Meet Botlhale AI Solutions' Thapelo Nthite, who is making digital services accessible
Thapelo Nthite started his journey with a mechatronics engineering degree from UCT.
The aim of Botlhale AI was to address social issues.
They've formed several connections with strong companies.
_______________________________________________
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, as they say.
With many people incorporating it in their everyday routines and workflows, Botlhale AI aims to bridge the gap of African languages in AI.
It breaks the language barriers for African businesses and their customers and unleashes human language technologies in African languages.
We sit with the co-founder, Thapelo Nthite, who gives us insight into his journey.
Inside his journey
You studied for a degree in mechatronics engineering at UCT. What social issues do you aim to address and what career gaps do you aim to fill through your qualification?
My journey into mechatronics engineering was marked by a valuable lesson I learnt from a high school teacher: that my qualifications, grades and achievements are not just credentials but serve as tools for creating a positive impact on society.
With my co-founders, who also graduated from the same department, we set out to build Botlhale AI. We were on a mission to address social issues that mattered deeply to us, which was making digital services more accessible.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Thapelo Nthite (@thapelo.nthite)
What Botlhale AI Solutions offers
Share with us what services Botlhale AI Solutions offer.
In an age dominated by digital technologies and information, the barriers to entry remain substantial for many people, particularly in Africa.
This stems from a multitude of challenges, such as infrastructure limitations, smartphone accessibility, high data costs and most notably, language barriers.
At Botlhale AI, our mission is to make digital services and information accessible to all, irrespective of the language they speak.
We help businesses engage their customers in languages they understand and trust. And, we do this in three ways: call centre analytics tool, multilingual help desk and virtual assistant builder.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Botlhale AI (@botlhaleai)
Growing the business
Share how you got your first clients, and your expansion plan to attract more clients in and outside South Africa.
As word began to spread about our mission and innovative solutions, several businesses reached out to us. They recognised the potential of our services in helping them overcome customer engagement challenges, and this initial interest came from inbound inquiries once our name started appearing in the media.
In addition to expanding our language capabilities, we've also recognised the importance of strategic partnerships.
We've formed strong collaborations with several companies that have a substantial operational footprint across Africa, such as Chenosis by MTN.
These partnerships are invaluable in making our expansion plan smoother.
By working alongside these established entities, we can leverage their expertise and reach to introduce our natural language processing services to a wider audience.
Beyond Botlhale AI Solutions
Apart from your business, what keeps you busy and fulfilled?
While my business keeps me occupied and driven, it's the bonds I share with family and friends, as well as the freedom and satisfaction I experience while running, that contribute to a well-rounded and fulfilling life.
Legacy and dreams
What would you like to be remembered for one day as an entrepreneur and a person?
In a world rife with injustice and inequality, my deepest aspiration is to be remembered as an entrepreneur and as a person who made a meaningful impact by striving to make our society better.
My foremost desire is to leave a legacy as an entrepreneur who dedicated their life's work to improving the lives of others. In a rapidly evolving digital age, I sought to bridge the gaps that exist, ensuring that every person had access to vital information and digital services.
However, I also want to be remembered for the person I am, not just for what I manage to achieve. I want to be remembered as someone who treated others with respect and fairness, offered a helping hand when it was needed, and made a positive difference in people's lives through simple acts of kindness.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by TechAfrica.com (@tech_africa_)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Checking In on the Economy and Some Stocks Worth Watching
In this podcast, Motley Fool senior analysts Asit Sharma and David Meier join host Ricky Mulvey to discuss: The latest Fed meeting, and what Jerome Powell is watching. What AI means for a consulting giant. Earnings from Kroger and Darden Restaurants. Two stocks worth watching: Ferrari and Cava. Motley Fool contributor Brian Stoffel interviews Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner about how AI has changed his investing process. To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy. A full transcript is below. Before you buy stock in Kroger, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Kroger wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $687,731!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $945,846!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 818% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 175% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 23, 2025 This podcast was recorded on June 20, 2025. Ricky Mulvey: It's the Motley Fool Money Radio Show. