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Let's head over to Davos.
Salesforce CEO Mark Benyoff speaks with Bloomberg's Bradstone and Mustapha. We're not getting along well on panels that they were on here at Davos. You can go back and see that. I remember one specifical panel that I was in and it was thought they were going to come to blows, but you know, it didn't happen.
And so has Larry Ellison, an oracle you think, stepped in as a technology partner or a source of funding for open Ai.
I can't speak to those specifics, but what I can tell you is that I think it's a big moment in the history of open ai that they're not running on a Microsoft data center.
And how does it impact I guess Microsoft's competitive competitiveness on AI going forward. We'll talk about Copilot and the like. But did you feel like, you know, because of these developments, Satya and Microsoft are in an unfavorable strategic position.
Well, I think, as you know, Microsoft doesn't have today their own frontier model, so they rely on open Ai. And now open Ai is saying that they're going to another data center structure. So it's a big moment.
Right, and to just close the loop on Stargate. You know, part of this is obviously driven by national security concerns and the idea that you know that it is vitally important for the US to maintain this lead. I mean, do you share the concern and the urgency and do you think China is close to AI parody?
Well, you have what six questions in there, let's kind of peel it apart one by one. I think that we're just seeing an incredible amount of investment in AI overall, which is because it's really exciting. Look at what's happening here at the conference I just showed you. You know that Salesforce has run the information management for the World Economic Forum for more than a decade, So all of everything
that's happening here is running on Salesforce. But and we've used our Einstein platform here for years, but this is the year that we're using Agent Force. So now you have an agent that's run front end of your app. Probably that is okay, Well, what it is is you have the ability now to use an agent, a kind of almost like a digital worker to help you to kind of get your job done. So here I am, I have my app, I'm on my phone. I'm normally just bringing up my World Economic Forum app. I'm going
through trying to find all my sessions. So when is Brad speaking? How do I know Brad? Can I contact Brad instead? Now I can just say to the agent, hey, when is Brad speaking? And let leave contact him for me and help me make this happen. At Salesforce, we just deployed our Agentforce technology on help dot salesforce dot com, which is how we deliver help to our customers. Thirty six thousand customers a week come to help dot salesforce
dot com. If you had come there a month or so or ago, about ten thousand of those customers have to move off and get support from human beings, and about twenty six thousand got resolved by our software. Now with agent Force, only five thousand are going off to human beings. So our nine thousand support agents have a little bit less to do because the software is able
to resolve a lot of this on its own. And that's a very exciting moment that AI and agents can kind of give us this incredible productivity that we couldn't have whether we're trying to navigate the World Economic Form and Davos or where Mark Benioffice trying to answer his customers' support issues. Agents are making a huge difference in our ability to be successful.
I want to come back to that, but I just want to make sure we answered the previous question on kind of AI parody between China and the US.
I don't think there is AI parody today. No. I think that the US has a definitive lead, and I think most of the analysis and I think obviously you have a big shootout going on at the very top end of the aron tier models between Google, Open Ai, and Anthropic. Salesforce is obviously an investor in Anthropic. We obviously have relationships with open ai as and also Google. The Google technology I think is amazing. Neil Ferguson just wrote a tremendous analysis of the three models and kind
of said it appears at Google. So Gemini as a player, I think Gemini is more than a player. It's probably ahead.
Okay, And by the way, Dario proceeded you on stage earlier this afternoon.
He has an outstanding model and is doing a great job in his company.
Okay, So back to agent forest.
He said, few less things for your employees to do with agent force, But does it also.
Mean fewer employees.
What are the ramifications of this kind of new age of agentic models going to unsupervised do our tasks for us?
No, no question, I mean, of course, in the history, look, technology is always getting lower costs in these yer to use. There's not any you know, horses out on the streets right now going out, and now we have cars now. And in the same way, I think we should just think about the analogy I just gave you, which is that we have a lot less work for our support agents to do because we've deployed agent force at salesforce, so I can redeploy that resource into other parts of
the company. That's very exciting for me. I have plenty to do, so I can kind of say, Okay, these folks can work on this now instead of being over here.
Has it changed the arc of your hiring plans going forward? And what is the widespread deployment of this technology mean for you a full employment labor market?
Well, that is really the powerful thing. We're in a labor market where it's really hard to hire people. There aren't people to hire I want to radically expand sales and service and marketing and salesforce because we are seeing a huge amount of demand in moving and deploying our new technologies. Finding those people incredibly difficult. That I have agents at my disposal is tremendous. So look, I want an unlimited workforce. I think everybody does agent force AI agents.
