Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. No, let's hood over two doubles where Bloomberg's Emily Chang is stunning.
My Emily, Fawnie, thank you so much. I'm here in Davos with Mark Benioff, CEO and share and founder of course of Salesforce. Good to be with you in another country.
You, Emily, Aloha aloha from the slow or the Comma of Davos.
All right, so this is my first Davos. This is your twenty fourth, right, Davos.
What's it like being a nice Hawaiian girl here in Davos.
No, it's chili, but I'm liking the vibes. What's the mood this year? Are people anxious? Are they optimistic? Or are they confused about the future.
Well, it's an exciting moment, There's no question. This is just an unbelievable amount of change. And I think when there's this much change and this much excitement, people are a little frenetic. And I think that, you know, some times Davos is like a measurement of the economy. That's not what's going on. Well, is the economy good? Is it bad? How are people feeling about the economy? More.
This is more like, well, what's happening exactly in the world, because you have the AI situation, you have the political situation, You've got you know, these very broad shifts, and I think that is what's really happening here. There's a lot of discussion. And you know, Davos was built on the concept of a multi stakeholder dialogue, the idea that we bring in lots of different kinds of people political leaders, business leaders, spiritual leaders, cultural leaders and have a conversation.
And this year's Davos is about the spirit of dialogue and that is playing out in spades.
Well, talking about that spirit, we're waiting for President Trump to arrive. You've said you want you want to see him prioritize US businesses. What does that mean?
Well, I think the number one thing is, you know, for the US president is as he is doing his job all over the world, he needs to support you businesses and make them successful. And I was with Macron yesterday and his job is to make French businesses successful. And there's no different you know, that's the role of the nation state leader is to help the people of their state. And so I have a lot of respect for President Trump and how he always supports the businesses of the United States.
So you're using Davos sort of as a live demo for some of Salesforce's new digital labor tools. You know, I know you were prepping on slack bot, but a lot of AI customers are saying, supposed.
To give away my secrets. Believe that's not right.
I don't think that's too big a secret, but a lot of customers are saying they're sort of stuck in AI pilot purgatory, like they're not They're trying stuff, but it's just not working.
Fortunate because there is so much that you can do right now in AI. Unfortunately, there's so many false narratives. So I think because so many companies and pundits have said things that are not true, it kind of freezes certain customers and they don't know who to believe. So that's why, like we were talking before we went on
that ramone is here the Sea of Pepsi. You know, it's a new generation, and he just deployed one hundred and twenty five thousand of his salespeople, one hundred and twenty five thousand, supporting millions of businesses, a lot of small and medium businesses all over the world. Is sell pepsi using new AI generation tools that we've built for him. Really only took us a few months and they're getting
fantastic results. And that all started actually last year. I saw ramone and he once said I'm ready to get a new level of efficacy in pepsi. And another Baraj is here from FedEx, the CEO of fed X. We just finished with him. He was a year ago saying I've got trouble selling internationally. We identified all of his domestic customers that when they start to work with his salespeople, his website and they haven't done international. Now we surfaced
them as an opportunity for international. It's generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Fedexso there is great opportunities right now to deploy AI. And look, that's our job. Our job is to sell it, to convince, show the use cases, make people excited about it, and that's what we're doing here. We will meet with more than five hundred CEOs one on one here.
You know, you obviously have also taken on a sort of you know, a policy bent. You recently apologized for endorsing President Trump, sending the National Guard to San Francisco. How will you what did you learn from that moment, and how will you continue to reconcile the sort of Salesforce Ohana values with the administration's policies, whether it's ice raids in Minneapolis or taking over Greenland.
That's such a great question, you know, Emily. The way I look at it, and I think that this is probably the right way to look at it is I've been doing this for twenty six years now. Salesforce, amazingly is twenty six years old, eighty thousand employees, will do
more than forty one billion in revenue this year. Presidents are constantly changing, but our core values are not changing, and so we're just anchored down into our core values and then we just speak to that and what we're trying to achieve as a business, to reflect back into
our customers and our communities what those values are. As you know, in San Francisco, where we are the largest tech company, there have been a lot of challenges, and so yeah, I always have anxiety about safety for our employees, and I think that that anxiety just manifests into how can we create a greater San Francisco? And so I'm excited to be working with everyone from Mayor Lurry to President Trump to do that.
You're really focused on AI and especially it's impact on teams, and you've been sort of raising the alarm about AI influencing team suicides, which is, you know, it's horrible that we even have to talk about this. You've called them suicide coaches. Like, what should companies be doing about this?
