The San Francisco-headquartered firm’s investment arm, Salesforce Ventures, has unveiled a US$250-million generative AI fund, which has put an undisclosed sum into startup Cohere. Salesforce is also integrating OpenAI’s technology to offer clients machine-made content like emails and marketing copy based on their own data. And the two firms are launching ChatGPT functionality for Salesforce-owned Slack. (The Logic)

Talking point: The SaaS pioneer is the latest tech giant to add auto-text to its core functionality by piggybacking on OpenAI’s viral, large language model-based (LLM) system; other adopters include Microsoft, a direct investor and partner, and API-linked Shopify and Snap. While it’s working with one generative AI startup, Salesforce it’s also betting on several others. The new fund’s other investments include Google-backed Anthropic; Hearth.AI; and You.com, which, like Cohere, is a portfolio company of Toronto-based Radical Ventures. Some tech giants pouring capital into the space are trying to secure compute-hungry AI clients for their cloud-services subsidiaries. There are “disadvantages” to “locking yourself into” one of those providers “and becoming beholden to them,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told The Logic last month. Salesforce isn’t in the business of selling compute resources, and its venture arm has long been active in Canada, backing firms including 1Password and Paper.