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joining me on the internet today are Motley Fool senior analysts Asit Sharma and David Meier. Great to have you both here. Asit Sharma: Good to be here, Ricky. David Meier: Likewise. Ricky Mulvey: Asit, we're going to kick off with the Big Macro. This week, the Federal Reserve decided to leave interest rates unchanged. Two key phrases in Jerome Powell's press conference were that ''uncertainty is unusually elevated'' and ''the economy is in a solid position.'' What did we learn from Mr. Powell? Asit Sharma: Ricky, we didn't learn a lot that we didn't already know, although those two phrases together do seem to be a bit in opposition. Chairman Powell talked about last year's very nice GDP growth of 2.5%. The economy was chugging along nicely last year. He mentioned that this year, the picture is a little more murky in terms of growth because all of this trade war overhang that we've got, uncertainty in the economy is making the data hard to read, especially the near-term import export figures. That's throwing some mud into the water. He did point to, let's round it to 1.5% GDP expected growth this year from the numbers he cited. That's not the Fed's estimate, but Chairman Powell was just citing some common figures that are looking out past this quarter for the rest of the year. He also mentioned that inflation is still somewhat elevated. Now, we're shoppers, so we understand that. Lastly, Chairman Powell also talked about the unemployment rate still being in a quite healthy place at 4.2%. That's low. It indicates pretty full employment in the workforce. You put all these factors together, and the message is, look, there's still some stuff we'd like to have a better beat on. We're in no hurry to lower interest rates just now, but reading between the tea leaves, investors can expect that the Fed probably will go ahead with two small-sized rate cuts later this year. Ricky Mulvey: The thing that doesn't make sense to me, David, is you heard Powell talking about how a lot of companies were pulling things forward to get ahead of tariffs. Liberation Day was April. We still have April and May in Quarter 2, and they're saying, GDP is going to bounce right back, while that was going on. We saw this from Edward Harrison in Bloomberg, and that ''the short version is that the US economy is decelerating so much that we should expect fed rate cuts to resume in September.'' I'm not asking you for a rate cut prediction because that's a fool's errand. But what do you think? Is the economy really decelerating right now? David Meier: Yes, it is. Ricky Mulvey: We'll move back to Asit. I'm kidding. Please continue with your thoughts. David Meier: Sorry, you got me there. Yes, it is. In 2023, the economy grew at 2.5% for the year. In 2024, 2.9%. It contracted in the first quarter, and we're only expecting somewhere between 1.5, and I've seen estimates as high as 2% growth. Yes, it is slowing down. Are we going into recession? No, I don't think that's going to happen. But I am of the camp that what we learned from Chairman Powell is that he's actually worried. He's not doing anything, not because he's like, this is necessarily the right thing to do. I think he's like, I don't exactly know what to do. Is inflation going to go up? If it ticks up and he cuts rates, what does that mean? That means that inflation could go up higher. If he cuts rates and inflation is, in fact, going higher, then what's going to happen? The bond yields are going to go up. Prices are going to go down. There's not a lot of good things for Jerome Powell to do right now, nor the FOMC. I agree there is a lot of uncertainty, especially because we don't have the full impact of the tariffs in the labor market, in the inflation numbers, so we're just going to have to wait and see. It's a terrible place to be, actually, to wait and see. It would be better if we didn't have all the uncertainty, but that's where we are. Ricky Mulvey: I pulled forward some spending, definitely on clothes, before the tariffs came rolling in. But, David, have you noticed any spending changes among your friends, family, or your communities? David Meier: Yes, I have a golf buddy who comes down about every other week, and we are not going out to dinner as much. We're eating in. We're getting things from the grocery store, and we're changing what we're getting. We're getting cheaper items. That's because we're feeling the impact of rising prices as consumers. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and I'm sure us together are not the only ones that are changing a bit of their spending patterns. We just got to see how that percolates through the economy. Ricky Mulvey: Well, we're seeing changes in diners' spending patterns, especially at those big chain restaurants. We're going to get to that a little bit later in the show. Asit, let's stay focused on the labor market, though. From Jerome Powell, he basically said, the labor market is at or near maximum employment. We've talked about this story quite a bit on the show, especially the disconnect among new college grads and the labor market they're facing. There's also a Wall Street Journal story this week titled the biggest companies across America are cutting their workforces. This big claim at the beginning that corporate America is convinced fewer employees mean faster growth. Do you understand the disconnect between what Fed Chair Powell is saying and what corporations are telling the Wall Street Journal? Asit Sharma: I think I do, Ricky. Fed Chair Powell is focused on the numbers of people who are employed. We have a labor force which is at around 164 million people in the United States that are productively employed just now. If you look at the largest companies in the country, and I'm just going to focus on the S&P 500 as a proxy, they employ about 17% of that total workforce. It's six of one, half a dozen of the other in some ways. There are two ways to look at this. One is that the labor force, among the S&P 500, is so small that it really doesn't affect the overall numbers. But 17% to other folks, that's a big percentage. Now, if we flip over to what this means in value to the US economy, I would argue that that smaller percentage of people employed has a disproportionate share of value. These largest corporations keep trimming highly skilled workers, that's going to have an impact on the economy. At that point, it might not matter that to Jerome Powell, hey, there's overall employment, and that's good. The drag on the US economy might start to show up if corporations keep gunning for fewer employees, higher profits. Ricky Mulvey: David, there's a key part of this Wall Street Journal story that talks about how revenue per employee being back is a metric that investors follow. They pointed to the dating app Grinder and how CEO George Arison doubled that number from $1 to $2 million in just a few years. Is this a metric that you follow? You're an investor? David Meier: No, it's actually not. The reason I don't follow it explicitly is because that number, in my opinion, is highly dependent on the business model. A follow up question for George Arison that I would have is, what did you do? Did you double revenue, or did you cut the number of employees? I'm sure it's some combination of both. That's