Hello and welcome to Onat by MarketWatch. I'm Jeremy Owens. Salesforce is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Over 25 years, it's grown from a startup that was laughed at for insisting that software didn't need to be sold in boxes to a cloud behemoth that brought in $35 billion of revenue last year. It's one of just 30 components of the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average and the youngest company in that elite group. And all of this can largely be credited to one person and his vision: Marc Benioff. 'I mean, I've never been more excited about Salesforce and our industry and what is happening. This is just an incredible time.' That's Benioff. He's the co-founder of Salesforce who has served as its chief executive since the beginning. With new AI software rolling out, he agreed to sit down with me and talk about the financial effects of artificial intelligence, why he's calling his new AI software 'digital labor,' and how he's preparing for a second Trump administration. I started by asking Benioff the question I hear the most about his company: What does Salesforce do?
You know what do we do? We help our customers connect with their customers in incredible new ways. And our customers are 135,000 companies all over the world who make all kinds of different products, from the media industry to the financial services industry to the consumer product goods industry to the government, on and on. And they all have customers, and they need tools to connect with those customers and find data about those customers. Of course, yeah, like that has been our business really for 25 years. And this has been a great business managing data. And I think there is something new and something super great happening, which is a transformation of our business that we are also now become, really already have become, a digital labor provider. So we're providing now digital labor in addition to our software, and the form of that is agents.
Right, I mean we've talked about this on the podcast. 2025 is the year of agentic AI, and you're telling there, you're saying these agents are basically little workers that a worker can send out to do what they need to do.
I don't know if they're little workers or big workers. I have to ask them how big they are. But I say is that we are providing digital labor. And you know, this has got to be an incredible new market. I mean, it's a trillion-dollar, multi-trillion-dollar market, I'm sure. Because what you're seeing is that while we were helping customers, for example, manage their call centers and their contact centers and their service organizations and their field service organizations, now we're providing the service personnel that go along with it, digital ones. That is a big shift. And for a company like ours, we are really excited about this because our customers are adopting this at a rate and at a level that we've never seen with any product in our history. And we now have more than 3,000 companies that have signed revenue-based agreements with us to deliver Agentforce. Those are agreements that have revenue associated with it. And those agreements span from probably small agreements to we've even seen eight-digit Agentforce agreements. So there is a really strong scale. And the other cool thing about it is, of course, it brings along all our other products with it. So you need more actually of our Sales Cloud and our Service Cloud and our Marketing Cloud and our platform and all of those things as you move these things forward. Because we're all about humans with agents creating customer success together.
And where does that land on the money scale for Salesforce? I mean, this is the big talk on Wall Street, Mark. Is the monetization of AI? There are analysts who doubt that this will lead to huge new revenue for Salesforce. And I can see the argument, especially you know from the customer side, Mark. When I talk to customers of yours or other enterprise software, they don't want to see their software budgets balloon by signing onto a bunch of new AI software. So what does it look like? Are they going to cut out some of their Salesforce?
Well, those are not the customers that I'm talking to. Because what I see is something very different. And what I see is a new world of digital labor. And that we are talking to companies about enterprise software. And let's kind of take your premise: 'Well, we don't want our enterprise software budgets to balloon.' Okay, that's fine. Let's keep them in this box over here. Now let's talk about the second box, which is digital labor. My job, I feel, is to help open the door to really say we're all going to have an agent force. And I think Salesforce is probably the first company to deliver this capability at scale. And you know, our goal is to have a billion agents in place within a year. And I feel very excited that we're going to hit that goal because I think we will have tens of thousands of companies, you know, which is maybe you know call it 10 to 20% of our customer base, using this product in production and deployed. And that there is going to be a tremendous agentic layer. And I'll tell you that I also feel that it's on me to pioneer this in my own company, which is why I've built help.salesforce.com, which you can go to, log in as a Salesforce customer, it will ground, which means connect you into the AI. We know who you are, we know your products, and the agent starts to take over and work with you. And that has been our own use of the agentic layer of Agentforce, and it has been incredible. You know, we get about 35,000 customer inquiries every single week on help.salesforce.com. And up to this point, about 10,000 of those have to be handled by our support agents. And we have about 9,000 support agents. And now by going to Agentforce, we've cut that to 5,000. So now that Agentforce can handle of the 36,000, 31,000 of them, and 5,000 a week are going to humans. So I actually need less support agents, and I'm rebalancing my workforce into new sales folks and new what we call sales development representatives, business development representatives, and other functions, because there's just less for the support organization to do because of what we've done already with help.salesforce.com. And by delivering an agentic layer for our customers, I think that's going to be an example for other customers to do this. And that, I think, is very cool.
