Dreamforce 2024: $1bn AI investment targets global challenges

Salesforce Ventures announced a new $500-million AI fund this week, doubling its total commitment to AI innovators in the past 18 months to $1-billion. The investment addresses major global issues through AI-driven solutions.

The fund was announced at Dreamforce 2024, the latest edition of the annual Salesforce conference in San Francisco, which  attracted over 44,000 attendees this year.

To date, Salesforce Ventures has invested in over two dozen AI companies, including market leaders such as Anthropic, Mistral AI, Cohere, TogetherAI, Runway, and Hugging Face.

The Salesforce investment arm’s new venture expands its stake in AI companies, offering patient capital, growth opportunities, and industry expertise. It supports high-growth companies and visionary founders, fostering innovation while upholding core values of trust and responsibility. Through its Fortune 500 ecosystem and ethical guidance, it helps startups balance trust, growth, and innovation.

“Salesforce Ventures is a leader in helping startups scale market-changing innovations in the cloud, and we’re expanding on that heritage to bring the power of AI to all parts of the enterprise,” said John Somorjai, president of Salesforce Ventures. “The first $500-million we invested in this technology has powered growth across our AI ecosystem, and we’ll continue to incorporate learnings from across our business, partners, and customers to help build the AI leaders of tomorrow.”

Paul Drews, managing partner of Salesforce Ventures, said: “The AI landscape has evolved greatly in the past year, encompassing everything from powerful LLMs to business-boosting applications — yet no enterprise will adopt AI at scale unless they trust it will deliver strong returns and avoid putting their reputation at risk.

“Our expanded investment deepens our commitment to helping the most dynamic and expansive innovators win the market by accelerating their growth through our customer network and delivering trusted AI that earns the confidence of the biggest companies in the world. Values drive value, and we know trust and responsibility are good for the world—and good for business.”

It is well established that AI increases productivity and efficiency. These benefits were acknowledged during a media panel discussion with Kate Jenson, head of revenue of Anthropic, who said: “Our top engineer stood up at the company the other day and said that they are 30% more efficient using our large language model Claude.

“Usually, we talk about bringing up the lowest common denominator with technology like this, but what we are finding is that, by embracing the technology, even our top performers are able to be much more creative and honestly have much more fun with what they are doing.”

However, AI is not only about boosting output, and Salesforce says it recognises the massive impact that it can have on benefiting the world in a more natural sense, and providing solutions to the most difficult tasks.

Claudine Emeott, Salesforce Ventures, said: “There is a really big hope about AI’s ability to solve some of the most seemingly intractable challenges, and the number one is climate change because it has a little ticking time clock on it.

“If AI can help us both mitigate climate change and also respond to the reality of climate adaptation, then we need to be pulling on every resource that we have.”

She provided an example from a previous investment by Salesforce Ventures in 2023, into Pano AI. The platform assists in detecting wildfires, so that they can be prevented.

“Human error is a huge problem for detecting fires early, and early detection is directly correlated with being able to control a fire.”

Pano AI uses cameras to pick up and differentiate conditions such as smoke or fog. Their models have improved over time with deployments across the US, Canada and Australia.

“I think it’s this really tangible example of how AI can solve real applications. It’s not about future state, its actually working today.”

When asked about generative AI, Jenson said: “I believe that this technology is going to transform how we all work. But I don’t think its necessarily transforming how most of us in this room are working today.

“What I am most excited about are the tools that are coming out that make it easy for you to just get started at an individual level.”

She provided the example of tackling emails, but also touched on how this technology can assist in dealing with tough customer questions, and make other interactions more robust but also fun.

Emeott said: “This technology has the power to create transformative change at a faster pace. To chip away at problems that we have been slowly chipping away from over decades. Whether that is lacklustre learning outcomes in classrooms, figuring out how to get more transparent data on supply chain visibility so we can clean up our supply chains whether its forced labour or carbon emissions.

“We are seeing the application of AI accelerate our solutions to these big problems at a whole new pace.”

* Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and writer for Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Threads at @jas2bann.