That's beginning of an unlimited workforce. Giveing an example. We have a customer called Wiley. They're a bookseller in the US. You probably have picked up some of their books when you're in college. You know them well, and you know they have this moment every year called back to school, and they have to normally hire a lot of gig workers to go into sales or into service or whatever it is. This is a year they did not have to do it. There were one of our launch customers
on Agent Force. They have the ability to just scale their sales and service when they needed it and then bring it back down when that demand spike ended. And we have now you know, lots of examples of that. So we've now released the code late October. We did about two hundred deals in.
Our third quarter.
In our fourth quarter, we'll see thousands of agent Force deals, and I've never seen anything go as fast at Salesforce as this. I've never been as excited about the technology industry as I am right now.
So in the tech industry, we love a good old fashioned feud. We used to have a lot of them, like Larry and Bill Sparring. You know, Kendrick Lamar and Drake had had nothing on the tech industry. But recently, you know, you've been tweeting or posting on x as you describe agent Force and drawing juxtapositions with Microsoft and co Pilot. Not to do more Microsoft pashion here, but I think you compared it to Yeah.
No, but I want you to because I don't know that I really fully got my brain around it.
How the agent Force model is different than the coilet mind.
I can make it very similar. Well, first of all, you're right, Microsoft has disappointed you know, a lot of customers with Copilot, and the reason why is.
I'm not sure everybody agrees.
But okay, well, I mean you can read the Gartner analysis, you can read a lot of the media, but I'm sure you're a big Copilot user yourself, Is that right?
I try to moderate my Oh, I see you know I don't want to, all right, but you're like most people, you don't use it, all right, thank you, thank you for making my case.
But anyway, the point of it is all Copilot is is repackaged chat GPT. So in a chart I just saw like the twenty most used apps currently on the Internet, like open Ai was very much at the top. Co Pilot was not on the list. I just retweeted it. Actually, so when you look at that, why that is is because why use it? It's not really offering me any value. So agent force is really what AI was meant to be. The ability to give a company, a user, a customer,
really the value of artificial intelligence. That's why I was excited to bring it to the show. Excited that Davos has deployed it and we can really show customers here this is a really great opportunity. In an example, yesterday we were in a session with Rollbank Canada who just deployed it for their wealth management. Look their ability to scale and compete against the big US banks when their wealth management is augmented because they're using agent for us.
That's very exciting for them. They're CEO Dave McKay is here. It was really a great, a great moment to hear you know what they're doing with this.
So before you mentioned the abundant capital flowing into AI, you know, anthropic to even today there was news of another one hundred one billion dollars from Google. Is there any case to be made that AI is over invested at this point?
No, there's not. I would say that we are really at a point where everything is changing. I think the evidence, like we just did a demo with your associate in the back here where I just took out my phone and we were demoing the World Economic Forum app. And if we were here a year ago, we'd be looking at a very similar app kind of going through what sessions are we going through? Who's coming to the conference?
I need to contact this person, all the typical things, and instead I have this agent that I just can go right to and say, hey, do all this for me. That level of productivity, that's why in the third quarter of last year we saw productivity rise in the US without any additional workers. That really hasn't happened in a while. That very society margin there that I think that is
exactly what is going on. I think AI is kind of kicking in Right now, I'm writing the business plan for my next fiscal year, which starts February one, and this will be the third year in a row that I'm working with an AI to write my business plan for the year. So I'm I have a colleague. I will write different parts of the plan, and then I will talk to the AI and I will say, hey, what do you think of this? How does this compete?
We have our we have some great technology. And then I'll say, hey, how does this How does this affect this competitor? How does it affect that competitor? And I have been shocked at how it's impact me. That it has made me more productive, but also expands my own consciousness on what I should be doing and leading and moving forward. So AI is definitely a part of I cat to be.
A little bit more skeptical, and when I are.
I didn't know that. How long do I know you for? I never knew this, But I'm so happy to know this about you.
When I when I hear things like Larry, your former boss, Larry Ellison saying today that there will be targeted vaccines for cancer using AI within forty eight hours, I mean it just feels like the exuberance is.
I don't think he means in the next forty eight hours. So I think what he's saying.
Is we understand forty eight hours within diego okay.
So what is okay? So I've actually talked to him about what he's doing. It is pretty incredible. His vision, you know, his vision is that, you know, there's these amazing kind of cancer tests that have kind of been developed, like GRAYIL and others, where you could get a blood test and it shows you if you have these fragments of cancer in your bloodstream and so forth, and then they go to try to find the cant in this case.
