Salesforce’s former co-CEO Bret Taylor is starting an AI firm with Clay Bavor, current VP of Google Labs.

Bret Taylor shocked the industry in early December when he announced he was stepping down as co-CEO of Salesforce. Taylor was widely seen as Marc Benioff’s heir-apparent, leaving quite a vacuum when he left. At the time, Taylor said he had ‘decided to return to his entrepreneurial roots.’

That is exactly what Taylor is doing, teaming up with Bavor to found an AI startup, according to a LinkedIn post by Bavor:

Bret and I have known each other since our early days at Google, and I have always admired his keen product sense and entrepreneurial spirit, his technical chops, and, above all, his character and integrity. We share an obsession with recent advances in AI, and we’re excited to build a new company to apply AI to solve some of the most important problems in business.

I’ll be setting out with Bret on this next adventure in March, and will have more to share once we get started. Until then, I’ll be focusing on transitioning my teams and projects, and wrapping things up properly at Google.

With AI in the spotlight as much as it is, it will be interesting to see what the executives accomplish.