Salesforce.com, Inc. has disclosed that it spent approximately $75 million on acquisitions in the last quarter, when it bought out three startups.

The disclosure came via regulatory filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last Friday. In its disclosure, Salesforce revealed it shelled out a massive $32.8 million to acquire artificial intelligence (AI)-based deep learning startup MetaMind Inc. back in April. The price was undisclosed at the time of the deal, but now it turns out Salesforce actually paid way over the odds for a startup which had a fair market value of just $1.6 million – a 95 percent premium, to be exact.

In addition, Salesforce paid out $41.6 million to acquire two other companies not named in the document, but Business Insider says they are believed to be analytics firm PredictionIO Inc. and German IT consulting firm YOUR SL, both of which were acquired by Salesforce last February.

But it was the MetaMind acquisition which attracted the most attention, not least because Salesforce has already made several other recent investments in the machine learning and AI space, such as its purchases of MinHash and TempoAI last year. During Salesforce’s most recent earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff called out AI as “the next major trend for Salesforce and our industry that will drive tremendous growth.”

Prior to that, in November last year, Benioff insisted that Salesforce wasn’t about to go “all-in” on any single kind of technology. Instead, he said the plan was focus on an array of emerging technologies that can be integrated with Salesforce’s offerings to create the best possible customer experience. Nonetheless, these acquisitions suggest that AI is going to play an integral part in the future Salesforce experience.

Benioff’s overriding goal is to transform Salesforce’s software into something that’s much smarter and more data drive. Benioff actually said as much in the company’s last earnings call:

“…as we look out into the future and we start to look at extreme improvement and advances in artificial intelligence whether it’s machine learning, whether it’s deep learning, whether it’s machine intelligence itself, I think that those kind of capabilities appearing inside our applications that is going to be a major growth capability going forward.”

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