Well, I think we should talk about that. We are dealing with a new kind of very unwieldy technology which by left by itself, these large language models, they can do all kinds of terrible things. I mean, they can do a lot of great things too. You've used them, you know, they can summarize things, and you can ask
them queries and you can get information. But unfortunately, we saw this year this horrible example or this company character AI specifically started to find that their product was turning into a suicide coach for their customers. And one of the most horrific things I've ever seen in technology is these children, you know, died and it was completely unnecessary, and I think it needs to be a wake up call that you know, we're letting all of this AI
technology out fully unregulated. And by the way, you remember that's true what we did with social media as well. And you probably remember what I said in twenty eighteen here, you know, which was social media was becoming the same kind of very dangerous technology. And look, a lot of governments have made changes around social media now, so you go to a lot of countries, if you're not seventeen eighteen years old, you're not going to use social media.
They're our controls or our protections. We need to get there with AI now. There doesn't need to be any more deaths. You know, we need to be like taking this seriously. And AI is great, it's incredible, but these models, you know, they're inaccurate, they hallucinate, they're kind of hard to control.
So what should we do? I mean, should CEOs be held personally liable? Should I was talking to Demis Hassibus, the CEO of Google Deep Mind, and he I asked, look, if we knew every company in every country would pause, should we pause AI so society and regulation can catch up? And he said yes, he would be in favor of that. Would you be in favor?
Emily? Number one? Tech hates regulation? You know that they hate it, right? They get people on, oh, it slows down innovation. They hate regulation, they hate it, they hate it, they hate it except one regulation they love, Section two thirty, which basically says they're not held responsible or accountable for these deaths or for anything that their social media or
their AI does. And that needs to change because here at Bloomberg, if you say something, you're held accountable, and you know, I own time, and if we say something, we're held accountable. But these companies are not held accountable because of a very specific federal regulation called section two thirty. It needs to be reshaped, reformed, you know, basically restructured to really reflect social media and AI and the dangers
that we see. And that is something that we should all be pushing for that these these companies need to be held accountable, and right now they're not going to be held accountable because of this regulation.
And right and like what regulation is the right regulation? Like California try to regulate. David Sax has his own version. I know you've you've just chatted with him, like is there any regulation?
Well, I'm going to have a one on one conversation with David is a close friend of mine later today. I hope you tune in and we're going to talk about that because, look, I think social media kind of is almost like a best practice that we can learn from that if we look around the world, you'll see that a lot of countries, not necessarily ours, but a lot of countries have made really good changes, and we could make those changes to because you know, it's kind
of funny. I'm like a large language model myself. You know, I feel like I'm putting one word together, but I have context. I have a life. I was born, I have a childhood, I have friends, hopefully you're one of them. And you know, I have a creator. I have a higher power than I'm connected to. These large language models.
They're running by themselves. They don't they were not born, they don't have a childhood, they don't have context, they're not connected to a creator, so that they're running kind of in a different way. And then all of a sudden, it feels very familiar. It feels like, oh, this is my friend. It's not your friend. So we need to like step in now and look, we can kind of see where it's going. It's not completely out of control.
So now is the moment. And I think people like you and others should be aggressive about this.
Last quick question and it feels almost going to the stock. But you know, you're trying to build your company on this new emerging technology. Wall Street's really down on software. Wall Streets salesforce is taking salesforce stock taking a beating, you know quickly what I mean what needs to happen.
For twenty six years and every now and then the software sector kind of falls out of favor. It doesn't mean our financials are out of favor. I mean we'll do more than forty one billion in revenue this year, more than fifteen billion in cash flow our margins or more than thirty four percent all record numbers, by the way, and we just introduced an amazing new version of Slack. You know that with slack Bot, the new AI enabled Slack that have the context and the AI built in.
We have Agent Force helping our customers deliver customer agents. So we do employee agents and customer agents. We've rebuilt our architecture to have a data layer and application layer, the agent force layer, and then these agents that sit on the top and the ecosystem. That's been a lot of work in the last three years, selling a lot
of huge deals. But you know, you sometimes have to wait around for Wall Street to realize, well, this is a huge opportunity and we're just going to keep executing that.
Yes or no? Are you at one billion yet? One billion agents?
I think we're beyond that. I haven't actually counted them all, but you know we're here's the way to think about it. We now just passed and I think we're number one or number two enterprise software company, or maybe software company overall in the use of tokens. You know, tokens are what these models generate to generate their intelligence. We just passed eleven point one trillion tokens. And you remember we talked after our earnings and we were about three trillion tokens.
And that idea that as an enterprise software company, we're publicly reporting and talking about the number of tokens. And I know all of those people, you know who love Bilbo Baggins are wondering if that's the tokens. It's different tokens.
All right, Mark, next time, we'll have to do this in Hawaii. Thank you, Yes, thank you. Okay, I'm good, I'm surviving.
Thank you, it's a beautiful day. Thank you for joining us next time it's Waikiki Beach, let's do that.
Absolutely, Mark Benioff's CEO of Salesforce,