*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).
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2018.
Investor sentiment is easy to track on the public markets, but private trends are more opaque ー and tech investors are increasingly prioritizing profitability over valuation. That's good news for companies looking to go public, like Airbnb and Lyft, but Uber might want to consider an alternative path to liquidity, J. Michael Ostendorff, director for Lagniappe Labs, told Cheddar on Monday.
Vocera wants to get patients in and out of the hospital as quickly and efficiently as possible ー and it's using Star Trek-inspired, connected badges to achieve that ambition. "We believe that by delivering the right information to the right caregiver at the right point in time, we can really eliminate some of those frustrations and delays and interruptions ー and allow \[patients\] to have a more seamless path through the hospital," Vocera CEO Brent Lang told Cheddar Monday.
The world's biggest tech event, CES, is upon us. In past years, the Las Vegas-based trade show has presented such memorable innovations as the first-ever home VCR and the (short-lived) Nintendo PlayStation ー but this year will be all about 5G. "Just like the transition from 3G to 4G, this transition from 4G to 5G is inevitable ー it is happening," George Slefo, Ad Age technology reporter told Cheddar Monday.
The head of security for Huawei, the embattled Chinese tech giant that has been accused of working as a front for Chinese intelligence services, told Cheddar's Hope King on Monday that "no government has ever asked us to spy" and that those accusations were part of a "drumbeat of anti-Huawei criticism."
It's become par for the course for Epic Games to release game-changing items in Fortnite just before tournaments. Ghost Gaming's Kayuun shares his worries for what that means for competitive Fortnite.
People with "get a job" on their list of New Year's resolutions should look to the tech industry, according to a trends report from PayScale. "Tech is the winner when it comes to where you really want to go for good career opportunities, high job satisfaction, and good wage growth," Katie Bardaro, PayScale's Chief Economist and VP of Data Analytics, told Cheddar Friday.
New York is getting into a crypto state of mind with plans to create the nation's first Crypto Task Force. "New York State is the financial capital of the world, and we must have the proper regulations and proper balance to be able to figure out how to regulate in this space," N.Y. Assemblyman Clyde Vanel told Cheddar.
Roku's new content partnership with Showtime, Starz, and other premium channels is "just the beginning" of a greater expansion into paid content, the company's VP of programming and engagement told Cheddar Thursday.
PepsiCo is spearheading an autonomous food delivery service on the campus of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., where students can now order snacks via an app that are then delivered to them via a small robotic vehicle. The "snackbot" is a "first-of-its-kind" experiment in self-driving and robotics technology, Scott Finlow, vice president of innovation and insights at PepsiCo, told Cheddar.
