Good afternoon, everybody, or still good morning? Yeah, I guess still good morning. Good morning again, everybody. Marc, good morning. Thank you. Our next guest, as you all know, is the CEO and co-founder of Salesforce, Marc Benioff. Marc founded Salesforce in 1999. We were just talking about how old we are and how old we're getting.
Too old.
Too old. It's an incredible Fortune 150 company with seventy thousand employees. The largest enterprise applications company in the world. It's always great to have you back at this conference. We always appreciate you being here.
I only do it for you, man.
Well, thank you then. I'm glad, I'm glad that
[audio distortion] the new guy is gonna be-
Well-
Tell them I'm not coming.
Okay. Well, then I'm gonna hang around for a little while.
All right.
I'll hang around for a little while.
You're hanging around? I'm gonna hang around.
Okay, I hope so. You guys also just commemorated 20 years as a public company in July, correct?
Absolutely, so i t's 80 earnings calls. How do you like that?
80 earnings calls? That's a lot of earnings calls.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can't say 80 earnings calls. I think I can say 24 at this point, so you know, I got a ways to go. I don't think I'll make it to eighty, but we'll see. Yeah. You're right about that. All right, so let's dive right into it, Marc. You talk to a lot of CEOs worldwide, got a lot of customers. You know, broadly, what are CEOs saying about their appetite to spend this year next? Just give us kind of a download on the environment based on what you see in here with your business footprint.
I think there's a couple of big things going on, and next week, we're gonna have our Dreamforce conference here, so this place will be filled with Dreamforce. How many of you will come to Dreamforce next week? God, nobody. This isn't really my crowd. I'm leaving. Anyway, we'll have 50,000 people here in San Francisco. It's gonna be awesome. It's sold out. And let me just... I'll give you a little insight into kind of what's gonna happen, because I think that, you know, what has happened and what is about to happen is just extraordinary.
I guess about a decade ago, I had my first kind of super AI freak out, and I really thought, you know, AI was just about to happen. You know, I mean, I grew up in the kind of the AI fantasy world. How many of you watch Minority Report? You know, the movie. Remember that? And, what about WarGames? Anybody remember that?
Gotta be really old to remember that one.
Yeah. Yeah. These people are not movie people, actually. It's interesting. How about The Terminator? Anybody? Her? What about Her? No. Okay, well, anyway, not a very interesting group, actually.
I watched all four of them.
What's that?
I watched all four of those movies.
Okay. I know you do.
Yeah.
Yeah, you and I are the same, genre.
Yeah.
The guy who wrote part of Minority Report and WarGames is our futurist, Peter Schwartz. You know him. You know, so a decade ago, we're kind of going, "Oh, this AI thing, it's gonna happen. Let's get going." I kind of had this existential moment, and I started buying a bunch of companies, and we built this incredible platform called Einstein, and it was doing this predictive intelligence. It did, you know, machine intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and we started pioneering a lot of amazing things at Salesforce with AI. We started publishing models. We created prompt engineering, something we don't really get credit for, but the first prompt technology came out of our research team.
And, you know, that's why, you know, you can see, like, we'll do 1.5 trillion Einstein transactions this week. Those are predictive and generative transactions. Now, still, though, it's not what I thought was gonna happen. So I got a lot of value. Like, for example, when I do my calls, you know, I do, you know, forecast calls every Monday, and we have our leaders from all over the world. I don't, you know, I don't know if you do this. And then, you know, I will say: "Hey, Einstein, all right, we've had everybody lay this down, but what is really gonna happen?" And that has been very good. And for the last few years, Einstein is by far our most accurate forecaster.
Okay.
And as you know, in running a business, this is actually really important. You want to know what the numbers are gonna be, right? Are you with me on this?
Yeah. [audio distortion]
The worst thing is when everybody's wrong. That's been cool.
Which is-
And-
... which is often, by the way.
Yeah, and we do that, and then we apply that AI and that intelligence across all of our various customer touch points. So that can be, you know, all the different pieces, you know. Like I just bought, okay, like these gorgeous shoes I'm wearing, you know, or this suit, whatever. They're both LVMH, and they're a huge customer of ours. They automate every one of their customer touch points. And, you know, if you go to Louis Vuitton, right down the street here, and you walk in, and you give them your name, and I'm sure you're in the computer.
Certainly my partner Jan is.
