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AI chatbots are already being used to send custom email pitches. It shows how AI like ChatGPT may soon play a significant role in business, with companies like Salesforce and Microsoft beginning to offer tighter integration between the chatbot and their software.

A recent viral Tiktok showed how it’s possible to use ChatGPT integrated with Google Sheets to write ten custom LinkedIn messages to executives asking for a meeting. It identified different potential companies in an industry and their CEOs, and generated different outreach notes for each one, including a unique question to ask.

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“I think we’re at a very interesting inflection point of how we’ll begin to use AI in the future in our day-to-day lives that wasn’t as easily accessible even six months ago, before ChatGPT was more readily available to the public,” said Alex Klufas, a creator who makes videos focused on working in the tech industry.

The video — and previous viral posts displaying similar techniques — clearly struck a nerve, with 2.5 million views, and scores of comments asking how it worked.

Generative AI and tools using large language model (LLM) techniques like ChatGPT have led to a boom as big tech companies and startups alike race to integrate software capable of producing content that resembles something a human would write.

Few LLM-based products are actually making money. Microsoft and Google are working to integrate next-level chatbots into search engines. Companies are working on using these bots to write marketing copy or computer code.

There’s one particularly promising application that could be commercialized in the near future: Using the power of a chatbot to quickly write and automate emails with a little bit of personalization, perhaps for sales, marketing, or personal networking. Microsoft and Salesforce announced new products this week with that exact feature.

Financial analysts at Credit Suisse pointed to email generation several times in a note earlier this month as a concrete and near-term use for the technology. The analysts estimated Microsoft’s recently announced generated AI sales features could help it take market share and potentially add over $768 million in annual revenue.

Products coming to market

On Tuesday, Salesforce announced its LLM product called EinsteinGPT, which uses an OpenAI ChatGPT model. It can automatically write marketing emails — a logical integration because Salesforce’s main product is a web app that keeps track of how often salespeople contact leads.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff demoed the software, using it to identify two contacts at a company, then automatically generating a one-sentence email trying to arrange a meeting. In the demo, EinsteinGPT softened the cold outreach email after the user told the software to be less formal.

Salesforce hasn’t set a price for the tools yet but said it’s in testing now with pilot customers.

Microsoft announced on Monday that it would integrate generative AI based on ChatGPT into a set of tools for business called CoPilot. One of its primary features is using AI to generate emails.

In a demo video, Microsoft showed the feature integrated into an Outlook mailbox and provided examples of using it to reply to a request for proposal, or to suggest a meeting time with a customer.

In the example, an inbound email wanted to follow up on a potential sales deal, and Microsoft’s feature offered four different draft replies, including one that offered a discount and another that addressed a concern.

Microsoft says that its AI email writer can take important context from the email thread, like the price that was previously discussed, and stick it in the response drafted by AI. In the example provided by Microsoft, the user takes the AI draft and edits it before sending it.

Microsoft’s feature is currently in beta testing, but will be released to customers of Microsoft’s Viva Sales feature on March 15, the company said on Monday.

Some startups have even trained their sights on developing customized AIs that can respond to messages the same way that their owner would, by analyzing a user’s previous email and text interactions and integrating it into a personalized AI model.

“The benefit is people who would want to communicate with you where you don’t have time to get back to them, where you don’t have time to offer your mind,” said Suman Kanuganti, founder of personal.ai, a chatbot currently in beta mode. “In those scenarios, you can choose to either have your AI help you in co-pilot mode or offer [automatic] responses to them in autopilot mode.”

Shortcomings

Some worry that the ability to generate email text could be abused to spam people and that chatbots could be used to phish for people’s private passwords.

“We could see mass targeted messages and spam indistinguishable from dedicated email,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note this month that examined the AI industry.

ChatGPT is also prone to “hallucinating,” or making stuff up. It merely predicts what the next word or part of a phrase should be based on statistics, and doesn’t know whether it’s correct or not.

Microsoft said in its announcement that it would use data from its software to ground the replies in facts, and has a thumbs-down button so users can tell the bot that a response was unhelpful. That helps train the model to avoid the same mistake in the future. A Salesforce executive previously told CNBC that it was moving as quickly as it could without compromising a responsible, ethical approach.

But the limits of ChatGPT were clearly visible in the viral TikTok video. While some recommendations were correct, several of the CEOs ChatGPT recommended for outreach were either former CEOs or are not currently an executive at the company. While the text for the cold outreach looked appropriate, it would still likely require a human to make sure everything was actually right.

“I think anyone using this technology, as nascent as it is, has to do that due diligence,” Kluflas said. She didn’t end up sending the notes generated by ChatGPT because she’s not currently looking for a job.

But she’s still excited about using ChatGPT to help her make TikToks and other content for social media. Her latest application is to use ChatGPT to produce TikTok captions packed with the keywords that make her videos easier to find online.

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

Former OpenAI exec says tariffs 'present AI's moment to shine'

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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Tesla's decade-long journey to robotaxis

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