actually not a problem. But did something in the business model change? That would be what I would want to know as an investor, because I want to know what is it that you're doing to either make employees more productive, make the business model stronger, or some combination of both. I understand it in terms of, hey, you would definitely want to be productive. You would want to have the least number of employees doing the best work that they can in order to generate the most revenue possible. But like I said, it does depend on the business model that you're using. It's actually quite useful if I'm comparing companies in similar industries to seeing which business model might be useful. That happens if I also look at what is the return on invested capital associated with those businesses, as well. Ricky Mulvey: Asit, is this a number that you look at, or are you in David's camp here? Asit Sharma: Yes, it is a number that I look at and quite frequently, but I'm in David's camp as well, because we both came up through manufacturing, and so both of us appreciate the trade-offs between having lots of employees versus maybe having a big subcontracted workforce. For me, it tends to be just as David was saying, contextual. I do pay attention to it, but I like to understand within the industry that I'm studying, what tends to be the trend here? Our company's mostly employing lots of people, so it's full-time equivalent employees. How are they succeeding or failing with that? I actually like to see sometimes that metric go in the reverse of what some people would like to see. When a company is in growth mode and adding dollars to its revenue base, when it's really growing, sometimes you need to add more employees to service that, whether you're a restaurant chain or a cybersecurity company. Ricky Mulvey: Should we go out to eat or stay in? Up next, earnings from big grocer and big food. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined today by Motley Fool senior analysts Asit Sharma and David Meier. We've got an earnings rundown. We're going to kick it off with Asit in Global Consulting Giant Accenture. The stock is down a bit this morning, and that's because the company beat expectations, but bookings are down, and the street really didn't like that Asit. What's happening behind those numbers? Asit Sharma: Ricky, bookings represent new sales that are coming in. The simplest way to look at it. The revenue that a company recognizes often is already in the can, so it makes the revenues by earning what's prepaid in deferred revenue. To keep this from getting too complicated, what we can think of as new bookings is stuff that's hitting the books to be earned in the future. Now, these aren't long-term contracts typically. Wall Street looks at this number a lot because it indicates what a company is going to earn in terms of its top line in the future. Even though the results look perfectly fine for me for Accenture this quarter, in fact, they were pretty strong, when you look at the total new bookings, that decline of 6% is telling. The bigger part really is in managed services. Accenture has consulting services and then managed services, which are a little more long-term in nature and a little more stable. Managed services portion of those bookings declined by about 10% versus this time last year, and that's a little bit of a yellow flag. It means some of the headwinds we're seeing out in the larger economy. Companies pulling back on spends, some of the trouble that Accentures had with procuring federal contracts in this age of cost cutting at the federal level and maybe some peel off as companies use AI more on their own to further their objectives, that picture might be coming together in a way that suggests that Accenture future revenue might be a little less than investors were expecting. Ricky Mulvey: Well, that's the multibillion-dollar question for Accenture here. What does the AI boom mean for this company? Does it mean that consulting work is easily outsourced to the chatbots? Does it mean that these companies need to pay young, bright college grads to show them how to use large language models? I'll pose that question to you, Asit. Do you think the AI boom ultimately helps or hurts Accenture here? Asit Sharma: I think it's going to ultimately help Accenture because we have to remember this company plays at a really high level across the world, has business with Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 1,000 companies, lots of sovereign governments around the world. It is extremely high tech in terms of its consulting, but it might mean that Accenture is going to have to be a bit more of a focused company and a smaller, leaner company in the future. This is the largest consulting concern on the planet. I think they've got a future at the higher levels of AI spend, but we might see some of its traditional business erode some in the coming years. I would not be surprised. Ricky Mulvey: Right before we move on to our next earnings story, Kroger, I think it's worth pointing out this note from our Chief Investment Officer, Andy Cross, to members of Motley Fool, pointing to the total yield for this quarter at about $8 billion on dividends and buybacks. That's significant for one quarter of about $200 billion company. Ricky Mulvey: David, let's move on to Kroger. You get to talk about Kroger twice this week, you lucky duck. A few highlights for me were that identical sales without fuel, so their comparable sales excluding fuel, up more than 3%. That's pretty significant for a grocer. Earnings about even from last year, and while the street is excited, this seemed like a fairly pedestrian quarter to me, but anything stand out to you? David Meier: Yes, and unfortunately, it's something that the company didn't really do a lot of highlighting about. I dug in a little bit and looked at how much they're expecting to spend in capital expenditures on new stores and maintenance of stores, as well as their free cash flow number. What I backed out is they're expecting about 13% growth in their operating cash flow. Now, for a company the size and the maturity level of Kroger, that's a pretty big deal. That increase in cash flow gives them significant options, which is good because that's what they need. I wish they would have highlighted that a little bit more. I get that same source sales is what people really want to see. But, yeah, to me, that's a really good sign for them. Ricky Mulvey: There's