How fast before Salesforce is out of business?

As foreseen and predicted, Microsoft is already moving in to offer private instances of ChatGPT working on your Azure backend. What it means is that if you authorize it, you can now run Microsoft AI to digest specific clusters of your company's data, make sense of them and allow your team or your customers to interact with them in a smooth and relatable way.

The most obvious application is getting rid of your horrid chatbots or ensuring that your hotline always provides a direct and clear answer in seconds...

This is only foreplay. If you're a reader of the newsletter, you remember what I wrote two months ago:

These cloud companies have been relentlessly pushing their SaaS solutions for a decade, evangelizing on data lakes and the globalization of corporate data infrastructures. But for now, these strategies lead to very few proper use cases. Imagine a multinational unleashing a Microsoft or AWS AI on these vast amounts of data and connecting it to a ChatGPT-like interface. The result? Instant queries on the company's technical, process, or customer-related information in real time. Having a vegetarian menu for six guests laid out for you is one thing, but asking for a comprehensive report on where to focus quality improvement in your worldwide supply chain process is another. Your customer hotline? Done. Training your sales teams on the new product offer? Trivialized. Drafting the answer to a multi-million dollar tender with all the tech specs? Child's play. This is the revolution we might not see coming yet. After Google, the next victims' names will be Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle. - The year the GAFAM could disappear. Special episode, ChatGPT

At this point, I don't see a way out for companies that haven't been major business cloud providers to get in this game and don't also have major network effects with their markets.

Even if they manage to get the technology under wraps as quickly as Microsoft did, neither Google nor Facebook will be able to get businesses to trust them with any amount of data beyond what they currently do for marketing. And Apple, as a purely consumer-oriented company whose business model is not directly challenged by AI, isn't probably concerned by this race–not that they shouldn't improve their desperately dumb Siri, mind you.

Amazon? They've been awfully quiet about all this, yet they have everything ready to outcompete Microsoft, including the AI bricks. It will be interesting to see their next move and when it will happen... A non unreasonnable bet? Cruising at a comfy $1.7 trillion market cap they could simply buy out Salesforce and its "punny" $200 billion valuation...🍿