I don't need to have all those details. And then you know, we'll see, like, everything you've bought online, everything in the store, everyone in the call center, every email you've done, on and on, and you have a whole Customer 360 profile, and you know this. This is our mantra. For the last 25 years, this has been the most important thing to us, automating every customer touch point. And that's what, you know, has really excited me. And when we look at Louis Vuitton, they have the brand that makes this suit is called Berluti. It's awesome, and they really do, like, we've really accomplished our goal. It's really cool.
It has been an honor to build our customers' sales forces with them, and their service forces, and their marketing forces, their commerce forces even, their analytics forces when we bought Tableau, which you guys use as well. You know, that's been very powerful, and even Slack. As we build these, you know, forces for these customers, now I think we are on the verge of building something truly extraordinary for them for the first time. It is gonna be their agent force. For each of our customers that we are starting to work with, this is a new concept. It's completely different and totally new, and maybe it, it hearkens back to these movies quite a bit. You know, I think that unfortunately, in the last couple of years...
You know, we've seen this, we've seen the statistics. You know, we spent $300 billion in AI collectively at this industry, but then there aren't that many great CEO stories about how they're getting value from artificial intelligence. Like, I even watched your interview you just did on CNBC, and it's hard to pull out a good story.
You know, the CEOs just don't have, "Oh, and we got this for the $300 billion." And I'm, like, just saying to myself, it's really interesting, and I think that there's been a few things that have gone on in the last couple of years that everybody needs to kind of get their head around, which is, it's cool to build a, you know, build your own model, okay, and train your own model, and then retrain your own model, and then train it again, and then retrain it again, and then retrain it again. And when you talk to customers who are doing this, I think they're wasting a lot of money.
I have seen this over and over again, and I think that the second piece is that these copilots that have been sold, and there's a pretty good Gartner report that came out this week, into these enterprises, that this is gonna be their AI panacea, also are highly ineffectual. Leak data, which is not something you like in your business, I know, have all kinds of trust and security issues, and don't have the level of. Let's just say, these are not the droids you're looking for, okay? In my mind, that is what I'm thinking about.
Is Agentforce that droid we're looking for?
I'm gonna get to it. Hold on there, [audio distortion] Don't give away the whole plot of the book, okay? So, I think that there's one other piece, putting technology aside, that since the pandemic, especially, and you and I have had these conversations ad nauseam, workforces are actually quite overwhelmed, and there's a lot of low-value work that is being done for sure, employers definitely want that promise of AI. And if you want to know who that is, you all have got doctors that you work with or hospitals and so forth, and it doesn't matter what major medical organization that you work with or talk to or talk to your own, we work with them all. Doctors are super overwhelmed. They're burned out, and nurses are burned out.
Something happened in the post-pandemic that we all got a lot more anxious about our healthcare, and we're, like, a lot more interactive with our doctors. Like, we'll get our labs, and then we have to call our doctor: "Hey, what's this number? What's this? What's that?" There is a magic part here that's gonna be very exciting because there's no question that the vision that we all have for what the future can be is really just about to happen, and I believe it is happening. Next week, we will show our customers for the first time a platform called Agentforce. And why that is exciting is that they will be able to really see how humans with agents are gonna drive customer success together.
This thought that you're gonna work with an agent in your business is gonna be an absolute reality for those clients. Today, that product already is with many customers, and I think that there's a lot of good examples. I'll give you a couple, but one is, so Wiley, we all know this textbook company. It's amazing. Wiley is... I wrote a couple little notes here, so I, you know, to myself, keep myself from being distracted. Wiley is got 5,000 employees, and you know, they're operating in 20 countries. They're in, you know, probably 10,000 schools. Not a huge company. It's a mid-market company. The thing about Wiley that's so interesting is right now is their Super Bowl. This is when everybody's buying textbooks, and what they usually have to do is surge their workforce .
Surge their sales force, surge their service force. In your business, it's not unusual to read a report from an analyst, great analyst like Kash, on seasonality. "Well, it's a seasonal time. We're seasonal. This is our seasonal workforce."... Not this year. Because they're using Agentforce, they're one of our first customers, they are able to deploy an Agentforce the way that they will deploy a Salesforce or a Salesforce. And the level of accuracy that we are seeing with our platform is remarkable.
Now, with the current generation of the models that are out there today, we have seen, like with our customers are trying, and I'm gonna kinda come back to the thought I've made: "Hey, I've built my own model." By the way, it's very fresh in my head 'cause I've been on this Dreamforce focus group tour for the last two months. So I've met now with hundreds, maybe thousands of customers, and it's not uncommon that like here, like I was just in Seattle, and I was with a large telecommunications company, and they're, "Listen, we've built our own model. We work with this model company down in San Francisco.
