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☆ Potential regulator challenges to Big Tech M&A may have far-reaching consequences for the tech ecosystem
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-30 | by ( Paayal Zaveri | April Joyner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

M&A deals involving large tech companies may get harder as US regulators ramp up scrutiny. If regulators increase scrutiny, it could deter other large tech companies from buying startups. More challenges to proposed tech M&A deals may also mean that the pool of potential acquirers shrinks. Of course, there are cases where a large tech company seeks to buy out a smaller, more innovative competitor because it is scared of getting displaced. "There has to be the hope and dream of selling to a larger tech company some day," Sherman said.

“VCs think this is the new internet,” a generative AI founder in the United States told Reuters. While the closure of Silicon Valley Bank may hamper debt financing, venture capitalists said interest in funding AI startups remains high, especially for top early-stage founders. Investors sense opportunity, even for a sale if not an initial public offering; some are betting that AI startups might outpace bigger rivals, encumbered by their size. You.com, a search engine company founded in 2020 and backed by Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff, has found new life from incorporating generative AI technology. It has attracted more attention from users and investors, handling millions of searches per day, the company told Reuters.

☆ Car dealers fight the threat of extinction as the Teslafication of their industry intensifies
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-24 | by ( Alexa St. John | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

The modern car shopping experience, from initial research to final purchase, can now be done online — and the pandemic accelerated that shift. Others are emulating firms like Carvana and moving some parts of the buying process online. We don't exactly know how the car business is going to look going forward with this EV shift, and how much the EV shift is actually going to take place." Ford has set stringent requirements for its dealers to sell EVs — though some dealers have called its EV certification program unfair and dropped out. Some dealers are having a hard time committing to changes when the return on investment — especially with EVs — isn't yet clear.

☆ Google got a pandemic boost for its Workspace software but blew it, insiders say. Now it plans to attack Microsoft with a new push in AI.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Rosalie Chan | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian spent much of his time at a partner meeting talking about Workspace, tweeted Tony Safoian, CEO of Google Cloud partner SADA Systems. "Around the globe, more than nine million paying organizations, and more than three billion users rely on Google Workspace for communication and collaboration. Other major customers like Deutsche Bank use Google Cloud for cloud infrastructure, but Microsoft Office for collaboration software. Forty-four percent of software procurers whose organization plans to or currently uses Microsoft's collaboration software also use Google Workspace, according to the 2022 Forrester study. While Google Cloud is still unprofitable, it has decreased losses to $480 million, down from $890 million last year.

☆ Why ChatGPT and AI are taking over the cold call, according to Salesforce leader
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-11 | by ( Ian Thomas | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are changing the way that companies and salespeople are communicating with customers for the better, said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce's Service Cloud business. "You look at how salespeople work today, and most of them, they dread writing sales emails; they'd much rather be out there with customers," Shih said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday. Earlier this week, Salesforce launched what it called the first generative AI CRM technology, Einstein GPT. The updated software uses generative AI technology and OpenAI's advanced AI models that power ChatGPT to do things like create personalized emails for salespeople, responses for customer service representatives, and auto-generate code for developers, among other tasks. "It's really about bringing enterprise-grade generative AI to our clients, whether those are small businesses or the largest companies in the world, and doing it in a way that's rooted in business outcomes," Shih said.

☆ Small-business owners already have the most effective tool to increase brand awareness and drive sales at the their fingertips: their employees
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-10 | by ( Erica Sweeney | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Employee advocacy has been shown to boost trust between brands and their customers more than ads. What consumers think about employees' social media postsRecent studies have shown that employee advocacy programs can increase brand awareness and positive perceptions about a company, drive sales, and improve employee recruitment and retention. In 2022, the company's social media reach hit 81 million with an earned media value of $2.5 million, Whalen said. Data shows that employee advocacy programs can also help boost sales. According to LinkedIn, companies that encourage sales teams to share content on social media generate more leads and are more likely to exceed their sales quotas.

