00:14:46 · Matt Goddard
[00:14:46] S1: It did bring me on to something else, this as well, because it's a case of, as you say, it's like people are are almost setting up, especially now with the harnesses where you can create scheduled tasks. And I'm I'm guilty of not posting them, but I've got my scheduled tasks writing a a summary of our our pod every week to then post on LinkedIn, and I often put a couple of sentences on my own nonsense first. But actually, there's there's people who you could be setting up those scheduled tasks, and you see on YouTube, don't you, videos and content are being created automatically by pipelines and of scheduled tasks that just run as and when they need to to generate things even based on triggers externally. So, you know, something's written on Pi, you can grab that, run it through your process, change it to your tone. What I'm more interested in, and I've I've seen this a two or three times from both engineers but also salespeople saying AI can't AI just writes nonsense for me or AI won't work for me. And it's because they're taking the out of the box Chat GPT or or Claude and saying, write me a LinkedIn post and then just assuming that's exactly how it is, and they're not going through the steps of getting them to review your historic content, getting its builder a builder style for you, but again, it's understanding how you would you prose. Yeah, all those things that you know I was listening to a podcast on the drive back earlier, and it was a case of there's a particular company now as an onboarding flow for Claude for their their business that actually interviews you and then helps you write this the skill to then generate your copy so it is written and your emails are drafted in your is your normal sense. So just go and it doesn't work or it hallucinates, it's like really lazy reaction. And I think that's in the same way as this. Like it was lazy for just to push it out, but it's not just Drucken Miller who's the lazy one, it's all those other people who historically would catch that the ghostwriter's done something wrong, or you know, or there's a number of failings, isn't there? It's quite an interesting debate that it's um ignited.
00:16:36 · Mal McCallion, Matt Goddard
[00:16:36] S0: Exactly, and then that they're not using it enough to be able to know that that those are the tells, and that and that's a big thing as well. Um, yeah, to your point, um you know, anybody out there who wants to try and work out what their tone of voice is, all you need to do is point claw chat GBC at your website and say, summarize my tone of voice. And it will tell you, and then yeah, and you may be quite surprised by actually how you're coming across. [00:16:57] S1: But it's a really good stall in AI. [00:17:01] S0: At this point, I'm sure most people have not, but yeah, it would be very uh very important, I think, to kind of understand and interesting actually to understand you know what is it that that you that you are transmitting perhaps unknowingly out into the ether in terms of um your positioning and brand and so on. Um all right, that was um the first of our AI and tech news. We wanted to cover also um this deal between Salesforce and Anthropic, which has got a rather predictable name, hasn't it, Matt?
00:17:27 · Matt Goddard
[00:17:27] S1: Oh, do you want me to say the name, right? I do, yeah. Is it sales sales cord? Claude Force. I actually think this one's more interesting than just the silly tape on the name. I know. Um but but also you know, it was it was what May, we would talk about the SAS pocalypse and all of the sort of Salesforce is doomed, all CRMs are doomed, all all SaaS products are doomed. And actually what we're seeing now is with the harnesses coming along and and gentic actually using frontend in the way that the humans do, um I was again, I was listening to something where Notion is becoming a bit of a brain and a display surface for people, and actually with these harnesses, they're now able to open up your your SaaS and enter information, progress things and and utilise things in your in the meantime. I think this cla Claude Force launch really sort of underpins that and from a time where you know Salesforce's shares were tanking and they've uh they've done an amazing set of results we've got announced. I think it was prior to oh this we go. So Salesforce shares down about 20%, 22% this year after dropping 20% at the end of 2025. But actually, they've now rose 12% in extending trading on Wednesday after this announcement. So the the shares price has actually recovered remarkably well from where it was with the SAS Pocalypse. I think at the lowest in mid-June, it was like at what's that 150 cents um and now it's back up at 281 cents, which is where it was before the SaaSpocalypse even kicked off. So actually seeing these companies come back, and and for the point of this in terms of what Claude Force is, is it's basically Claude skills plugged directly into Salesforce so that where you start using your Claude co-work as your basically your surface area, your operating system for the day, it's pulling in all your Salesforce data for you so you don't have to go anywhere else and you can just issue your commands. And so whether it's Salesforce, whether it's HubSpot, whether it's RePit or whether it's Rex, you know, you do you start to have somewhere where your emails are in place, your WhatsApps are in place, you've got your analytics, you've got your Sage or whatever accounts, it's all in just one combined workspace. You don't have to keep logging into multiple different areas to get the specialist information.
