Each year, Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) updates its V2MOM, a planning document laying out vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. CEO Marc Benioff has said it’s “been used to guide every decision at Salesforce” since the software company’s founding 25 years ago this week.
But in early 2023, there was a problem. ChatGPT was going viral, and Salesforce’s strategy didn’t account for it.
“The V2MOM had nothing about generative AI,” Parker Harris, who co-founded the company with Benioff, told the media.
It was a first for Salesforce, which had never been caught so off-guard about an emerging technology trend. If Salesforce was to become a leader in generative artificial intelligence, the company would need to quickly revise its guiding document to redirect the company — and its 73,000 employees — toward the technology that’s sweeping across Silicon Valley and making its way into every industry, from manufacturing to medicine.
Salesforce would have to go to battle with tech giants Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) , Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), as well as red-hot and well-capitalized startups. But following a handful of hefty acquisitions and a run-in with activist investors that led Salesforce to disband its M&A committee, a splashy deal was likely off the table.
After generative AI made its way into the revised V2MOM last year, Harris supervised its brisk insertion into the company’s sales, customer service, marketing and commerce applications. He studied new techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation, which involves feeding information outside of an AI model’s training set to yield a better answer.
CRM shares dipped $1.28 to $304.00.