☆ ChatGPT is being used to automatically write emails: Microsoft, Salesforce, and TikTok creators are hopping on the trend
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-08 | by ( Kif Leswing | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

The analysts estimated Microsoft's recently announced generated AI sales features could help it take market share and potentially add over $768 million in annual revenue. Microsoft announced on Monday that it would integrate generative AI based on ChatGPT into a set of tools for business called CoPilot. One of its primary features is using AI to generate emails. Microsoft says that its AI email writer can take important context from the email thread, like the price that was previously discussed, and stick it in the response drafted by AI. Microsoft's feature is currently in beta testing, but will be released to customers of Microsoft's Viva Sales feature on March 15, the company said on Monday.

☆ Salesforce follows Microsoft in launching A.I. tools for salespeople with help from OpenAI
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-07 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

The company said Tuesday that it will release software incorporating artificial intelligence to help salespeople, customer service agents and marketers do their jobs. Salesforce is calling the offering Einstein GPT, drawing on OpenAI's technology that's taken the tech industry by storm since the Microsoft-backed startup opened ChatGPT to the public in November. These AI models sometimes display incorrect information, prompting companies that sell to big businesses and governments to proceed carefully. Like Salesforce, Microsoft is trying to keep the spread of incorrect information to a minimum as it brings AI features to its competing Dynamics 365 software. Salesforce is also touting a new ChatGPT app for Slack that can display information derived from Salesforce.

☆ The unraveling of fintech darling Vise
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +28 min

It was April, and more than two dozen salespeople who worked for the fintech startup Vise had been ordered to a multiday off-site at the W Hoboken hotel in New Jersey to share exhaustive reports on their performance. Even salespeople at bigger, established, top-tier investment-management firms typically wouldn't close $250 million in a year, multiple sales employees said. (K-means clustering is an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm often referred to as a form of AI, Vise's founders said). (Vise's founders disputed this, saying the company received updated financial data only once a day for its portfolio-construction engine.) And to address its "leaky funnel" of overestimating prospective sales, Vise was to stop outreach to new clients while it onboards and upsells to existing clients, the document said.

☆ New Salesforce Has to Keep Selling
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-27 | by ( Dan Gallagher | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Salesforce put on its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last year and began laying off 8,000 workers in January. Selling is the one thing Salesforce has long excelled at. The company founded by salespeople to make software for salespeople is in the midst of the worst sales slump in its history. Revenue growth for the fiscal fourth quarter ended January is expected to fall below double-digits for the first time since Salesforce went public in mid-2004. This for a company that has averaged year-over-year revenue growth of 25% per quarter even since it broke through the $10 billion annual revenue threshold in early 2018.

☆ Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav faces complex challenges as a combined HBO Max-Discovery streamer preps to launch this spring and staffers fear more layoffs and cuts
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-22 | by ( Lucia Moses | Claire Atkinson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

CEO David Zaslav is expected to provide an update of the company's financials and outlook for the year ahead. WBD also shed more than half its stock price since the merger deal closed April 8, before a more recent partial recovery. But optimism around the company seems to be based on the feeling that things can only go up from here. Discovery to $20 from $16, assuming the heaviest cost cutting is done and despite the fact that the near-term ad outlook is poor. Legacy Warner ad salespeople in particular are frustrated over this approach and worried it'll cost them in the form of a smaller annual bonus than they've come to expect in years past.

☆ Salesforce's Marc Benioff has revised a plan to stack rank a bottom 5% and ordered employees back to the office, according to leaked messages
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-21 | by ( Ellen Thomas | Ashley Stewart | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made revisions to the company's annual strategic plan, including return-to-office mandates and policies that would have implemented stack ranking, according to an internal Slack message viewed by Insider. "He's still pushing performance culture," a Salesforce employee who read the revised draft told Insider. It currently requires three days a week in the office for non-remote employees and four days a week for employees in "non-remote" and "customer-facing" roles. Revenue for fiscal 2022 grew 25%, to $26.5 billion, according to the company's annual report. Or, as an employee previously posted in a Slack channel, "Can execs commit to never referring to Salesforce employees as 'family' again?