We've got our own model, we're retraining the model, and we're resolving now 25% of all of our cases. It's very exciting." And I said, "Well, that's very cool for you. It's great, but why are you doing that? Why aren't you just using our platform?" Because the way our platform is put together with Agentforce, we are now resolving more than 90% of all customer service issues. It is the highest level of accuracy. Yesterday, I was in LA with Disney, who's using this to resolve complex issues, not just with customers, but even with employees. And if you like, work with any of the Disney cast members. Have anybody here been to Disneyland? Only a couple. Actually, it's a very boring group. Surprising. Don't watch movies, don't go to Disneyland.
I think they're shy.
Oh, okay. Anyway, any of you ever hired a Disney guide to, like, help you, like, get around the Genie lines? Very poor people here, actually. Anyway, when you make some money-
Again, I think they're shy.
When you make some money, what you could do is hire these Disney guides, okay? And they get you around the lines, and instead of getting through 10 rides a day, you can get through, like, 30. And it's really a cool product from Disney. And but it's very complex being a Disney guide, and if you're with Disney's guides and you're in the park, you'll notice that they've got, you know, Slack on their phone, which is our, you know, employee communication. They also have Salesforce on their phones. And it's kind of an amazing use case for them is, and this is not uncommon, "Oh, hey, I'm with Marc Benioff, and we're heading towards Rise of the Resistance." This is a Star Wars ride. "
And, this is really exciting, and... Oh, the ride is broken. Oh, he's gonna be so disappointed. So what I want to do is figure out, where am I gonna go now in the park, you know?" Now, Disney knows because we do know, automate every touch point with Disney Store is on Salesforce. Disney+ is on Salesforce. We took that off of another vendor, actually. We all the cruises, the real estate, the guides, every single every customer touch point and all the data is in Salesforce.
So that opportunity, which is amazing, is to say, "Hey, I'm with Marc, and Rise is broken," and there's a lot of reasons why it breaks, but it, it's broken. It's a very temperamental ride. "And what am I gonna do? What is... What's the what has he not been on? What does he like? “Where will he...”
And the AI, boom, can read across the data set and now is delivering between 90% and 95% accuracy with almost no hallucinations because we have a platform approach where we have been able to not just use a great model, not just use incredible, you know, we call, it's a technical term, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which is this kind of ability to kind of deliver very advanced query capabilities. But by putting a number of things together, we have delivered, through Disney's own benchmark, 2X the quality of Google's AI because of this platform approach. It's, it's incredible. But you can imagine the value that we're bringing right at that moment to that Disney cast member in the park, and that is the value of the agent right there, to augment that employee.
Now, in some cases, you're gonna get productivity, like the seasonal workforces. You're extending the workforce, clearly. In some cases, you're gonna augment the employee, there's no question. In all cases, you're gonna increase the margin of the customer and the revenue. In fact, when I was talking with some of their executives, I won't go through the names, but, you know, let's say it was a super hot day yesterday in LA, which it was, like a hundred and nine degrees. And they're like: "Oh, I don't know if people are gonna want to come out to the park exactly, and, you know, we might see a volume decrease on attendees." And it's really important for them because they have super high velocity into their parks. You know, they've got 17 million visitors a year into the parks.
So if they can kind of dial up the pricing a little bit based on certain variables, well, these agents just aren't kind of doing customer service thing. Then they can go, "You know, that Marc Benioff guy, he's good for a good discount." So let's send a coupon to him saying, "Hey, we know you're in LA, and you want to come to Disneyland tonight. We're gonna give you a certain nighttime voucher, and let's make this happen."
And this idea for them to be able to action their employee base against a temporal idea of, like, a temperature change, to then increase volume and capacity, this is real. And it's not just the query... then when the customer is interacting, they are gonna get a very high level of experience, much higher level than we've ever seen before. Now, you can see how that could be incredibly important where you look at Disney+.
where we had to replace another vendor who did not do as well, was not part of kind of our framework, and we're able to have a very complex custom conversation with that customer, able to do the upsell, cross-sell, you know, they have a variety of bundles and this kind of thing, and to be able to close that transaction across hundreds of millions of consumers. This just wasn't possible before, and that's why it's so exciting. I'll tell you one more quick story, and then I'll... and we can kinda go on. I'm kinda trying to set the stage, but I am so jacked about what's going on. Another customer I'm visiting down there is Kaiser. Now, Kaiser, if you're not familiar with kind of our health plans here, it's large healthcare company here in California.
