Meta aims at enterprises with hire of ex-Salesforce AI exec

Meta has hired ex-Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih to lead a new Business AI group that will aim to make generative AI technology accessible to businesses. Shih revealed the move on LinkedIn on Nov. 19. The development comes nearly two years after Meta introduced its flagship Llama family of open source large language models. Llama’s success Before the release of Llama, many saw Meta as just a consumer-facing social media vendor. However, the release of Llama has enabled Meta to make significant inroads in enterprises. "Meta has done a fabulous job in the last 12, 18 months of getting Llama 3 adopted and taken seriously in the community," said Paul Baier, CEO and co-founder of GAI Insights. "This is a material change in the industry of helping Meta become a major enterprise vendor, and it's completely different than what they've been doing for the last 20 years." The new Business AI group will likely accelerate the open versus closed AI wars, Baier said. "This is going to be an explosion of effort on open source models, with Llama and others going against the closed source vendors like OpenAI, Flexion, Cohere, Mistral and others," he said. Sticking with open source will also help Meta continue to be a differentiator in the market, Gartner analyst Andrew Frank said. "I don't see any reason to suspect that they're going to veer from that path," Frank said. "It's been a pretty successful differentiator for them." The benefit of Shih The addition of Shih will also be a big plus for Meta, Baier said. Besides leading the Salesforce AI and Service Cloud units, Shih was an early-stage investor and advisor to various startups including AI search vendor Perplexity. She is likely to help Meta create the right partnerships to push its product more in the market, Baier said. "They need to get more of the systems integrators like PWC, IBM and others pushing the Meta products for companies behind the firewall," he said. Shih's experience on the business side of AI technology is also important, Frank said. "She understands the needs of the enterprise IT community probably to a greater extent that is found in a lot of other areas at Meta," he said. Some concerns What remains to be seen with the new business group is whether Meta will depart from its core business of maximizing advertising revenue and follow Google in diversifying "out of the media business into business tools," Frank continued. The competitiveness of the generative AI arena might be challenging for Meta, he added. "As the market matures, it's going to go through a difficult phase of disillusionment before it becomes productive," Frank said. "The timing of those kinds of trends is always a challenge." Esther Ajao is a TechTarget Editorial news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.