*By Jacqueline Corba*
Salesforce has saved a seat at its executive meetings for Einstein, an artificial intelligence-powered robot developed by the cloud computing company.
"The fact that we are using our own products to really drive our forecasting, it's pretty amazing," said Bob Stutz, CEO of Salesforce's Marketing Cloud. "It is really great to have that tool that you can use every single day to run your business."
Salesforce's chief executive, Marc Benioff, has been an outspoken proponent of the company's use of A.I., and said that Einstein has [been at every weekly senior staff meeting](http://fortune.com/2018/01/25/salesforce-benioff-einstein-davos-ai/) for the last year.
Stutz said Einstein pulls his weight on a team that has grown its quarterly revenue by 41 percent year over year.
"We are on an incredible tear right now," Stutz said in an interview with Cheddar. "It's really helping customers connect with their consumers across sales, marketing, service ー it's a real growth driver for us nowadays."
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/inside-salesforce-marketing-cloud-growth).
Major players in retail and tech are shaking up the health care industry with massive consolidation. But just as some new unions in the industry are forming, others have shown signs of instability. Amazon, a player that seems to dominate any field it enters, is well positioned to exploit those weaknesses and find itself at the top of another industry once again.
The power of Black Twitter, the name given to a loose network of black Twitter users behind both viral memes and social campaigns, is the premise of "Power Star Live," a 30-minute show that will live stream every Wednesday on the social platform. Jessie Woo and co-host Xilla Valentine aim to dissect how the Twitter users influence pop culture.
The internet is moving away from an ad-based revenue system says Jack Conte, co-founder and CEO of Patreon, a platform that allows people to pay for access to exclusive content from digital creators. That trend is evidenced by the growth that Patreon saw in 2018, Conte said in an interview on Cheddar Wednesday, the same day the company announced it now has more than 3 million subscribers, or "patrons," with more than 100,000 creators on the platform. The company began 2018 with 2 million patrons supporting its content.
TD Ameritrade posted quarterly earnings above expectations, but Wall Street's reaction wasn't exactly enthusiastic. Still, the brokerage firm is celebrating last month's successes. President and CEO Tim Hockey talked to Cheddar about how the company navigates market volatility.
TD Ameritrade president and CEO Tim Hockey said the company feels primed to compete with younger-skewing investment products like Robinhood because it's already deep inside millennial pockets ー and more users join the platform every quarter. "In our case, we have a much more sophisticated trading platform, technology platform, education platform, and we are growing at a very happy rate, so we are quite confident in our offering," Hockey told Cheddar Wednesday.
Latch's partnership with UPS is expanding to more cities ー and applications. "The use cases are so much broader than what we would've thought," Latch CEO and co-founder Luke Schoenfelder told Cheddar Wednesday. "People are coming up with entire new businesses just using our system."
Symbiont, a smart contracts platform for institutional applications of blockchain technology, has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Nasdaq Ventures and joined by new investors Citi.
The addition of Netflix to the exclusive Motion Picture Association of America on Tuesday is likely to prompt a shift in policy, both for the movie industry and for the streaming giant.
"Netflix ($NFLX) is going to shape the MPAA's agenda as much as the reverse," Eriq Gardner, a senior editor at The Hollywood Reporter, told Cheddar.
CBD is the latest hot trend in wellness ー and Alkaline Water Company is jumping aboard with a new CBD-infused water.
"We just see that as a market we can take right onto, and glom onto," Alkaline Water Company CEO Ricky Wright told Cheddar on Tuesday. "We already have a lifestyle health product in alkaline water ー we see that as a natural extension."
Slowing economic growth may spell disaster for some businesses, but travel booking site Kayak tends to see more business when times are tough. "When we enter a recession, prices come down and so, as a result, services like Kayak get used more frequently as consumers try to find those deals," Kayak CEO Steve Hafner told Cheddar on Tuesday. The International Monetary Fund on Monday downgraded its forecast for global economic growth, sparking fears of a global slowdown. But Hafner said Kayak managed to grow through the last major recession, and he feels good about its prospects moving forward. "It was a bad one, but we grew right through it and I suspect this would be no different than that," he said.