a lot of weirdness with Kroger right now. They had a longtime CEO Rodney McMullen leave fairly abruptly earlier this year. Not a lot of communication around that. How they're using money for buybacks, especially after the failed acquisition of Albertsons, is something that they haven't, in my opinion, been super communicative about as a former shareholder of Kroger. Nonetheless, stocks up 7% this morning. Maybe it's those buybacks. What do you think investors are so excited about? David Meier: The buybacks are definitely a nice to have. But I will say this. Last quarter, their identical sales came in at half a percent versus about 3.2% for this quarter, and as you said, management upped their full year guidance for the identical sales. With all that's going on, what we are seeing is stores are becoming more productive. That is a good sign. Because again, this isn't a big chain. They're not going to be knocking it out of the park in terms of opening up new stores. They sold off their specialty pharma business, so there's a lot going on, but for investors to see that stores in their arsenal are being more productive, I think that's what they're hanging their hat on today. Ricky Mulvey: Let's wrap up with Darden, which is the parent company of Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse. Same store sales up 4.6% for this big restaurant chain. Asit, we've heard about spending pullbacks. Apparently, it's not happening at these value oriented chain restaurants. What did you see in the earnings? Asit Sharma: Ricky, I thought that Darden did a pretty good job of keeping people coming to the restaurants. It's actually not that easy and not every chain which is operating at a lower price point is being successful at this as Darden is. I loved that the company was able to hold its bottom line. You would think with a 10% increase, which is what they generated this year on revenue, they would probably increase earnings by maybe close to the same amount. Actually, earnings were flat. What they did was to absorb some costs in the cost structure, but that allowed customers to keep coming. They ran some nice promotions in the Olive Garden franchise. Not surprisingly, LongHorn Steakhouse also had an appreciable jump in same store sales, 6.7%, very close to Olive Gardens, 6.9% the restaurant chain. Businesses, restaurants, which can pull people from the higher dining segment down, are going to succeed in this environment. Not surprisingly, their fine dining segment actually lost 3.3% in same store sales. All in all, a really good job managing expectations of consumers, managing costs, being able to keep this going. The investors who are watching this industry, the restaurant industry, they really want companies to maintain their traffic. Those are the ones that will be rewarded in terms of share price until we get over this hump in the economy. Ricky Mulvey: Yeah, we've seen declines not just at Ruth's Chris, which is Darden's fine dining chain, but also at Maggiano's, which is at, shoot, I forget the name, but it's the same parent company of Chili's. It's Brinker International. There it is. As we wrap up, quickly, Asit, Olive Garden, offering the buy one take one deal after five years, it means customers get a meal to go along with their sit down meal. Is that bringing you to an Olive Garden, yes or no? Asit Sharma: Sure, buy an entree for six bucks, take another one home. I'll take it. I'll be there. Ricky Mulvey: Up next, how AI is changing the way that we invest. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey. How is AI changing the way you invest? Up next is a portion of our members only podcast. It's called Stock Advisor Roundtable. Brian Stoffel caught up with Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner on an episode titled, "Market Volatility: Tom Gardner's Playbook" to discuss how artificial intelligence has changed his process and the broader implications for all investors. Brian Stoffel: The Motley Fool and Stock Advisor started as as a newsletter, the Fool started in 1993. Now, if you were starting it today, you just pointed out some things that would be different. But let me just focus on if you had to give an elevator pitch for how your style of investing has changed from 1993 to today, what would that elevator pitch be for how it's changed? Tom Gardner: The biggest change would just be deepening my understanding and enjoyment of studying companies. I think when I started investing, and we grew up, obviously learning from our father, and then David found Peter Lynch's books. We read those books and really had an earnings driven focus at companies, and a long term earnings driven, those great charts that Lynch had in his books overlying EPS growth with stock price performance over long periods of time. I think I was very earnings driven and very quantitative in my approach in the 1990s. Then I started to see, wow, something's happening that's different at Costco than at other companies. Costco actually was saying, Jim Sinegal, we interviewed him out there in a Costco store in Seattle. I think that's where I flew. Maybe it was in Florida actually, Mack will remember that and correct me on this, but I will say that I just remember Jim Sinegal telling me something along the lines of, we do not want to grow more than 20% a year. But that wasn't my orientation, my thought process about business. I was like, of course, you want to grow, 40%, 70%. If you could grow the top line, 100%, three years in a row, think what would be happening in your company. But in the case of Costco, the idea was, we want this to go on for the next five decades. Every time we grow much more than 20%, that'll rattle and shake up our operations and systems. Every time we grow less rapidly than that, we're losing relevance in the marketplace. We really target a stable growth path. Then from interviews and conversations like that, I really learned about how companies are run and stopped just thinking about the earnings call, the quarterly numbers and started to think more about the larger story, the culture, the leaders, the strategic side of the business. Since we had mentioned AI, now AI's ability to score those elements allows me to see much more than just an interview with the CEO or a company I've dug deeply in myself to look across the whole array of businesses and find patterns that match up with my business thinking developed over years. I think I was very earnings driven, still multi years, but