I don't know if everybody would say it's cool though, Mark. I mean, when you're talking about not enterprise software but instead creating digital labor, human labor is going to have a little bit of a problem there.
Let's take that head on. But first, let's address your first question, which was, 'Hey, is the enterprise software market going to grow?' And I'm trying to make the case that I think the enterprise software market is growing because it's the enterprise software market plus the digital labor market. And that was your first question. So now the digital labor market would then be competing against a human labor market, you know, and there's problems there. I would say yes. Well, I think that this is reality, which is we are entering into a world where there is going to be an opportunity to expand the labor market. And I think right now the labor market, as you know, is very stagnant. We have declining birth rates in a lot of countries. We don't have people to hire. There aren't people to fill a lot of these positions, and it's hard to grow your business. And now it's going to be much easier to grow your business because you're going to be able to do it with digital labor. I talk to and work with CEOs and companies all over the world. There are opportunities that are appearing for these companies to grow and to expand where they just could not before. And because we provide the digital labor, they're able to go into new territories or speak languages or you know open opportunities that before were just not available. And this is a growth opportunity in all areas.
Yeah, and when we talk about digital labor versus human labor and what the financial effects of that, you know, we've really seen it in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years. You and Google and a lot of other companies went through massive rounds of layoffs to shore up the bottom line. And now we're bringing in AI, and it's almost like I see tech setting an example for other sectors on what can be done. But I wonder if all those other sectors follow, like are we still going to be a shortage of workers? Are there going to be a lot more workers out there after layoffs that are replaced by agents?
I think you're mixing two things here, and I want to try to tease them apart. So I think that's really important. So you're right, Salesforce did a layoff exactly two years ago. Because what happened was there was this thing called the pandemic. I don't know if you heard about it. There was this thing called the pandemic. So let me catch you up. And during the pandemic, it was really a moment for the whole tech industry where revenue just accelerated like it was incredible. And all companies, Salesforce, but also even like companies like Meta and others in social, everybody went on this huge hiring surge thinking that oh, the pandemic is going on forever. And then the pandemic ended. And when the pandemic ended, if you look at Salesforce now versus when the pandemic started, you know, Salesforce is going to do about $38 billion this year, but when the pandemic started it was $20 billion. So we've almost doubled our company at scale in that period of what is now five years. So that is really important to kind of grok this idea that there was a moment where the whole industry was surging. We were all surging our employment, and we just went a little too quickly and we needed to make an adjustment. So let's put that issue aside for just a second. Because I think that what we're saying when we talk about digital labor is now we're really saying, oh yeah, look, we're able to extend what we're able to do as a company. Like I am myself doing this as I said, and I'm able to do more, grow faster, go into new places, do new things, offer new products faster because I have digital labor and human labor.
We're going to take a quick break. Coming up, the marketing of AI isn't the only thing changing in tech. We'll talk more about other changes as well as the core issue with AI: Will it make enough money to justify high stock valuations? Stay with us.
Welcome back. Before the break, we talked with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff about his new agentic AI software. But I also wanted to discuss larger forces with him. Silicon Valley and the tech sector have seen financial, technological, and cultural change since the pandemic. Amid that change, rivalries and competitions have ramped up. Benioff has been criticizing the largest software company in the world: Microsoft.
Microsoft has been a disappointment in this area. They have delegated their whole AI strategy to OpenAI, and they just are reselling the OpenAI product as a repackaged product in the app called Copilot with a prompt in a search field. They have not deployed thousands of customers on the agentic layer as we have. And it's, they look, they're a fast follower, that's their business model. I'm sure that they will have a product and do what they can. But there's a reason why Microsoft only has a few percentage points in the CRM market after trying to follow us for 25 years. Because they're distracted. They have a lot of things they're working on. I mean, over here they're competing against Amazon, over here they're competing against Google, over here they're competing against Oracle. They've got a lot that they're trying to do. But we are singularly focused to, as I said at the beginning, we're trying to help our customers connect with their customers in new ways. And now this is a new way with digital labor to do that at this agentic layer. This idea that, and you understand this very well, which is that we make the number one Service Cloud in the world. We have a tremendous business with Service Cloud. And now this Service Cloud is agent-first. And the Service Cloud that we're offering our customers today is all agent-first Service Cloud. So not only do you have the incredible robust functionality that we had let's say six months ago, which was number one in the world, but it has a huge new agentic layer also. And that is like for our customers, yes, their heads are spinning. Our heads are spinning. Everybody's head should be spinning because we just all walk through a door, you know, which is we're moving into the agentic world. And this agentic world is a lot about dollars and cents, and it is a lot about revenue, and it is a lot about expense expansion of opportunity for our customers and for our whole industry. Because we are entering a whole new world.
