Flashy new artificial intelligence startups have been popping up all over the place and raising tons of venture capital money over the past year and a half.
But it’s not just early-stage startups developing the latest AI products: Experienced technology companies, particularly in the Southeast, may have made their mark in certain technology sectors but are now major players in AI innovation.
Take Salesloft, for example. The company is known for its focus on the world of sales. But in reality, Salesloft has been an AI-focused company for the past seven years. The Atlanta-based team filed its first AI patent in 2017.
The sales automation platform, which was valued at $2.3 billion in 2021, launched Conductor AI earlier this year as a tool to help sales teams streamline the lead generation and deal closing process, and in 2023 launched Rhythm, which improves the buying experience for end users.
Frank Dale, vice president of product at Salesloft, told Hypepotamus that the company’s focus on AI is important for the ever-evolving sales industry.
“We’re hired to help salespeople be more productive,” Dale told Hypepotamus. Today, that often means helping salespeople keep track of 40 or more deals at a time by recommending next-step activities, keeping follow-up notes, and reducing the time they spend on administrative tasks.
AI in your inbox and in the cloud
AI is impacting most technology industries in some way, especially those working in cloud computing, said John Gleason, COO of Atlanta-based Storj, where the AI ​​boom is giving rise to entirely new industries based on new hardware solution stacks.
“Cloud providers and private data centers are competing for access to vast quantities of high-end GPUs, where demand far outstrips supply. Smaller and mid-sized companies entering the space face supply chain challenges due to volume purchases by the largest players in the space,” he told Hypepotamus. “Supply chain constraints and the high cost of HPC infrastructure mean that expensive infrastructure must be running nearly 24/7 to achieve the required ROI. A new industry of distributed computing marketplace providers is emerging, offering AI customers access to high-end GPUs for model generation and inference, comparing operational costs with capital expenditures acquisition models. These providers can accelerate time to value for customers needing GPU resources, but customers also need to be able to move training and inference data to these compute resources quickly and efficiently.”
Gleeson said Storj was an early innovator in machine learning and is “uniquely positioned” now as AI goes mainstream, thanks to the foundations it has laid: its security model and economics.
“AI is impacting Storj’s business and how we think about our products. We’ve seen early traction and strong growth in both our Backup and Media & Entertainment Solutions areas, but AI is emerging as a third, fastest-growing area. We’re particularly excited about the convergence of AI and M&E in video production. We’ve been investing heavily in partner integrations, such as our integration with Valdi, as well as other tools like Replit.com, to capitalize on the rapid growth in this area.”
Other major Atlanta-based companies are also focusing on developing more AI tools for their current user base.
Mailchimp’s name is synonymous with email and it’s known as the most successful bootstrapped Atlanta tech company in history, but now the Atlanta giant is rolling out AI automation tools as a full-fledged marketing suite.
This includes the recently announced new revenue intelligence technology, which helps marketers find untapped revenue streams by “accurately identifying leads that are ready to convert.”
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Featured photo courtesy of Mailchimp