00:19:33 · Matt Goddard, Mal McCallion
I think it because of this partnership, I think it's a really strong call out of um you know where what the direction of travel is for that. [00:19:41] S0: Yeah. And I like you, I I kind of I look at portals, sorry, at the um um the CRM systems, you know, the the problem seems to be that their kind of unit charge, unit economics were all around seats. So number of seats that they could sell. And now if you're plugging Clawed in, then the number of seats you have to pay for is kind of one, right? If it you know, and that's and that's kind of it. So so I I don't know the confidence that the 12% price share price increase last week kind of um indicates. Suggests there must be something in here, and again, I I I've kind of read it and and couldn't see anything, that said how they're gonna make this more profitable for Salesforce because Salesforce changed their charging model last year, and uh it's it's harking back a little bit.
00:20:27 · Matt Goddard
[00:20:27] S1: Well, it's a year ago, but they um and it's not in this article, but if if you remember way back, basically they they started ch charging for AI conversations, and then within a week they realized that that wasn't well if I get it right way around, it's had the conversations and then flipped it to outcomes, or it was outcomes and then flipped it to conversations, but they moved away from the seats-based pricing at that time, and HubSpot have done something similar recently at the start of the year. So they are moving away from that per seat into much more of a sort of an engagement type approach, and I think that's where the the SaaSpocalypse is going to survive. It's not the the seats approach anymore. It's because of, as you say, for a GenTic, you plug in an MCP, which Salesforce call have got their headless 360 is what they call their MCP. So like if you can start connecting and never have to log in, then why would you be charging seats? And as you say, that share price rising 12% wouldn't be reflective if suddenly everyone's got you know your or your team of uh rain males working on something.
00:21:25 · Mal McCallion
[00:21:25] S0: Yeah, no, it's it's so again kind of referring back to that. So I I think it went from from conversations to outcomes. I think outcomes has been the kind of thing, but but I don't know anybody that really kind of wants sorry, I know some people who do want that, but but I I don't think everybody's moved wholesale across because again, you know, that that would be a huge drop in a drop in price. But but you you're right, you know, in terms of direction of travel, absolutely, yeah. They're moving towards uh an understanding or a different business model that does reflect that. But uh but yeah, I I it's it's more the this yeah, I I I I still don't see how I would be twelve percent more confident that this business is going to make as Much money, if not more money, than they're going to do before the announcement. But again, as as you say, the the SASPocalypse, you know, um sounds like it's um it's on hold for now. How many horse people of the SASPocalypse there are? But uh but yes, it's it is an interesting deal. Um, presumably HubSphore is now gonna have to go to Chat GPT OpenAI uh and they're all gonna kind of buddy up like that. But uh but yeah, it's um it's it's a it's an interesting move. Interesting to see Dario actually um still alive. I haven't seen Dario Amaday in anything for a long time. He's been kind of kept away. But yeah, he's done the um he's done the press around this and looks very happy about it as well. All right, um that's um some a little bit more of our AI and tech news. Um let's dive into probably I don't know, one of the biggest stories of the week, which is um Hugging Face, which we spoke about a few weeks ago because it was basically the target of an open AI agent, agentic AI attack, because it it hosts a number of um benchmarks that uh the open AI bot wanted to hack. It is on the verge of being acquired by NVIDIA. So again, NVIDIA, for those not familiar, are the the microcheck GPU providers to pretty much everybody in the whole of the AI universe, and it is something that is is quite a huge deal, really. Um and NVIDIA Jensen Huang, uh their CEO, um, is very um very adept at using the zillions that his business is making on the back of the AI boom, actually entrenching his um his business into other areas that that are very interesting, such as Hugging Face. So, Matt, you know, what do you make of this?