Salesforce Exec Invites A.I. Bot to All Senior Staff Meetings
*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).
A week after raising concerns over the braking time of the Tesla Model 3, Consumer Reports is now recommending the car. The electric automaker deployed "over-the-air" updates, something Jake Fisher, Director of Automotive Testing at Consumer Reports, said he'd never seen before.
The online second-hand retailer has turned selling your old duds into a billion-dollar business, helping more than 4 million people clean out their closets and switch up their wardrobes for some serious cash.
The company, which makes a FitBit-style fertility sensor, announced it will use the fresh capital to fill gaps in the market. "Women's health and women's health research has been underfunded for the last decade," says co-founder Lea von Bidder.
Hugging Face is an A.I.-powered chatbot designed to have "meaningful" conversations with users, says the CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue, who likened a relationship with a bot to the ties one might share with a pet.
ABC is canceling its hit show 'Roseanne' after the sitcom's star Roseanne Barr made racist comments on Twitter. The company released a statement saying, "Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show." Disney CEO Bob Iger chimed in to voice his support for ABC's decision. Barr has apologized for her comments about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett.
Facebook is reportedly getting ready to launch its WhatsApp Pay service in India. The company could introduce the payment service across the country as soon as next week, according to Bloomberg. WhatsApp Pay was launched in February of this year and has received rave reviews. Around 200 million people already use WhatsApp's messaging service in India.
Budweiser is introducing a new beer to its Reserve Collection. Proceeds from the new Budweiser Freedom Reserve Red Lager will go towards helping veterans. Ricardo Marques, VP of marketing at Budweiser, joins Cheddar to explain why this is an important mission for the company.
A new data privacy battle is brewing in Europe. The EU is considering stricter data privacy rules called the ePrivacy Regulation, just days after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect.
Crowd Cow enables consumers to bid on parts of cows from independent farms and will only process orders once the entire cow is sold. "What we're doing is providing a very different experience from the entire meat industry," says co-founder and CEO Joe Heitzeberg.
A former Snap software engineer wrote an email last November criticizing the company for not being welcoming to women and people of color. Snap told Cheddar it’s making efforts to address what the engineer, Shannon Lubetich, called a “toxic” and “sexist” culture.
An Austrian privacy activist filed lawsuits against the tech giants as soon as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect at midnight, accusing the companies of failing to comply. "This is a very hard reality check for companies, not just abroad, but in the U.S.," says Andrew Rossow, internet attorney and Forbes contributor.
The iconic yellow cabs will be fitted with a tablet-based digital operating system that will help drivers with navigation and charge riders a fixed price. This will help taxis compete with other ride-hailing apps, like Uber and Lyft, says Amos Tamam, CEO of Curb, the company powering the new initiative.