• Subscribe
  • Log In
  • Home
  • Daily Diary
  • Asset Class
    • U.S. Equity
    • Fixed Income
    • Global Equity
    • Commodities
    • Currencies
  • Sector
    • Basic Materials
    • Consumer Discretionary
    • Consumer Staples
    • Energy
    • Financial Services
    • Healthcare
    • Industrials
    • Real Estate
    • Technology
    • Telecom Services
    • Transportation
    • Utilities
  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Video
    • Columnist Conversations
    • Best Ideas
    • Stock of the Day
  • Street Notes
  • Authors
    • Doug Kass
    • Bruce Kamich
    • Jim Cramer
    • Jim "Rev Shark" DePorre
    • Helene Meisler
    • Jonathan Heller
    • - See All -
  • Options
  • RMPIA
  • Switch Product
    • Action Alerts PLUS
    • Quant Ratings
    • Real Money
    • Real Money Pro
    • Retirement
    • Stocks Under $10
    • TheStreet
    • Top Stocks
    • Trifecta Stocks
  1. Home
  2. / Investing
  3. / Technology

How Adobe, Salesforce and Others Are Embracing Machine Learning

Investments by major enterprise software firms in AI/machine learning features are growing considerably. Chip developers and cloud service providers that make a lot of these investments possibly stand to benefit.
By ERIC JHONSA
Aug 06, 2019 | 05:04 PM EDT
Stocks quotes in this article: ADBE, CRM, NOW, PD, PLAN, DT, NVDA, AMZN, MSFT, GOOGL

Compared with all the attention given to the giant AI-related investments made by tech giants, the investments being made by many enterprise software firms don't get as much attention.

But as talks with industry execs often drive home, investments in software features that leverage AI/machine learning have also become a key R&D priority for many publicly-traded enterprise software firms -- even if their spending on such work can't compare with what tech giants are doing.

When looking at how enterprise software firms are using "AI" to strengthen their offerings, it's worth remembering that there's a difference between broader investments in machine learning, and investments in deep learning in particular. Machine learning (ML) covers the general use of algorithms that analyze data to make conclusions and predictions, and which get better as more data is analyzed. Deep learning (DL) is a computationally demanding subset of machine learning that involves creating artificial neural networks (ANN) that in some respects function like a human brain.

Whereas tech giants have been investing heavily in training advanced deep learning models for a variety of applications, some (though not all) of the "AI" work being done by enterprise software firms doesn't involve deep learning, but rather fits under the broader definition of machine learning.

With that qualifier in mind, machine learning-related investments by enterprise software firms appear to have picked up considerably in recent years. Here's a run-down of how a handful of these companies are leveraging the technology:

  • Adobe (ADBE) has rolled out Sensei, a ML platform that powers a number of features for both the content-creation apps in its Creative Cloud and Document Cloud suites, as well as the marketing, advertising and e-commerce software offerings in its Experience Cloud suite.
  • Salesforce.com (CRM) has been making investing heavily in its Einstein ML platform, with the goal of letting its various CRM software apps -- among other things, they cover sales, marketing, customer support and e-commerce -- surface insights and make recommendations based on data produced by a number of different apps. In addition, analytics software firm Tableau Software, which was just acquired by Salesforce, recently launched Ask Data, an ML-powered solution that lets users make natural-language data queries within Tableau's software.
  • ServiceNow's (NOW) Intelligent Automation Engine, which launched in 2017, uses ML to analyze a customer's operations data to do things such as prioritize tasks, detect potential problems and automate routine jobs.
  • Along similar lines, PagerDuty (PD) , a leading provider of software used by teams of on-call IT workers, has been using ML to group related problems turned up by its software, and figure out which issues are worthy of immediate attention.
  • Anaplan (PLAN) , a leading provider of business planning software, is working on using ML to provide planners with accurate predictions about what will happen if a particular decision is made.
  • Dynatrace (DT) , a top provider of application performance monitoring (APM) software, has launched an ML engine known as Davis that attempts to figure out the root cause of a problem that an app is seeing. The company also wants to eventually use Davis to automatically detect anomalies within business data.