And I'm not going to describe it as beautifully as he did today, but because it's his vision, his idea is that you're gonna be able to run that same test and then use AI to have much more affinity on what's really going on, and then be able to use our mRNA technology to develop a highly personalized vaccine for that cancer and eradicated from your body. That is pretty extraordinary. Obviously it hasn't happened yet, but the vision
is awesome. And you know what, I think we should be looking for innovation in the world, and it's exciting to see someone like Larry Ellison having a huge vision for cancer. He has invested lots of his own money and cancer treatment and has centers in la and in Oxford and it's been very impressive. Okay to see what he's done.
I want to hit a couple more topics before we are supplanted by a head of state. I think last year we talked about social media and you sounded the alarm on misinformation and you.
Know, the lack of proper oversight.
You've viewed some salty language, and in the last few months we have seen a retreat on moderation. You know what, what do you make recent moves at Meta and the company formerly noticed Twitter, And do you think it's dangerous?
Well, I think, you know, my thoughts on social media is really well known. But I think that you know, we need to continue to look at from the fundamental reshaping of you know, section two thirty. I think if we are going to let these organizations go to every possible extreme, then they should be held accountable and liable
for whatever the content is. And I think that when we look at section two thirty, it wasn't written for this kind of moment, and especially with the age of AI, this is a time when that we have to go back and do that. And I hope that the Trump administration will evaluate that they've made a number of comments along that along those lines, and I think that that is appropriate to to get rid of that regulation so
that these organizations can be held accountable. I think you're a journalist, you're held accountable for you what you write and what you put on your platform, So should they.
You have come to Davos in years past and made some pretty strenuous.
One thing we said was yes, positive, Well.
We've still three and a half minutes and you've made some pretty strenuous laid out some strenuous climate goals. I think there was planting a trillion trees by twenty twenty.
I mean, how in fact today right now, actually we're announcing that we're delivering the largest forest reserve in Earth's history in the Congo, and President of the Congo's making the announcement part of the trillion tree announcement that we did five years ago. And we're almost at two hundred billion trees, so we're not quite at a trillion, but we got to keep going, I will se question twoga cont Okay, I'm glad you're excited about that.
I love trees. We love trees.
If I'm not sure you do based on that, but we spent exactly about five seconds on trees and a lot on Larry Ellison. I think you like Larry Ellison more than trees. Brad. My question is I'm just saying.
That is required to run these AI data centers. If the industry is sort of conveniently waving it away talking about nuclear if we've really accounted for the requirements that these companies are.
Going to need as they scale up their operations.
Yeah, well, I think that that whole idea that energy still needs to get rationalized against what's happening with these data center demands and some of the stuff that's happening I think is kind of there's some kind of indiscriminate kind of development and people just using them as much as they can and so forth. I think it's salesforce. We continue to try to do our best to be in that zero company, including in the work of our AI will deliver about two trillion AIS actions this week.
You know we've been doing that for about a decade. You mentioned Einstein now agent force, and even in development of our own models and all of these things, we have not had these same exhaustive energy demands. And part of that's because of how we operate our own systems. But I think for everybody there's probably an opportunity for another level of efficiency.
And what is the solution? Is Is it nuclear? Is it fuel cells?
Like?
How does the industry catch up to the energy use that will be required?
I think that it's going to How are we going to get more energy in the world. I mean, I'm not really an energy expert. I'm obviously a huge bowl on fusion. I think what Commonwealth Energy is doing is incredible. I'm an investor in the company and I hope that it's a huge success. And then yes, I also think these kind of SMR nuclear modular nuclear plants. I think there's a new one just going in Texas for example,
right now in other places. I mean, if you think about it, you know we've run small nuclear for a long time. Everyone knows about nuclear submarines or nuclear aircraft carriers, right, and that's basically what we're talking about. Why don't we just take one of those and just plug it into our grid. We just don't think that way. But that's all we're really talking about, being able to just use the energy that we have in the world that's available
to us, and deliver in the clean way. I think obviously we have to think about the amount of carbon we're putting in the atmosphere. It's very significant, not just from our emissions, but as you mentioned, the trees. And I hate to go back there because I know you have it to test for them. But you know, we used to have six trillion trees on the planet. Now we have less than three trillion. Every trillion trees is two hundred gigatons of carbon, so that's six hundred gigatons
of carbon that we emitted through deforestation. And connecting that back to industrialization, we've only admitted about two hundred gigatons through all industrializations, so you can see deforestation remains a major issue.
Last question, you could give me a yes, Ordain, you're the owner.
I know we've probably exited the trees now once.
Well, no, this is actually understand you're the owner of.
No one's going to accuse you of being the Laura.
You're the owner of Time magazine, a tree based publication at a time where it's very uncomfortable.
For media owners.
There were reports that you're going to sell, are you?
Are you going to There's no deal on the table for time, so if that we do sign something, I will call you right away.
Mark Benieff, thank you very much.
Thank you,