Microsoft and HubSpot Add AI Power to Their Products 🤖

Update 2023-03-07

• Google to Offer Fewer Promotions this Year Due to New Performance Review System

• Atlassian Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

• Enhancing AI Capabilities with Microsoft's Copilot

• HubSpot Launches AI-Powered Tools to Help Companies Connect With Customers

• Google AI Language Model Progressing Toward Supporting 1,000 Languages

• Bing AI Chatbot Gets Generative Conversational Styles and Updated Behavior

• Silver Lake and CPPIB Offer $12.4B Takeover of Qualtrics International Inc.

• Stability AI Ltd Seeks $4 Billion Valuation, Powered by Open-Source AI Tool Stable Diffusion

• ARM to Raise $8 Billion in US IPO, Aiming for $50 Billion Valuation

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Big Tech and Startups

Google to Offer Fewer Promotions this Year Due to New Performance Review System

Google is informing employees that fewer of them will receive promotions to more senior levels this year than in the past.

• This is as a result of their new performance review system, Google Reviews and Development (GRAD), which will result in less employees receiving high marks and more receiving low ratings.

• The company has also slowed hiring, cutting 6% of its workforce and reducing the number of staff promoted to L6 and above.

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SaaS and Cloud

Atlassian Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

Atlassian announced a 5% reduction of its workforce, affecting 500 employees. This move is not reflective of Atlassian’s financial performance and is instead seen as a “rebalancing” to prioritize growing areas. The layoffs are limited to specific areas such as talent acquisition, program management and research & insights.

As compensation, the company will offer 15 weeks of severance pay plus one week per year of service, accelerated vesting and employer-sponsored healthcare for six months, visa support, and access to communication tools for the remaining week.

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AI

Enhancing AI Capabilities with Microsoft's Copilot

Microsoft has introduced new AI capabilities, called Copilot, to its Power Platform and Dynamics 365 enterprise tools.

• Power Platform's "Power Virtual Agent" and "AI Builder" have been enhanced with the new models.

• Copilot will provide sales teams with AI-generated emails or meeting summaries to reduce administrative effort. Marketers can use natural language to ask the AI about potential insights into their data.

• Currently available for preview in the US, more AI capabilities are expected to be released in the future.

HubSpot Launches AI-Powered Tools to Help Companies Connect With Customers

HubSpot, a CRM platform for scaling companies, has introduced two new AI-powered tools—content assistant and ChatSpot.ai—to promote productivity and save time.

• Content assistant helps users quickly generate blog post outlines, write content in a flash, and streamline their content marketing workflows.

• ChatSpot.ai enables customers to add contacts/companies to the HubSpot CRM, craft sales emails personalized to recipients, and create custom reports related to marketing, sales, and customer service.

• EVP of Product Andy Pitre noted this is an effort from HubSpot to help companies connect more deeply with their customers by creating quality content faster & easier.

• The launch of the two tools builds on previous HubSpot investments in AI technology from OpenAI.

📝 Cloudly note: The news from both Microsoft and HubSpot, in our view, clearly shows what will happen in the productivity and business space when it comes to utilizing the LLM's capability to understand text, data and human input. Every type of SaaS application will most likely implement an Assitant/chat layer to enhance their products. Ultimately, this will not be a differentiation from peers but something the user will do in a couple of years (or faster) and takes for granted. The actual difference is unique datasets that the AI can be applied to, and the potential power lies for the company.

Google AI Language Model Progressing Toward Supporting 1,000 Languages

Google is progressing towards its goal of building and AI language model that supports 1,000 languages.

• Universal Speech Model (USM) is a state-of-the-art system with 2 billion parameters trained on 12 million hours of speech and 28 billion sentences across over 300 languages.

• USM currently supports over 100 languages and will work as the platform for an even more expansive system.

• Meta is also working on an AI translation tool in its early stages.

• AR glasses could employ this technology to provide real-time translations, but Google has made misrepresentations of Arabic during presentations, indicating how easily mistakes can be made.

Bing AI Chatbot Gets Generative Conversational Styles and Updated Behavior

Microsoft has added options for how its Bing generative AI chatbot responds to queries, allowing users to decide the tone and style of the AI with Creative, Balanced, and Precise conversational styles.

• Turn counters are included to indicate how many chats turns users have had so far.

• Microsoft has also updated the AI's chat behavior by loosening some restraints that previously caused defensive responses from the AI.

• The goal is for Bing's responses to be more engaging and provide more observations.

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Funding, Ventrure Capital and M&A

Silver Lake and CPPIB Offer $12.4B Takeover of Qualtrics International Inc.

Qualtrics International Inc. has received a $12.4B takeover offer from Silver Lake and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).

• The price is a 73% premium over the last closing price of its stock prior to the disclusure of a potential bid, which happened in early February. Compared to last days closing, the offer holds a 6% premium.

• Qualtrics provides tools used to collect feedback from customers and employees and analyze it accordingly.

• It withdrew an initial public offering in 2018 to accept an $8B buyout from SAP, which currently holds a 71% stake.

• SAP announced plans to sell its Qualtrics stake at the end of January 2021, with three buyers reportedly submitting offers so far.

• Silver Lake has been granted exclusive acquisition talks until March 15th, and if successful, it will mark one of the largest acquisitions this year.

• Qualtrics reported fourth-quarter earnings with revenue growing 23% year-over-year, while its adjusted net income turned positive after posting a $39.4B loss twelve months prior.

• It has over 16,750 customers worldwide, including 90% of Fortune 100 companies, with an estimated total addressable market of $60B.

Stability AI Ltd Seeks $4 Billion Valuation, Powered by Open-Source AI Tool Stable Diffusion

According to sources, Stability AI Ltd, the creator of Stable Diffusion, is seeking to raise capital at a valuation of $4 billion.

• The company has investors including Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

• Stable Diffusion is an AI tool for making digital images which competes with OpenAI’s Dall-E 2.

• The software is open-source and used for video games, advertisements, etc.

ARM to Raise $8 Billion in US IPO, Aiming for $50 Billion Valuation

Softbank-owned chip designer, ARM, reportedly plans to raise at least $8 billion in a US IPO.

• The British firm is aiming for a valuation of over $50 billion with the share sale.

• Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Barclays and Mizuho Financial Group are likely to be the lead underwriters for the deal.

• Last year, SoftBank attempted to sell Arm to Nvidia for $40 billion but due to regulatory issues the deal failed.

• With its Artificial Intelligence technology in place, Arm looks well-suited to benefit from AI’s growth.