Growing investments by enterprise developers in machine learning is a tailwind for Nvidia (NVDA) . The company has long had a dominant position in the market for the accelerators used to train deep learning models, and (though this field is more competitive) has also begun to see sales ramp for accelerators used to perform deep learning inference -- the running of trained models against real-world data and content. Recently, Nvidia -- via its RAPIDS software platform -- has also been working to grow the use of its GPUs to more broadly accelerate machine learning workloads.

In multiple ways, machine learning investments by enterprise developers also benefit public cloud giants such as Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (MSFT) Azure and Alphabet's (GOOGL)  Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The cloud giants offer a host of services that developers can use to build and train machine learning models, as well as programming interfaces (APIs) that let developers leverage the powerful models the cloud giants have developed for tasks such as image analysis, text analysis and voice recognition.

In addition, with many enterprise cloud software providers relying on public cloud infrastructures to host their apps, their machine learning services often run on the cloud giants' servers, regardless of how they were developed.

Get an email alert each time I write an article for Real Money. Click the "+Follow" next to my byline to this article.
TAGS: Investing | Technology

More from Technology

Netflix Reports Earnings on Tuesday: 5 Important Things to Watch

Eric Jhonsa
Apr 17, 2021 8:00 AM EDT

Along with its total subscriber adds, keep an eye on Netflix's regional growth rates, as well as its free cash flow guidance and content spending outlook.

Taking Another Look at Twilio's Charts

Bruce Kamich
Apr 16, 2021 1:12 PM EDT

Aggressive traders could begin probing the long side of TWLO.

GE Isn't a Value Play and Has No Earnings Momentum - Buy Some Puts

Jim Collins
Apr 16, 2021 12:11 PM EDT

The company is in a secular downtrend fundamentally, but the stock has risen with the market in this wild ride over the past 12 months.

TSMC's Guidance Did Nothing to Spoil the Fun for Chip Stocks

Eric Jhonsa
Apr 15, 2021 4:20 PM EDT

Though the chip manufacturing giant is lower post-earnings, there's a lot to like about its revenue and capex guidance, as well as other commentary it shared.

Keysight Technologies: Bullish Fundamentals and Charts

Bruce Kamich
Apr 15, 2021 2:07 PM EDT

TK

Real Money's message boards are strictly for the open exchange of investment ideas among registered users. Any discussions or subjects off that topic or that do not promote this goal will be removed at the discretion of the site's moderators. Abusive, insensitive or threatening comments will not be tolerated and will be deleted. Thank you for your cooperation. If you have questions, please contact us here.

Email

CANCEL
SUBMIT

Email sent

Thank you, your email to has been sent successfully.

DONE

Oops!

We're sorry. There was a problem trying to send your email to .
Please contact customer support to let us know.

DONE

Please Join or Log In to Email Our Authors.

Email Real Money's Wall Street Pros for further analysis and insight

Already a Subscriber? Login

Columnist Conversation

  • 08:05 AM EDT JAMES "REV SHARK" DEPORRE

    This Weekend on Real Money

    How recency bias and the Pareto Principle impact y...
  • 02:42 PM EDT PAUL PRICE

    Wednesday on Real Money Pro

    Make this stock a 'part' of your portfolio.
  • 04:44 PM EDT PAUL PRICE

    Pretty Incredible + Hard to Believe

  • See More

COLUMNIST TWEETS

  • A Twitter List by realmoney
About Privacy Terms of Use

© 1996-2021 TheStreet, Inc., 225 Liberty Street, 27th Floor, New York, NY 10281

Need Help? Contact Customer Service

Except as otherwise indicated, quotes are delayed. Quotes delayed at least 20 minutes for all exchanges. Market Data & Company fundamental data provided by FactSet. Earnings and ratings provided by Zacks. Mutual fund data provided by Valueline. ETF data provided by Lipper. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions Group.

TheStreet Ratings updates stock ratings daily. However, if no rating change occurs, the data on this page does not update. The data does update after 90 days if no rating change occurs within that time period.

FactSet calculates the Market Cap for the basic symbol to include common shares only. Year-to-date mutual fund returns are calculated on a monthly basis by Value Line and posted mid-month.

Compare Brokers

Please Join or Log In to manage and receive alerts.

Follow Real Money's Wall Street Pros to receive real-time investing alerts

Already a Subscriber? Login