probably looking out two years with valuations. Now I'm much more looking out four plus years with valuation and looking more deeply at businesses. Brian Stoffel: Let me ask you this because it's a perfect segue into our next question. You were talking about AI. Now, a lot of investors focus on financial metrics, and you said yourself, back in the early 90s, that was you too. It's still you today, I imagine, to a certain extent, but AI can help in evaluating those things. But you also emphasize things like you just said Jim Sinegal, leadership, culture, things that are harder for AI to capture. I would call these soft variables. Do you think AI will ever be a substitute for qualitatively looking at such soft variables? When you said it could score, are you saying that it could score and capture the same thing that you remember Jim Sinegal saying, or is that something where there's always going to have to be a human element? Tom Gardner: The first thing I'll say is it's hard to know what's going to happen. I guess that is always true, but with a technology that is more transformative than any technology in human history, trying to understand what the world will look like even four years from now is getting more and more difficult. I would say that right now, the large language models actually weren't good. These weren't computational models. You put math into any of the platforms, and they would do poorly with it. You'd start to say, well, I can't rely on this. This is a joke. Then we began hiring AI engineers at the Motley Fool. I started to see a different thing happening, which is that when you have a collective group, let's just say, of 10 people who have worldwide level expertise in AI engineering, and they're collectively prompting using enterprise licenses and buying massive amounts of data, getting API fees and just buying access to data that we wouldn't even normally have thought to assess as an investor. We know that we can go deeper and deeper. There are people that are measuring back in the day with Iomega at The Motley Fool, How many people are in the parking lot of CompUSA? There's endless amounts of information. How do we organize that information? How do we score that information? How do we weight those scores to get an overall score? How do we adapt that with new information coming in real time, not just about that company, but about its industry, about everything in the marketplace? The butterfly flaps its wings in the Yangtze River, and it has a massive effect somewhere else around the world, but you just can't string together all of the knock on effects of that. It's a never ending game. That's the first thing I'll say. It is a never ending game. However, if you could get all the information about all the communications, if you can get endless amounts of information on the CEO and CFO of a public company, could you score them as leaders? You could, relative to others. How easily can you get that information? Obviously, who knows what is and isn't private. I'm not even going to go in that realm. I'm just going to say there is less information on things like leadership. Our leadership score in our AI Moneyball database is a lower quality score. It just doesn't have enough information, whereas you can process 10,000 10Ks in 20 minutes and create more and more sophisticated prompts to go into those filings that are consistent across all companies. Therefore, scoring is much easier. You're comparing one income statement to 5,000 other income statements over the last 10 years, and you can see amazing patterns will emerge from that. You are correct that most of what we're working on right now is the structured data that comes from financial filings of public companies. Because those filing standards are different in different countries, it does take time for us to go out to the 40,000 businesses, but that is exactly what we're planning to do. Wherever there's consistent data structured, and there are significant amounts of it, you can get signal. You can score things. But when you start getting into the more qualitative areas, as you're noting, it really comes down to how much information you can get. I would say that right now, Meta has an incredible ability to score human beings, based on the massive amounts of data around qualitative soft subject matter in our lives. That's weird, scary, unusual, different, and every quarter, we're moving into a new world faster than most of us can realize and understand. That's why I think it's a very good idea to follow the leaders of AI on whatever social platforms or wherever you can get that access to their information, whether it's YouTube interviews, whether it's being out on Twitter, whether it's being just Google searching. But start to lock in on the top 10 minds and see what they're saying. They're expressing something that does capture the word terrific. It's amazing and it's terrifying. It's a thrilling ride. It's exciting, but I'm scared. They're so far ahead of us, with massive amounts of data and billions of dollars to put against it, and they're showing that it's not about, it hallucinates. Those things are true. These tools aren't perfect, but they're much more powerful than anything we've ever had in human history, and we're wielding them right now with not a clear path for how they're going to be regulated, and I would say that the best place to be in answering that question is, you should assume that everything can be evaluated and everything can be scored. I think that it's just a question of whether you can get that information to score those soft factors, and right now, in some places there's a lot of information and in other places there isn't good structured data, so you're just using what you can to come up with scores that are pretty brittle and fragile in terms of whether they're going to be consistent and reliable. Brian Stoffel: Let me ask you this then. The question is, will AI improve retail investor returns? When I ask this question, I'm not saying, will it improve retail investor returns for The Motley Fool, because you've just outlined all the ways that you plan on harnessing the best of what AI can have to offer. I mean writ large retail investors. Do you think AI will improve returns? Why or why not? Tom Gardner: What I assume you're asking by covering the full scope of retail investors is that there's some investors that love to do research and would like to dig into filings and make their own decisions, but