☆ Amazon asks employees to be in office at least three days a week
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

Feb 17 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) would require employees to be in office at least three days a week from May 1, the e-commerce giant said on Friday. The COVID-19 pandemic had altered the workplace, with companies sending employees home to work remotely. Even as lockdowns eased around the world, a large population of employees remains remote or in a hybrid environment. "This shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office," Jassy wrote. Amazon had said in October 2021 it would let individual teams decide how many days corporate employees would be expected to work from office in a week.

☆ Salesforce is applying pressure to workers to drive down headcount
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-15 | by ( Diamond Naga Siu | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Before we drive off into the night, let's jump into today's tech. Salesforce performance pressure is on. Employees told Insider that the cloud company is about to drop new performance metrics for engineers. Plus, multiple investors are believed to be pressuring Salesforce to cut additional costs to become more profitable. Email dsiu@insider.com or tweet @diamondnagasiu) Edited by Dave Smith (tweet @redletterdave) in Toronto and Nathan Rennolds (tweet @ncrennolds) in London.

☆ Salesforce engineers are about to be hit with new performance metrics, while some salespeople are being pressured to quit
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-14 | by ( Ellen Thomas | Ashley Stewart | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Some Salesforce employees have been offered a "Prompt Exit Package" instead of a layoff, with less severance. Employees say the company is ratcheting up performance expectations as activist investors invade. "The company is pushing hard for productivity tracking and metrics on all facets," one employee told Insider. Salesforce cut a few hundred salespeople in November, a person familiar with the matter told Insider, and the company told Insider the cuts were made for "accountability," implying that performance was a consideration. In some cases, the company has presented employees with PEP offers in the same week it has executed mass layoffs, employees told Insider.

☆ The ChatGPT AI hype cycle is peaking, but even tech skeptics don't expect a bust
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-11 | by ( Eric Rosenbaum | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +18 min

Even the skeptics of the latest hype cycle recounted during the Town Hall numerous examples of how AI is already embedded in more efficient business processes. The arrival of ChatGPT and generative AI only a few years after the hype cycle over the metaverse has attracted both the AI bulls and bears as tech pursues its next big thing. Another executive who works with lawyers and accountants said the sentiment right now is that AI is not to replace lawyers, but "lawyers using AI are gonna replace lawyers." And what generative AI does, is really help you crunch, take your machine learning to, you know, the 'nth' level of the finite level. That may also place AI in the crosshairs of ESG investors, making sure that the ethics part is part of the mission of companies using it.

☆ Here's an exclusive look at the 20-slide pitch deck generative AI startup Regie.ai used to raise $6 million from OpenAI-backer Khosla Ventures
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Regie.ai is a generative AI startup that automates content creation and management for sales teams. Check out the 20-slide deck that landed Regie $6 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. Together, the two founded Regie.ai, a generative AI startup that automates content creation and management for sales teams. Regie signed its term sheet with Khosla Ventures in October 2022, as excitement around generative AI started to pick up, Sridhar said. Here's an exclusive look at the 20-slide pitch deck Regie.ai used to raise $6 million in Series A funding from Open-AI backer Khosla Ventures:

☆ Microsoft plans to start using AI tech to write emails for salespeople, and it's not hard to see why
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-03 | by ( Matthew Loh | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Microsoft plans to use artificial intelligence from ChatGPT maker OpenAI to write emails for people. This new tech is to be deployed in Viva Sales, Microsoft's sales app launched in October, that manages customer information and uses AI to scan calls and emails with clients. My company needs 20,000 reams next month, and we have a budget of $100,000. ChatGPT responded like so:Dear Jerry, Thank you for your interest in ordering paper from Dumble Muffin. Best regards, Mike WazowskiSales Representative, Dumble MuffinWe had "Jerry" respond by adding a few more details and a request for a suggestion.

