelty that can summarize emails. But in 40 years…?

Here are 3 reasons why the success of AI is as sure as the '“little friend inside the box” 👇

DOLLA DOLLA BILLS

AI Investment, Salesforce Included

Let’s get the most obvious reason out of the way. Money. Check this out-

• Nvidia- the company that makes AI chips is worth $3,000,000,000,000 🤯.

• Meta/Facebook - has reportedly paid $100,000,000 for top AI developers. This is on top of their investment in their open-source, in-house LLaMa LLM.

• Microsoft - committed $10+ billion dollars to OpenAI. Additionally, they will spend $80 billion in other AI companies and their own R&D.

• Amazon - a major investor in Anthropic, to the tune of $4 billion, and has their own in-house solutions.

• Google - another prolific investor into AI companies and also creator of Gemini, has a total AI Investment somewhere in the Microsoft range of $80 billion and growing.

• Salesforce - while they don’t make their total AI spend public, last year their investment arm announced $1 billion committed to AI. Small compared to the above companies? Not relatively compared to market cap ($250BB vs $multi-trillion).

Look, anything that gets this level of investment is going places. The 2024 Dodgers, and 2001 Diamondbacks proved this out - pay tons of money, get results.

And note, the aforementioned companies are just some of the big players. Look around - everyone and their mom is getting into the AI hype. One or many are bound to succeed, like Apple did with the phone.

I’M NOT A BABY WAAAAAHH

Not an Adult…but Not a Baby

Steve Jobs 1984 quote was prescient, a pre-baby. Meanwhile, AI is a tangible thing at your fingertips right now.

You can go to ChatGPT, Claude, or an array of other AI solutions and get impressive results.

You can ask it to explain rocket science like your five years old, or tell you about the The Italian Wars. It will write you code (of varying accuracy), or provide those difficult time-conversion formulas for Salesforce.

You can build your own LLM or go off-the-shelf, connect your apps via n8n, Claude will build you a frontend, and you’ll have a functioning AI chatbot in a day.

Sure it’s not perfect, yet, but time will add polish 💅, case in point…

Salesforce’s enterprise AI solution, Agentforce, is in its Motorola 8900X-2 era?

But how long until they get to the Nokia 3210, then iPhone, and then ) craziness?! How polished and powerful will Agentforce (or whatever they’re calling it then) be in that version?

IRONICALLY..PEOPLE

The (Ironic) Secret Sauce

Our future AI overlords will be birthed by humans.

You can worry about that future…in the future. But, just know - the reason AI will succeed is because really smart, determined, creative people are working on it like Alexander Hamilton worked the Federalist Papers.

Consider this - Meta wasn’t handing out $100,000,00 contracts to just any AI developers. These are prodigies who worked in the vanguard of AI before ChatGPT exploded in 2023.

Lucas Beyer. Alexander Kolesnikov. Xiaohua Zhai.

Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Tom Brady.

Salesforce undoubtedly has some excellent talent dedicated to converting the company into an AI powerhouse. It’s a different, harder problem at Salesforce than data-hoarding companies like Meta (metadata vs consumer data) but this will attract hardcore nerds 🤓 to solve hardcore problems.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

There’s too much money, momentum, and smart people invested in the AI space for it not to be successful.

You might say the same thing about cryptocurrency in 2022 but crypto had no real uses. AI is becoming embedded into our most basic consumer goods.

Salesforce is a good platform for you to be in and around AI. And unlike crypto, marketing and sales have been around forever and aren’t ever going away. Salesforce is well-positioned to take their platform, and their professionals, for a ride on the wave 🤖 🤝 🧑.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes