Marc Benioff: Salesforce can beat Microsoft in AI

MARC BENIOFF: We have the most accurate AI, better than any model company. And I think that this agent revolution is real and as exciting as the cloud revolution, the social revolution, the mobile revolution. I think this is going to change companies forever. I think it’s going to change software forever. And I think it’ll change Salesforce forever.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Marc Benioff, CEO of the enterprise software giant Salesforce. The company recently announced a fleet of tools called Agentforce that provide users with AI assistants to fulfill tasks on their behalf. Marc says he’s never been as excited about anything Salesforce has released. Always unafraid to ruffle a few feathers, Marc calls Microsoft’s competing Copilot AI a quote “disservice to the whole industry.”

In our talk, Marc explains how and why he pivoted the company to embrace AI agents, including a specific three-week sprint earlier this fall. He says he could even see changing Salesforce’s name to Agentforce. Plus, what he’s learned from Nvidia’s CEO, and why he talks so much about core values. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s dive in. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian, and I’m here with Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. Marc, thanks for joining us.

BENIOFF: Bob, it’s great to be back with you again.

Copy LinkInside Salesforce’s “best Dreamforce” ever

SAFIAN: So you’re coming off another Dreamforce, which, for those who aren’t familiar, is Salesforce’s annual gathering. I always think of it as somewhere between a business conference, an urban festival, and like a revival meeting. Are there any evocative moments for you personally from this year’s event?

BENIOFF: Well, it was amazing. It was probably not only our best Dreamforce ever, but also our most important. Forty-five thousand people came to San Francisco. It was three amazing days. Incredible show with 1,500 sessions. About 20 million or 50 million people joined us online as well.

We’re doing a dozen or two dozen world tours over the next month or two because the message is so important. It wasn’t just our largest and best Dreamforce, but by far it was our most important Dreamforce.

SAFIAN: The comedian John Mulaney did a set, which kind of went viral online, sort of roasting Salesforce employees and AI and tech journeys. And you had Seth Meyers last year who kind of did the same thing. Is that something you like? Like you invite that?

BENIOFF: Yes, we invite that, of course. We invite a lot of things. Comedy, of course; we love comedy. But we also love music. We had a lot of great music. We had Pink. We had Imagine Dragons. We had Brandi Carlile, one of my absolute favorites. And it was really awesome.

Copy LinkMarc Benioff’s excitement for Agentforce

SAFIAN: Now a lot of the focus was on Agentforce, a new Salesforce tool to build and customize AI agents. I hope I’m describing that the right way. Clearly, you’re very excited about it.

BENIOFF: I would just say I’ve never been more excited about anything at Salesforce, maybe in my career.

And not only would I say that’s true for me, but what we did at Dreamforce was let customers get their hands on and build their first agent. It’s extremely important because customers have been told things about enterprise AI, maybe AI overall, that are not true. They need to understand what is true, how it works, and what it can do for them.

You know already, Bob, that Salesforce is probably the largest enterprise AI supplier in the world. We’ll do a couple trillion AI transactions this week alone with Einstein, but what we have built with Agentforce is very different, very unusual, and very exciting.

This is what AI was meant to be. Just yesterday, I was reading feedback from a customer who had just turned it on and they were like, “This must be witchcraft. This is crazy what’s happening with my customers now.” And I am really excited about this. I think this is going to change companies forever. I think it’s going to change software forever. And I think it’ll change Salesforce forever.

Copy LinkHow Agentforce differs from Microsoft’s Copilot

SAFIAN: At the risk of poking the bear, how is Agentforce different from Microsoft’s Copilot?

BENIOFF: Oh, God. Bob, you know you’re going there. Well, first of all, Bob, I think, unfortunately, I’ll just have to tell you, I think Microsoft has done a tremendous disservice to not only our whole industry but all of the AI research that has been done. Because when you look at how Copilot has been sold to our customers, it’s disappointing. It doesn’t work, it spews data all over the floor, it doesn’t deliver value to customers. I haven’t found a customer who has had transformational work with Copilot. And customers are so confused based on this Microsoft narrative that we have to let them get what we’ve been keep saying: get their hands in the soil because they need to see for themselves exactly what is possible, what is real, and how easy it is to get huge value from AI, how to make it low hallucinogenic, how to help them connect with their customers in new ways, raise revenues, augment employees.

But, yeah, it’s not Microsoft Copilot. Copilot is really the new Microsoft Clippy. I don’t know if you remember that, Bob, but it was not a huge success. I don’t think Copilot will be around. I don’t think customers will use it, and I think that we will see the transformation of enterprises with agents and Agentforce will be the number one supplier. I think we’ll have more than a billion agents running from Salesforce within the next 12 months. Even at Dreamforce, I got 10,000 customers hands-on with Agentforce. This was very important to me. And, Bob, you’ve been in the industry a long time. You know you can have a vision for technology in a demo, and you can have customers, but you’ve got to put two and two together to get four. I just wanted to train them and really get them in it. I’ve never really done it at a level of scale like that before. And, Bob, it worked out far better than I could have imagined. And I think that this agent revolution is real and as exciting as the cloud revolution was, the social revolution, the mobile revolution. It will provide a level of transformation that we’ve never seen.

Copy LinkAgentforce’s key differentiators from competitors

SAFIAN: There is a lot of anxiety about AI. Do you feel like there’s a responsibility about sort of putting this fleet of agents out into the world? How do you protect and help this transition happen in a way that’s effective and doesn’t scare too many people, doesn’t leave too many people out?

BENIOFF: At a time when we saw some very incredible movies, one of the key writers of those movies, Peter Schwartz, is now our futurist here at Salesforce. Things like Minority Report, which he was involved in, and WarGames. I know you love that. We’ve always had the fantasy of what is AI, what does it mean, how does it interact with us and operate with us? I think this idea that AI is our partner, is it our friend, is it our foe? All of those things are great, but we’re not exactly at that level of AI yet. One of my real peeves, Bob, is that there are these AI priests and priestesses out there running some of these new companies. There’s a lot of them who make these AI models, and they’re like, “AI is curing cancer, and AI is solving climate change,” and I’m like, that may be possible.

Okay. And a lot of things may be possible, which is kind of what you just alluded to. But it’s not exactly where we are today. These LLMs are great, but they’re not AGI, and LLMs are not the bridge to AGI. This is like a very constrained model that you can extend and complement and make it very accurate, which we have. We have the most accurate AI in the world.

If you go to my Twitter feed, you’ll see the benchmarks. We have the most accurate AI, better than any model company because we combine a large model, a small model, a RAG technique — that’s the retrieval augmented generation to kind of make the prompt better — and also we include the customer’s data and metadata, which we have an unfair advantage of because we have 230 petabytes of that.

And we’re delivering these very accurate agents that are able to do very specific things that you basically give them instructions to do. And yes, eventually those agents will talk to other agents, and it’ll be a world of agents working with a world of humans, but that’s not where we are.

We need to walk before we run, and this is the next step. And we’ve all been wondering what is the transformational moment for business with AI? Because you know, you talk to these customers that they have spent a lot of money with companies like Microsoft and gotten no value. And they are kind of sick of that proposition because it started very exciting. Like I was in ChatGPT and I did this kind of query and all of a sudden it gave me the best chocolate chip cookie recipe. If I could do that in my company, my company would be so much more productive. How do I do that? “Oh, here, buy Microsoft Copilot, buy Microsoft’s training for your own model.” No, no, no. We can see now that was a false prophecy.

Copy LinkHow customers will use Agentforce

SAFIAN: You had an idea for what Agentforce could be. Was there a moment where you realized like, oh, this actually works? Like this does what we thought it would do.

BENIOFF: I have a friend of mine, okay, he’s the CTO of a very large medical company. And they’re one of the largest healthcare providers in the world.

And he called me, and he goes, “We’re using Agentforce, but we just shifted to Agentforce version two,” which we call Atlas. It has this new next-generation Atlas reasoning engine in it. “And something is happening, Marc. Agentforce is resolving more than 90 percent of all of our patient inquiries and scheduling needs. And now the vision is very clear.” Agentforce is going to, like, you’re going to say, “Hey, Agentforce, my leg is hurting, I need to schedule an MRI, I need to see my orthopedic surgeon, I need to get labs drawn,” and Agentforce is going to do all of these things. And then as you get the MRI or see the doctor or whatever, all these things, Agentforce is going to call you back and say, “Hey, how’d it go? Is everything okay? Are you taking your meds?'”

That is a level of capability that technology can now provide. And I think then as you move into other industries like media, financial services, travel, and entertainment, I mean, across the board. The ability to put these agents into place rapidly and get very high outcomes is going to be a huge shock to customers, and that’s why, as I said, I’m getting their hands in the soil. They need to get their hands on it, and it’s going to get turned on live October 25th for all of our customers. So those hundreds of thousands of customers who will begin to get access to this technology, I expect to see tremendous velocity in the number of companies that are going to deploy these agents.

Copy LinkEmbracing rapid change & pivoting

SAFIAN: So the name of this show is Rapid Response, and you’ve had to make several rapid responses over the last two years.

BENIOFF: Oh yeah, we’ve been talking about that.

SAFIAN: You managed some layoffs, you restructured to enable the creation of Agentforce. How have you approached this phase of your leadership?

BENIOFF: So I’ve been the CEO of Salesforce for 25 years. And as we’ve grown from zero to now 38 billion in revenue this year, we’re obviously the number one CRM, but also now the second largest enterprise software company in the world behind Microsoft.

I would say, and we use this term for start-ups a lot, but it’s true for big companies. And I think big company CEOs like me now don’t think enough about this. And it’s not exactly founder mode, which is this kind of funny buzzword term that’s going around. It’s: pivot. You have to be ready to shift, to pivot, to evolve, to move forward, to make things happen. When you see that opportunity, you’ve got to go. I think that not enough CEOs do it. I’ll tell you, at Dreamforce, Jensen Huang came, who is the CEO of Nvidia, but it was interesting.

I did a long conversation with him one-on-one. My neighbor here is David Kirk, who was the chief scientist at Nvidia and helped create the GPU, that was 2009, 2008, 2009.

SAFIAN: It was a video game company, or at least that’s the way I used to think of it.

BENIOFF: That’s right.

These chips made triangles, all these graphics and things right on the chip level.

But they didn’t realize that when they built that technology, that it would be able to be used, oh, for training models and making AI a little better. And in 2011 or ’12, when Jensen saw really deep learning evolve out of Stanford for the first time, he made a pretty big decision that no one else made in the whole tech industry: “I’m going to pivot my whole company to deep learning.”

And by doing that, as these companies started to emerge and evolve, they would, he would basically say, “Use my chip, use my chip, use my chip.” And they found great performance building their AI capabilities using Nvidia. And he became an expert in AI, became fascinated with that.

I know that because I had that same knowledge and that same insight. I saw that, but I didn’t pivot my company at that point to that. It’s interesting. I was doing the interview, I’m like, “Well, Marc, how stupid are you? You saw all that too, but you didn’t do the hard pivot to deep learning. You did some things with AI and you built Einstein and you did this, but did you really do a hard pivot of the whole company to AI?” No. However, why that’s important right now is because as I kind of have looked at the last two years and how AI is kind of making a little transformation here with this next generation of capability we have now. That’s when I saw the agent capability emerge, I said, “Oh, okay, you might not have done it in 2011. You had other things on your mind. No, no, this is the hard pivot. Where for the last two decades, you’ve built all the customer touch points, Marc.” Now I’m talking about myself in the third person. These are all your customer touch points. Why don’t you hard pivot the company?

And so that’s why we’ve hard pivoted the company to agents and Agentforce. I even had an employee, a top engineering executive, say, “This is so big and so exciting. We should change the name of the company from Salesforce to Agentforce.” I’m not convinced he’s wrong, by the way.

You want to hear a funny story? It was 30 days before Dreamforce, and the deck I have in front of me, which is the deck I gave — and you can watch the presentation online, it’s on YouTube; well, the deck was probably 90 percent different than this.

I had kind of named Agentforce myself, and I’m very excited about it, kind of shepherding it along, and the customer feedback said, “This is the most transformational thing we’ve ever done.”

And I said to myself, I need to pivot. Well, Dreamforce is only like three weeks away. I brought my team together, and I said, when you get to Dreamforce, it’s going to say, “Welcome to Agentforce.” And the keynote is going to be literally about Agentforce. The demos are going to be, and we’re also going to fly 4,000 of our employees into Dreamforce just to work hands-on with our customers in these launch pads to get them ignited so that we’ll have 10,000 customers live by the end of Dreamforce.

SAFIAN: Let me make sure I get this.

BENIOFF: And—

SAFIAN: This was three weeks before?

BENIOFF: This was three weeks before. Look, when you pivot, you pivot. And so was everything perfect? No. Is every sign perfect? No. Is every video perfect? No. Is every demo perfect? No. But we got 90 percent of the way there. I’m super proud of my team.

Every customer, if they’re not on Agentforce, they will be at a significant competitive disadvantage.

All of them will have the ability to have workforces that are non-human.

And that is a freaky thing, but very exciting. And yes, what does this mean for us? How does it? Where are we going in the future? All of those are very important existential questions. But the reality of the here and now is there are things we need to do today to make our businesses more successful with this technology.

I think you’ll be inspired. I’m inspired. I’m more than inspired. I think I’ve never been more excited about not only Salesforce, but about a piece of technology and what it can do for humanity.

SAFIAN: Marc has never been shy about talking up his products. I mean, there’s a reason he gathers 45,000 people in San Francisco every year for Dreamforce. The cult of Salesforce believers is very real, and we’ll soon see if they run to Agentforce and away from Copilot the way he hopes. After the break, Marc goes deeper into what he calls the “fantasyland” of AI. Plus, he talks about his values, from his ownership of Time Magazine to his toe-to-toe battle over anti-LGBTQ legislation. It’s worth sticking around for. So stay with us.

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SAFIAN: Before the break, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made an impassioned case for why the company’s new fleet of AI agent tools will reshape business forever. Now he talks about the quote “fantasyland” corrupting the AI narrative, and shares advice for business leaders looking to stay adaptable while staying true to core values. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkBalancing social responsibility as a corporate leader

When I asked you about sort of the future, about where this could go, you kind of like push it off a little bit. You’re like, well, right now we have to do this. And I’m remembering you and I talked back when I was editor of Fast Company. We talked about the role that values play in leading a business. And since then, we’ve seen some CEOs more embrace the idea that businesses have to engage in societal issues and then kind of a backlash against that. I guess I’m curious, has your perspective on that changed at all? Or is there something specific about AI that sort of, I don’t know, removes it from that discussion?

BENIOFF: No, no, I think that our core values don’t change. And I think they just get wrapped into this new technology model. And I think that what you’re saying is completely right. By the way, you know that 1-1-1 model where we took 1 percent of our equity, profit, and time, we’ve given away a billion dollars. We run a hundred thousand nonprofits for free on our service. We have done 10 million hours of volunteerism now. And 20,000 companies have copied us. And so it’s not just our billion, it’s billions and all kinds of things.

The great things have come from that model all over the world. And you’re right. It’s about core values.

We haven’t changed who we are as a company.

But yeah, this product is set up, for example, with trust inside. It’s got a trust layer, so you don’t end up giving all your data to these AI companies that are trying to suck down all your corporate data.

It also has the ability to build guardrails in so your agent doesn’t go down the wrong path. And yes, could this go in a lot of crazy places? It could, it can, it might, it might in the future, but our job is, look, technology is not slowing down. It’s constantly getting lower cost and easier to use. Technology, Bob, it’s not good or bad, it’s what you do with it that matters.

Business is the greatest platform for change, and it’s how we use that tool and how we guide it with our core values.

The critiques of ESG, you sort of feel like that’s just nomenclature. That’s just passing. Are you just like, I don’t really care. Want my honest answer?

SAFIAN: Yeah, sure.

BENIOFF: My honest answer, Bob, is I do what’s in my heart. And that’s all I can do. I know who I answer to. Look, when we started our company, we were a tech bro company, mostly men, male-dominated, all function, et cetera. Two of my top female leaders came to me and said, “Listen, you pay men more than women for the same work.” And I said, “I do not. That is a lie.” And they said, “Oh, really? Here’s the data and the evidence.” And I’m like, “Oh, Jesus, they’re right.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, we’re going to change that.” And we made that change.

Today, five or six of our major functions are more than 50 percent female. And I believe that soon more than 50 percent of our engineering organization will be female.

This idea that all ESG, CSG, whatever, is nonsense is not true. And that there are some things that are empirically correct. And this idea that we can do a better job in our tech industry across women, but also across other certain classes of folks is true. We just need to have our eyes open as leaders and we can do a better job. Or maybe our agents need to have our eyes open.

SAFIAN: You’ve been the owner of Time Magazine since 2018, the publication where I once worked as an executive editor.

BENIOFF: You were great. We need you back.

Copy LinkNavigating the role of Time & media at large

SAFIAN: How do you see what the role of media is in today’s world? I mean, we are just a few weeks away from a critical election. There are a lot of trust issues for media.

BENIOFF: The reason we bought it is we feel like it’s bringing more trust in the world. Obviously, I think Time’s got a great brand.

We’ve used it to talk about things that are very important to us, like the health of the oceans or the health of the environment. I’m working on a program called the Trillion Trees, which has been very important to me to sequester 200 gigatons of carbon, or lots of things that are avenues for change in the world that are important.

And I would say this is a moment where media is important. And we’ve seen that media has to become trusted. It has to be transparent. It has to be clear what it is.

Time has a lot of different ways to talk about the present and the past as well as the future. It has a hundred-year history, as you know. It’s an incredible brand.

SAFIAN: Yeah. No, I mean, I guess I feel like it’s really tricky in the media business right now because your audience sometimes defines themselves politically before they even consume your content. Time has always been able to bridge that a little bit. Is it still that way?

BENIOFF: This morning, I was texting our editor and asking him that question because I saw some things, and I won’t tell you what direction they were moving, that I thought, just asked him, “Hey, is this too much this way or too much that way?”

And are you looking at this, and are you keeping your eye on the idea that we need to be going the middle way?

Copy LinkStanding up for equality and inclusion

SAFIAN: And you have to juggle the same kinds of things as CEO of Salesforce, right? Like, where do you choose to engage in some issues that have an impact across your organization and to all of your team, but that may also put off some prospective customers, depending on what you say or do.

BENIOFF: Okay, so that’s just a great story and I’ll just tell you and I give that advice to a lot of CEOs all over the world. Which is that here I am, I’m exiting the Bush administration, as you know, the person who chaired the PTAC, which is the President’s IT Advisory Committee for him. I had this kind of conservative stance, and it’s about 2015. I got a phone call or an email from one of my employees in Indiana that said, “Listen, the governor here is writing this legislation that is going to discriminate against our LGBTQ community.”

Now, I’m a San Franciscan, born and bred home San Francisco, the home of gay rights.

And I didn’t think it’s really possible. So I’m kind of laughing to myself saying that this is a very sweet thing that he’s writing me this note, but this isn’t true. And then he’s like, “No, this is true. You need to write him a letter. Please don’t sign this legislation.” But I was like, “He’s not going to sign it to work.”

And then they signed it. So then, my company in Indianapolis. Taking this company from 300 million in Indianapolis to 3 billion. Now I have Salesforce Tower Indianapolis.

What am I going to do? Stop hiring LGBTQ employees? Not be able to bring my customers? Not have huge events and conferences in Indianapolis? Are you going to force me to disinvest in Indianapolis? Are you not about equality? Is this not the United States of America?

I’m totally confused. I was at a dinner at the Rosewood in Palo Alto. I’m driving back to my house in San Francisco on 280. I’m in the back seat of the car being driven because maybe I’ve had a glass of wine. And I tweet, “If this is signed, we’re going to be forced to disinvest from the state of Indiana because we have to be about the equality of every human being.” And I went to sleep that night, I got up, I turned on the television, CNN, Fox, everybody had my tweet on. And I’m like, “Oh no, what did I do?”

And, not just that. By like the next day, 3,000 companies had said the same thing. And all I was doing was following my heart on this.

And as these different things have come up in different states or different countries, all I do is say, “Hey, we have your back, we’ll have your back and we’ll advocate for you. And if you’re not happy in a state or a country or a city, hey, we’ll move you. We’re a big company. We need people everywhere.” So that has kind of turned into something that I think that has influenced a lot of my peers. And it’s not about quotas and it’s not about DI or any of these things or getting accused of this crazy stuff. It’s really about, “Hey, we’re about equality, and if you are not about paying men and women equally for equal work or you’re about discriminating against our employees by their race or gender or religion, whoa, you’ve got the wrong company in your country, state city.”

We’re just trying to do what we can do.

I think that fuel of trust and equality has taken us a long way.

SAFIAN: This has been great. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that I should have?

BENIOFF: Probably, but we don’t have enough time, Bob, so.

Copy LinkThe reality and potential of AI

Look, I think that this is an incredible moment. This is a moment where the world is going to change. We may have heard from these AI priest and priestesses of these LLM model companies and Microsoft and others about AI is now curing cancer, and AI is curing climate change, and we all have to plug into these nuclear power plants to get these data centers. None of this is true. It’s all fantasy land. What is true is that the current version of AI is going to help us run our businesses and be more productive, augment our employees, improve our margins, increase our revenues, and improve our customer relationships and our business KPIs.

Thank you very much. That’s what’s exciting about AI today. We need to move the Fantasyland folks to the side and say, “Let me actually show you that we are in a moment that is truly incredible.”

SAFIAN: Well, Marc, this was great. Thanks so much for doing it.

BENIOFF: Great to see you, Bob.

SAFIAN: I love to get caught up in Marc’s energy, you can’t help nodding along with him. Still, I will confess a little uneasiness at how he sidesteps potential future risks around AI.

Now, I agree that AI is too nascent to exhibit a lot of the most dangerous threats. And focusing on the impact of AI on companies right now makes business sense. Agentforce could well be as significant as Marc believes.

At the same time, it is exactly a values-driven company like Salesforce that can make a difference. Today, Marc’s emphasis was on his new product, and I get that. Here’s hoping that he’s more engaged than he lets on in prioritizing addressing long-term risks as well. I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.