then the majority of investors would like to either get guidance on what to do or just to index. You're asking about the full range of all of them, and I would say that I do think returns will improve, but they're mostly for those cost benefits of automation. We'll get greater efficiency across all of these systems of financial advice and money management. We'll also see, I think, a reduction in fraud in certain areas. It will be harder and harder for companies to be misleading or to get financial advice from somebody that does not have your best interests at heart, because it will become easier and easier to score every financial management company and to understand. One of the ways to think about this is, pick an area of life where you would really like to see major progress in cost reduction for you as a customer and effectiveness of the solution that you're getting. One place that everyone could go would be into the medical world where a lot of medical work and our systems are antiquated. In a lot of cases, when you're going to get a treatment and care for a condition you have or a serious matter of a family member, you're left out there trying to figure out what it is and all the healthcare system costs, and it's just a mess. There isn't the efficiency to bring down costs, and there isn't a clear pathway to understand these are the best three options that you have that are not being told to you by a doctor. If we think of those areas of life where wouldn't it be nice if we had that, I think when it comes to financial management, people would like to know that it's clear what types of returns they might get, and they can simulate things and understand clearly, if I do have a 15-year holding period, what happens if I trade every three weeks versus what happens if I actually just put money into index funds and maybe buy some stocks and just let them go for five years or 10 years, or 15 years? What does that simulation look like if I'm not paying transaction costs or I'm not paying capital gains taxes throughout all the rest? I think we'll get more and more visual data for investors to understand. That will help the aggregate returns when you can more easily see what risks and what opportunities you have out there. But mostly, I think, the benefits will come from continuing cost reduction to where a lot of your financial investment work will not come with a lot of inconvenience or a high cost. If there was one thing I could see that would be negative, it's that we will see, I believe, the creation of more and more digital assets. Less and less tangible assets, even just the collapse in the value of commercial real estate that we're all seeing from office buildings collapsing. The value of physical assets continues to decline. You want high gross margin businesses with high rates of return on investment driven by knowledge and technology, and that's where so much of the wealth is going to go, and that is really a winner-takes-most category. I think we're going to see a lot of wealth inequality and a lot of digital assets that people don't realize are very speculative very soon. The NFT craze, we'll see a return to more and more crypto and NFT investing that will hurt the overall returns because there's such a speculative element to it. But all net-net, I think, we'll get better returns. It won't be material. It's not going to be like- Brian Stoffel: Sure. Tom Gardner: Person by person, but I think the cost management will help. Ricky Mulvey: Members of Stock Advisor and higher level services can check out Stock Advisor Roundtable on Spotify or The Motley Fool app. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Our personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provide for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Up next, radar stocks. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined by Motley Fool senior analysts, Asit Sharma and David Meier. Asit, this weekend on Sunday, Tesla is expected to roll out full self-driving Model Ys in Austin, Texas. Seems like we're pretty close to that full self-driving roll-out that we've heard about for years and years. Asit Sharma: We are, Ricky, but what we're looking at is probably a limited release by Tesla. No surprise, Tesla tends to over-promise and under-deliver. What I'm reading is that we're going to have something which is almost like a geofenced environment, and it's very limited. Here you have Tesla which is competing with the likes of Waymo, which has really come into this space in a big ways. They are now moving on to the East Coast. I want to point out here too, there are some under-the-radar competitors who seem to be actually further along to me than Tesla is, Amazon's Zoox. If you haven't heard of this, or Zoox, not sure how to pronounce it, they're actually working on commercial production of vehicles in a big way. They have a facility which can produce about 10,000 vehicles every year, and they're having a commercial launch in Las Vegas in the near future. I think the competition is actually ramping up, and I'm very curious to see if this is just a bit of a flash in the pan introduction, or if Tesla is really going to show up this weekend. Ricky Mulvey: Quickly, David, before radar stocks, are you buying that widespread self-driving services are just around the corner? David Meier: No. It's difficult. There's a lot of work that needs to go into this for it to be widespread, as opposed to in a certain geographic location, but it'll get here. It will. Ricky Mulvey: Let's wrap up with radar stocks. Each of our analysts will pitch a stock. Dan Boyd, our man behind the glass, will hit you with a question, backhanded compliment, or occasionally an insult. Asit Sharma, what you got this week? Asit Sharma: Ricky, Ferrari, symbol RACE is on my radar screen. Actually, this company has been on and off my radar screen for years to my detriment. It is a market-beating company. One of the things which is important to know about Ferrari is that it sells its vehicles, of course, that really high price point, €180,000 and above, but it controls production and the release of its high-end models, and that keeps demand up. This is a premier brand that is only benefiting from the explosion of interest in F1. It operates at a 29% operating margin. You see that premium for luxury goods. Just a very well-run company, invests a lot in R&D, as you would expect. About two-fifths of the workforce here at this company are