☆ As Expected, Salesforce's Latest Cuts Impact Sales Teams
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-02 | by ( Ashley Stewart | Ellen Thomas | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Insiders expected sales teams to be cut in February after the end of the fiscal year, they recently told Insider. Like most companies who sell software to businesses, the fourth quarter is traditionally its biggest sales quarter as sales people push their clients to sign contracts to make sales quotas. It's unclear how many employees Salesforce laid off this time. Execs have repeatedly told employees, through emails and all-hands meetings, to expect rounds of layoffs to last for weeks, Insider reported. Salesforce laid off a few hundred salespeople in November, a person familiar with the matter told Insider.

☆ Ketamine is being sold as a depression wonder drug. For some, it's making everything worse.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Anna Silman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +42 min

The infusions at the ketamine clinic in his West Texas hometown were a Christmas gift from his grandmother. About five years ago, more and more of my friends started using ketamine recreationally. IV ketamine treatment centers charging $400 to $2,000 an infusion popped up all over the country. "Ketamine used as directed in an appropriate clinical setting very rarely leads to any dependence," Mindbloom says on its website. Like Nadia, most of the people I interviewed said when they started using ketamine, they didn't think it was possible to become dependent on it.

☆ Salesforce employees fear deeper cuts now that a second activist investor has a stake. Elliott, the world's most feared hedge fund, has confirmed it wants changes.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-23 | by ( Ashley Stewart | Ellen Thomas | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Feared activist investor Elliott Management now has a multibillion-dollar position in Salesforce. This is the company's second activist investor after Starboard Value disclosed a significant stake in October. Elliott Management — the world's most feared activist investor — now has a multibillion-dollar position in Salesforce, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, and some employees worry Elliott's attention could lead to further layoffs. Elliott is Salesforce's second activist investor after Starboard Value disclosed a significant stake in Salesforce in October. Activist investor firms such as Elliott "are tough," another said.

☆ 5 questions to ask before buying your first electric car
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-20 | by ( Alexa St. John | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Today's electric car buyers have a lot of questions. Potential EV drivers have plenty of questions, and there's plenty you need to know before buying an electric car. Regardless, here are some tips on what to ask your dealer or sales advisor if you're considering buying an EV. It's important for car-buyers considering an EV to ask about how it fits into an average driver's lifestyle. But given how much this market depends on improvements in battery tech, dealers should still be ready to talk about what separates their EV's battery from competitors.

Many major companies are requiring employees to return to the office full or part time. Here's a list, in alphabetical order, of major companies requiring employees to return to offices. AppleIn August, senior leaders told workers they had to return to the office at least three days a week. Read more: Elon Musk tells Twitter employees to return to the office or their resignations will be accepted10. Read more: Uber CEO's internal memo mandates employees return to the office in April.

Bangkok/Hong Kong CNN —For years, Thailand welcomed legions of Chinese tourists to its golden beaches, shopping districts and striking temples. Three government ministers headed to Bangkok’s international airport earlier this week to personally greet the first group of Chinese tourists to arrive after China lifted travel restrictions. Amazing Thailand always warmly welcomes our Chinese family.”Travelers from a Xiamen Airlines flight being welcomed by Thai officials upon arrival at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok on Jan. 9, 2023. “The arrival of tourists from China, as well as from countries around the world, to Thailand is expected to increase continually. In Thailand, that’s been no exception, with travel companies beginning to reactivate Chinese social marketing campaigns and increase staffing, according to Barnett.

☆ Salesforce insiders expect the sales teams to be hit with layoffs in February. Some say the company may cut an additional 10% later this year.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-13 | by ( Ashley Stewart | Ellen Thomas | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Salesforce insiders are expecting layoffs to sales staff in February, after the fiscal year ends. Employees told Insider there has been chaos and confusion since Salesforce announced layoffs. Execs have repeatedly told employees, through emails and all-hands meetings, to expect rounds of layoffs to last for weeks, Insider reported. So Salespeople were largely untouched by the company's first round of cuts earlier this month, sources told Insiders. In November, Salesforce cut hundreds of people, many of them in sales, for what it referred to as performance-based reasons.

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