Guys, they're across the nation. I think they're about 20 million patients, and it's. You know, this example that I gave is not an uncommon example. They are Epic's largest customer. I've gotten my labs. I have my labs, and now, oh, I can see, you know, one of these numbers, you know, are not what they want to be. Who's had that experience? Raise your hand. Nope, lots of healthy people here. Anyway, good news, they're there. But what happens is, all of a sudden, you kind of are having this situation where you're in Epic, and it's like, "This number is not right. I need to call my doctor."
You ever had that experience? Everybody has that experience, and instead, you're able to work with this agent, and the agent is gonna say things like, "Actually, we're just gonna repeat the lab. We're going to schedule the MRI for you. Actually, we've contacted your doctor, and we've scheduled a visit for you." And the agent is able to take action and reason and also then deliver the actual result.
This is phenomenal. We have never seen this level of accuracy, and with Kaiser, we're seeing 90%-95% accuracy in the model, and that's our next-gen model. So we have right now, Atlas version one in, you know, with Wiley, for example, as version one, and version two, that's called Atlas, which is with right now with Disney, it's with Kaiser, it's with several other customers, delivering this phenomenal change. This is the droids that we're looking for. This is the vision that we want, where we want to be able to have much greater productivity, okay, much more efficiency, and drive our top line with AI.
We just are at this moment, and what I'm excited about for next week with Dreamforce, and for those of you who will come, we will turn this on for our customers in real time. We're bringing four thousand of our employees to San Francisco to basically run what we call launchpads with our customers, and we are gonna turn on for thousands of our customers, this capability for the first time. Now, why that is exciting is, as I said, for the last 25 years, we have been tirelessly automating the customer touch points of hundreds of thousands of customers all over the world, and this has been our passion.
For the last several years, what we've been doing is something incredibly important, which is building a Data Cloud, which allows us to amalgamate the data so that we can deliver this accurate AI, because you're not gonna get the AI accuracy without the data and metadata. The final piece is the agent. The agent then is gonna provide that ability to connect with the customer in a whole new way. This is really, I think, the moment that I've been waiting for in enterprise software.
To see it with these customers and to be with Disney, to be with Kaiser, to be with, you know, so many of these customers already who have this technology, and now to show it to thousands of customers, is what's really exciting me. What I've done is I made a decision also to schedule... You know, we're very good at very large scale events at Salesforce. You know, we'll run these World Tour. How many of you have been to a Salesforce World Tour? Anybody? Okay, they don't get out much.
But anyway, but these events on, they're about 10,000, five to 10,000 people each, and we're gonna do 25 of them between Dreamforce and the end of our fiscal year. And the idea is that we want to put as many customers in and launch and get as many customers turned on to Agentforce and configure it for them and get going. Because up to this point, it's been a world just like bots, and we've all had that bot experience where we go to the bot and don't even want to deal with the bot 'cause it kind of flails out. This is not that... This is not that experience. This is a phenomenal experience that I think customers are gonna have, a transformational moment for their businesses.
So you laid out a lot there. If you-
I'm only starting.
Okay.
But thank you.
I figure I'll get to ask one more question, and you'll-
Yeah
-finish from there.
That's right.
But so take that. The implications of that as customers get onto the platform and they use it, how does it filter through to what happens in their business? How does it filter through into the terms of the size of their sales forces? How does it filter through in terms of the size of their marketing forces? You're obviously talking about things that make people more productive, but you're also talking about things that should create more efficiency, too. It's hard to change processes in business. How do you think about how this will impact your customer base as people adopt this? What will it allow them to do strategically in terms of the way they operate?
You've got to think about this. Let's put it in your own... Let's see if I can get you excited about your own business. You know, one of the customers who has Atlas, which is the version two of Agentforce i t's currently in test, which is this you know, platform approach for AI. Not writing your own model.
It's figuring it all out for you, okay? So RBC has been a customer of ours for many years. They're amazing, and Dave McKay's a fantastic CEO. Great. And you know, they are a company, to give you a size, it's a pretty good-sized bank, right?
[audio distortion]
It's not, you know-
Largest Canadian bank. It's a big bank.