engineers solely. This is a company that has staying power through all environments, and it's a little bit recession-resistant, because the price points are so high. Unfortunately, the super wealthy are a lot more able to withstand recessions than your average Joe. This is a company I think investors should watch, and the cars are pretty fun too. Ricky Mulvey: Dan, a question about Ferrari. Dan Boyd: Asit, what kind of car do you drive? Asit Sharma: The Toyota Camry. But hey, I like my Camry. Dan Boyd: Not a Ferrari, though. Asit Sharma: Not yet. Ricky Mulvey: David Meier, what you got this week? David Meier: I have CAVA Group. I will say, I was a CAVA bear for a little bit, and mainly because of the price. Look, this company is just flat accelerating. Opening up new stores, new stores are becoming more productive. There's lots of cash flow being generated. They're profitable. The world is their oyster, pardon that pun. But the thing that has come down is the stock price. We're paying a much more reasonable valuation today than we were, say, six months ago, and that's because the valuation metrics have literally been cut in half. From that standpoint, I'm putting it back on my radar. We want to dig deeper and see why the company is going to be successful over the next 10 years, and we'll see what happens from there. Ricky Mulvey: Dan, quick question about CAVA. Dan Boyd: David, what are you ordering from CAVA? David Meier: My go-to is falafel. I love their falafel. Each time I go in, that's what I get. But the great thing is, they have so much variety that anybody can get almost anything they like. Ricky Mulvey: My beef is the variety. There's too much, there are too many decisions to make when I get to the front of a CAVA. Dan, what you putting on your watch list this week? Dan Boyd: Ricky, I cannot afford a Ferrari, but I can afford some spicy lamb meatballs. Let's go CAVA. Ricky Mulvey: Let's do it. That's all for this week's Motley Fool Money radio show. I'm Ricky Mulvey. That's Asit Sharma and David Meier. Dan Boyd mixes the show. Thank you for listening. We'll be back tomorrow. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Asit Sharma has positions in Amazon and Costco Wholesale. Dan Boyd has positions in Amazon and Costco Wholesale. David Meier has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Kroger, Meta Platforms, and Spotify Technology and has the following options: long August 2025 $73 puts on Kroger. Tom Gardner has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Accenture Plc, Alphabet, Amazon, Costco Wholesale, Meta Platforms, and Spotify Technology. The Motley Fool recommends Cava Group and Kroger. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Checking In on the Economy and Some Stocks Worth Watching was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Salesforce is using AI for up to 50% of its workload, and its AI product is 93% accurate, says CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff said the company now relies on artificial intelligence for 30% to 50% of its entire workload. Coco Gauff and Emma Grede team up to help small businesses I've become an AI vibe coding convert Tech layoffs June 2025: Microsoft, Google, Disney, ZoomInfo join the list of companies said to be shedding jobs The software giant, like many other tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Microsoft and Google, is going all in on the AI boom. 'All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work,' Benioff told Bloomberg, including positions like software engineering and customer service. 'It's these agents, these digital laborers, digital employees who are out there doing this work servicing the customers, selling to the customer, marketing to the customer, partnering with me to do the analytics, the marketing, the branding.' Benioff said he even writes his yearly business plan with an AI partner, along with a 'human' Salesforce executive, adding that the company was on track to have one billion of these 'agents' before the end of the year. (Sixty-five percent of companies are now experimenting with AI agents, according to an April KPMG survey.) Benioff also estimated that Salesforce has reached 93% accuracy with the AI product it's selling to customers, including Walt Disney Co., which was developed to carry out tasks such as customer service without human supervision, according to Bloomberg. Benioff added that it's not 'realistic' to reach 100% accuracy, and that other companies are at 'much lower levels because they don't have as much data and metadata.' The software giant was ranked the No. 1 customer relationship management (CRM) software provider in 2025 for the 12th consecutive year by the global market intelligence firm IDC. Salesforce's clients include Apple, Boeing, Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald's, to name a few. According to Bloomberg, AI is ushering in a new era of 'the tiny team.' Gone are the days when Silicon Valley companies rapidly hire as they scale; now tech companies are in a race to the bottom, competing to see who can manage the lowest head count in an effort to cut costs and increase efficiencies. The AI boom comes at a time when many tech companies are slashing jobs, in part to keep up with inflation and increased economic uncertainty, spurred on by the Trump administration's tariffs and conflict with Iran. Salesforce Inc. (NYSE: CRM) was trading up less than 1% on Thursday in midday trading, at the time of this writing. In the company's latest round of earnings for the first quarter, which ended April 30, the company reported revenue of $9.8 billion, up nearly 8% year over year, beating analyst expectations, and it raised guidance 'by $400 million, to $41.3 billion, at the high end of the range.' Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $2.58, topping estimates of $2.55. Benioff said Salesforce has 'built a deeply unified enterprise AI platform—with agents, data, apps, and a metadata platform . . . with Agentforce, Data Cloud, our Customer 360 apps, Tableau, and Slack all built on one trusted, unified foundation, [so] companies of every size can build a digital labor force—boosting productivity, reducing costs, and accelerating growth.' The company had a market capitalization of $257 billion at the time of this writing. Its next earnings report is scheduled for late August. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Yes, You May Lose Your Job To AI. So What Will You Do About It?
