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Written by: Lisa Chai, Sr. Research Analyst
Salesforce’s $28B acquisition of Slack was notable, for several reasons. This strategic deal allows Salesforce, a THNQ Index member, to expand its leverage to the enterprise cloud shift as it allows them to finally compete with Microsoft. Since its 2009 acquisition of the social media platform Chatter and the 2016 acquisition of Quip, a social file sharing platform, Salesforce’s ultimate vision of a “Social Enterprise” could now be achieved with the acquisition of Slack. Salesforce’s CEO Mark Benioff and President and COO Bret Taylor, formerly CTO of Facebook, who helped orchestrate the deal, remarked on a conference call to investors that the pandemic has made this acquisition sensible because of the “all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”
It also helps that 90% of Slack’s enterprise customers are also Salesforce customers. Slack is a collaboration app that has exploded in popularity among enterprises. The most compelling reason to adopt Slack into your organization is that it integrates well with all kinds of intelligent apps and services. Slack, with its rich user interface, will allow Salesforce to have a strong operating system for a whole new class of apps.
AI bots and apps play a key role at the organization level, as they improve the digital experience between employees, customers and partners. An intelligent bot like Polly.AI can perform automated surveys in a matter of seconds; another app, Morgan, can efficiently organize meetings; and Yala uses machine learning to study your audience’s social media patterns. These are game-changing bots, available today on platforms like Slack, that will boost office productivity as we enter the new era of the digital workplace.
Investing in AI Stocks
For investors, AI is still in the early stages of adoption. Historically, the stock market tends to under-appreciate the scale of opportunity enjoyed by leading providers of new technologies at this phase of development. As we watch index members, like Salesforce, continue to pave the path, it is growingly evident that those involved in the AI space are on course to grow faster than many existing public companies.
For those too hoping to profit from this growth, the biggest takeaway is this: AI is not just coming, it’s here. The ROBO Global Artificial Intelligence Index is one way to to capture a basket of AI stocks.