Largest Canadian bank, 17 million clients, right? And also, they have in their call center, maybe, I can't remember exactly, maybe it's three to six thousand people. I think they've got 35 thousand people on our Sales Cloud selling mortgages and all their financial products. So how do we give them an Agentforce? How do we make those service professionals not having to deal with all of the really mundane work, while still preserving all of the regulatory environment that's mission-critical for the bank? All the KYC stuff that we're so good about, you know, that we have to do in our Financial Services Cloud.
How do we sell more mortgages for them, which is one of their hot products right now, and especially as we start to move in a, you know, more favorable interest rate environment, the ability to go out and talk to all of these customers and have meaningful conversations? Now, because these agents are operating across the flow of work, and because we're able to read across the data, we're able to have and engineer complex relationships with the customer through the agent, looking at all aspects of their financial hierarchy, all the products that they have.
All of the conversations they've already had with professional advisors and the whole institutional memory is already in Salesforce. The ability for the agent to have that complex conversation is possible and is happening, and I believe that that is gonna be a huge accelerator for companies that use these capabilities. Yes, there's gonna be efficiency opportunities, but there is gonna be revenue opportunities like we have not seen.
More revenue and productivity with the same size force.
Who would not want this kind of capability? [audio distortion] You have a great sales force, don't you?
We do.
And you've got a great service organization, don't you?
We do.
'Cause I know we've been on the phone when things have gone wrong.
Yep.
But you're gonna have a great Agentforce also, and no one does yet, and everyone will. And that is what is exciting for me. And I think other companies are coming to us now to help them build their agents because of the breakthrough that we've had in the technology and because we've been doing this so long. We probably saw with Workday. We just did a relationship where we're building their agents for them for their Workday platform. This is really a moment in time, I think, that I have never been as excited about the historic moment. It's this moment that I think that we will remember as we're really about to enter a new world.
So, because of this, what does Salesforce look like five years from now that's different? How does it evolve Salesforce?
Well, I think that where Salesforce is going in terms of when we look at five years from now, the ability to deliver that agent, your agent for your business, for your industry, for your sales organization, for your service organization, to build your own custom agent for your own level of efficiency inside your organization. That in the same way that in the last 25 years we've built a company, now we're giving guidance this year for about $38 billion in revenue. We've got about 75,000 people. I feel like we're a startup. I feel like this is the beginning of Salesforce. We've automated all these customer touch points. That's been step one. You can't do this without the data and the metadata, so that is key that we have that. Two, we have to amalgamate the data.
If you don't have the amalgamated data, you can't get to the accuracy on the AI, and the final piece is these agents, so what is the level of acceleration? What is the capability for all of our clients? All I know that for every single CEO that we talk to, every customer that we talk to, when we show them what is now possible, and it's not about that they have to go train a model or they do this kind of heavy lifting, the technical work. A lot of people have been running science experiments for the last two years in their businesses that they did not have to run. They did not achieve the efficiency that they wanted to achieve. They did not get to where they wanted to get to.
You have to let enterprise software professionals and platforms evolve and mature to the point where we can deliver this capability, and I believe that we will inspire the next iteration of the whole industry. Everyone will have to fast follow us into this. You know, I think that in the case of what we've been able to invent in regards of the ability to kind of deliver these kind of extended RAG models and these next-generation capabilities for these clients, when they get their hands on it next week, I think that they will be astonished. And this is my big bet that I'm making in my own mind. I was going through this with... We have a phenomenal engineering leader, this great person who's been in the industry a long time.
He used to work at Microsoft and has been with us for a number of years and helped us architect quite a few things. Great person. And we're all so excited, and I work obviously in a large team and an engineering team, and he came to me and said: "You know, this is so big and so huge, Mark, you should change the name of the company from Salesforce to Agentforce." And I said: "It's kind of a high-risk maneuver." And but his point was very like, hit me really heavy, where it's like, I do believe, and I think everyone who's touched this technology believes, this is that big. It's by far bigger than anything I've ever experienced.
When I talk to customers, like I'm sure even as you have fantasized in your own mind, it's gonna impact every company, and our ability to deliver that immediately is gonna be so exciting for us. And so that's what I'm super excited about.
It's super exciting. It's bold ambition, and we're gonna be excited to watch you make progress. I'm sure that the Dreamforce next week will be awesome.
Really appreciate you having me.
Good luck.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate you doing it.
Look forward to seeing you.
Thanks a lot, Marc.
Thank you.
Thanks for being here.