The Silicon Valley gospel has been preached from every conference stage: "You won't lose your job to AI, but to someone who learns to use AI." It's a comforting narrative that keeps executives sleeping soundly while their HR departments frantically roll out "AI literacy" programs. But this conventional wisdom misses the fundamental transformation happening right under our noses. Putting the notion of "AI won't take your job" into context. The real disruption isn't about individual workers becoming AI-savvy. It's about the obsolescence of entire job categories as AI becomes exponentially more capable, efficient, and effective at core business functions. The Exponential Reality Check Here's what should terrify you: Today is the worst AI will ever be. Several current AI models have surpassed the average IQ of humans. Most people have an average IQ between 85 and 115. Overall, about 98% of people have a score below 130, with the 2% above that are considered 'very superior'. With the latest versions of OpenAI's o3, Anthropic's Claude 4 Sonnet, and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental all well above average human intelligence scores, we now have genius-level AI. Ranking The Smartest AI Models by IQ Level But that's just the beginning. AI capability is roughly doubling every six months. Let's do the math and be a bit more conservative and assume it doubles every year: I share this just for illustrative purposes. Humans typically think in a linear fashion. It's hard for us to think exponentially. And it's hard to not think this is all 'science fiction' and will happen years in the future. No. This is happening now. This is compound growth in action. When AI can already write better marketing copy than most marketers, analyze data faster than any analyst, and code more efficiently than many developers TODAY - imagine what happens when it's 32 times more capable in just five years. The Job Container Is Breaking For decades, companies have organized human effort into neat packages called "jobs"—performing tasks in predefined roles with specific responsibilities, reporting structures, and compensation bands. This industrial-age framework worked when work was predictable, hierarchical, and required sustained human attention. AI is obliterating this model. When artificial intelligence can write code in minutes, draft legal briefs in seconds, and generate marketing campaigns instantly, traditional job boundaries become arbitrary constraints. Why maintain a "Marketing Manager" role when AI can execute campaigns while a strategic thinker provides direction? Why preserve "Financial Analyst" positions when AI can process datasets that would take humans months to review? Think this is hype? Check out the latest release that dropped this week from HeyGen, an AI-powered video creation platform that allows users to generate videos with AI avatars, text-to-speech, and customizable templates. They just announced this week the HeyGen Video Agent, the first prompt-native creative engine designed to transform a single idea into a complete, publish-ready video asset. Whether that's a TikTok ad, a YouTube hook, a product explainer, or a quickfire UGC clip, the video is created by AI in seconds. The tool looks amazing, and it will surely be compelling to marketers at small companies to large global enterprises. However, this is another nail in the coffin for a creative agency or production company that was providing those services. We're entering the era of agentic content creation where intelligent systems don't just assist with ... More editing, but act on your behalf to create high-quality videos, end to end. Reading Between The Lines: The Amazon Example The companies that survive won't be those that train existing jobholders to use AI tools. They'll be the ones that completely reimagine how work gets done. On June 17th, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy published a memo with "Some thoughts on Generative AI." While highlighting AI's incredible applications across the company, he dropped this bombshell: 'As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.' This should be a wake-up call. It's a direct admission that AI will eliminate jobs, and it should terrify anyone doing repetitive or process-driven work. Amazon is just the latest in a number of companies that are signaling what is to come slowly, carefully, and publicly. Sure for now it's mostly tech companies like Duolingo, Klarna, and Shopify that are talking about being 'AI first'. In the case of Shopify, CEO Tobi Lütke told employees that teams must demonstrate why AI cannot fulfill a role before requesting to hire a human. This effectively positions AI as the default option for many tasks. This AI first approach might start in tech, but it won't end there. The Rise of Liquid Labor Forward-thinking organizations are moving beyond "jobs" toward what I call 'Liquid Labor'. In a hybrid human-AI workforce, Liquid Labor is the fluid combinations of human creativity, AI capabilities, and automated processes that adapt in real-time to business needs. Consider Netflix. They don't have traditional "TV Programming Executive" jobs. Instead, they have data scientists, content strategists, and algorithm specialists working in fluid teams that constantly reconfigure based on viewer behavior and market opportunities. This shift challenges everything: OK, this is scary. So What Should I Do? The obvious answer is to upskill yourself and learn how to use all of these AI tools. Are you using not just one model (say ChatGPT), but experiment with multiple models from Claude to Perplexity to CoPilot to Gemini to Grok. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, so learn what works best for you. This is table-stakes, though. Here's a more candid survival guide: Double down on uniquely human capabilities that AI can't replicate (yet): Develop higher-order thinking abilities that allow you to adapt and learn faster than AI can optimize for your replacement, focusing on skills that help you navigate complexity and change rather than specific technical competencies: Become the critical bridge between AI systems and human needs: Forge a unique professional identity: Urgently diversify your income streams and build wealth-generating assets while you still have earning power: Cultivate deep, value-creating relationships as your unique network of human connections becomes one of your most defensible and irreplaceable assets in the AI era: The Time to Act Is Now Most people think they have years to adapt. They're wrong. By the time AI visibly threatens your job, it's already too late. The exponential curve means: The window for repositioning yourself is now, while you still have leverage, income, and options. The transformation from jobs to liquid labor is already here. The choice isn't between learning AI or losing your job. It's between fundamentally reimagining your career or watching it become obsolete. Those who act now - building unique capabilities, creating new value propositions, and positioning themselves at the human-AI interface - won't just survive. They'll thrive in ways we can't yet imagine. Those who wait, believing that disruption is still years away, will discover that no amount of prompt engineering can compete with exponentially improving AI that works 24/7, never gets sick, and improves while you sleep. The question isn't whether this transformation will affect you, but whether you'll adapt fast enough. Now is the time to get AI ready.
