You can vibe code all by yourself over here with no controls and no security and no sharing models, or you can vibe code on top of one of these deterministic systems. This is going to be the happy middle where I think the blossom, you know, of the lotus is going to happen.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Six Five Summit 2024. I'm Patrick Moorhead, and I'm joined by Daniel Newman. We are thrilled to have Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, joining us for our opening keynote. Marc, it's great to have you on for our seventh summit.
Always great to be with you and great to see you online, though I did prefer to see you in person.
Yeah, we 100% agree with that. Schedules are crazy this time, but I did hear that there was a random running into somewhere in the UK with Patrick and Marc not too long ago. So we will meet again in person. It's just this time we're going to make it work.
But Marc, I would love to start out talking about just the macro picture of what you are seeing. You know, you've been building Salesforce for multiple decades now. You have hundreds of thousands of customers. You talk across the political, regulatory landscape, of course, and CEOs across the world in every industry. I guess just your read on the tech industry as a whole. This change has gone parabolic. It's never looked like this before. It feels like what you know on Friday can be different by Monday. How are you sort of just seeing the whole tech ecosystem right now?
Well, it's a tale of two cities. And you're right, we were over in Wimbledon together, and that was part of eight weeks that I just spent in Europe. And while I was there, I met with probably more than—I'd say more than 200 customers one-on-one. And I'll tell you that when I say it's a tale of two cities, what I mean by that is that, on one side, we're all here, we're online, we're listening to the podcast, we're hearing about the change to this model, we're hearing about the singularity, we're hearing about all these things. And then back in reality, we're talking with customers who said, "Hey, I've got my Salesforce, I have Microsoft, I have SAP, maybe I've got my data lake, I'm using Teams or I'm using Slack, and a hyperscaler, and I still haven't really started my AI transformation."
And so I think that is the two worlds. It's a world where, yes, all of us are enjoying using consumer-facing AI, which is kind of Reddit with these very cool models on top of them that can do these cool things: draw pictures, answer questions, summarize things, give us advice, do therapy with us. And then on the other side, we keep asking the question, well, how is this going to impact our business? So, the vast majority of customers are still at the beginning of their AI journey, not just in Europe, really all over the world. And I think we have to keep this in mind that these are large companies that have enterprise systems with the security, control, governance, compliance, and trust with their information systems that has to be preserved as we move into this new AI world. And so that's the two worlds.
And listen, I think we are moving into an exciting new world. There's no question. I think that for a lot of us, we were all there at our ChatGPT moment three or four years ago now where we looked at the prompt and we said, "Wow, I can kind of query this data set and get this amazing answer." And we all know Sam Altman was the CEO of Reddit, and while he was there, he had this revelation that he'd be able to use this huge data set, scoop it up, drop it into these algorithms known as models, and be able to provide what we call intelligence. And that has gone incredibly well. And we have, of course, now so many amazing new models—all kinds of things from not only the United States, from China, even where I was in Europe, there are French models like Mistral, there's Japanese models like Sakana. It's kind of an amazing moment.
Now, let's also think that we moved pretty fast from kind of AI 1.0, which was the prompt and the model and the public data set, to agents—this idea now we can actually almost program these prompts and give them intelligence to go and do work for us. Salesforce has Agentforce; there's a lot of companies having different agent platforms. Now, it's cool. Like even at Salesforce, we have our agent Casey, and Casey has gone out and resolved 5 million customer service issues for us on help.salesforce.com. It's so cool. We have another agent called Slackbot. And Slackbot works with me or with tens of millions of Slack customers who are trying to make sense of all their Slack data and the world around it. And we have Marshall, our supply chain agent that goes out and tries to help us rationalize our relationship with all of our suppliers. So, we have lots of new things as we move from AI 1.0 to 2.0.
And then when I was in Europe, it just became really clear to me that we are moving rapidly into the third phase already. And that's what's exciting, is this is moving fast. So we started in that prompt world, call it the chat moment. We moved into the second world, which is the agentic enterprise we call it, but we're moving fast into this third world, which is the interface. And this is where I think enterprises are going to get extremely excited. So, a lot of us are using Cowork from Anthropic, or maybe you're using even Slack or some other user interface that now is kind of a dynamic view on your data. And all of a sudden, these systems, our corporate systems, they're very deterministic. They know who they are, they're known entities, they're very secure, they're control-oriented. And then you take these probabilistic AI-based systems and you kind of put them on top, and they don't know who they are, and they don't have controls, and they don't have the governance. But when you combine them together—a deterministic system and a non-deterministic system, or maybe a probabilistic system like an AI system—and you start to move the interface forward, it's pretty awesome what we're seeing, which is this era of very dynamic user interfaces and releasing all this trapped value in the enterprise.
Where these companies have spent billions—bajillions, not even billions, bajillions of dollars—with vendors, not just Salesforce but so many, a lot of data is trapped in there: in the workflow, in the governance, in the user models, in the sharing models, in the data sets. And the AI is able to find it, still preserving all of these security and controls, but delivering these highly customized user interfaces. And for us, it's cool because Salesforce is delivered now as a fully headless system where we have these APIs, but all of the apps that have ever been built in Salesforce—like everything ever built in Lightning; people forget Lightning is a design environment and a runtime environment—it's all in there. And so then it all gets revealed into the new UI. And this is, I think, the AI transformation customers are really going to groove with and get excited about.
And that's why I am pretty jacked after my trip to Europe. I spent eight weeks there. It was exhaustive, but as we started to show customers what the opportunity is, I think that we saw this is going to be an incredible new moment, and I think we're going to see that really open up over the next 12 to 18 months.
Yeah, Marc. The learning curve here is amazing, and I'm so glad we've come a long way. I feel like if we started off as kindergarteners doing recipe LLMs and we migrated, I think we're maybe in the second grade at this point. I am glad that we are out of this notion that I'm going to sit in an afternoon and vibe code any enterprise app, I'm going to stand it up, I'm going to scale it to 50,000 users, governance, data, I'm going to get good answers back, and then I never have to update it. I'm glad we're not having that debate anymore. But maybe there are new debates out there.
I think that in some cases you will vibe code your app. And let's just take apart what you said because I think it's so important what you said. There's kind of this idea that you either have the vibe coding of the apps over here or you have the prepackaged apps over here. And I don't agree with this, that it's kind of either/or. I think what you're going to find is the happy middle.
And let me explain to you again the happy middle. You have your deterministic systems, call them your enterprise core. And then you have these next-gen AIs over here kind of doing their thing, but they've mostly been doing their thing maybe in coding. And we have these awesome new capabilities in coding. We even have now Slack code, like Slack can code, Claude can code, Replit can code. You can do all this coding. We even have our own core vibe coding products as well. And you can vibe code, but you can vibe code in two ways.
One, you can vibe code all by yourself over here with no controls and no security and no sharing models, and operate it and manage it and all that on your own. Or you can vibe code on top of one of these deterministic systems. Again, if you take a non-deterministic system like these vibe coders or the models or whatever and you apply it over here to the deterministic model, this is going to be the happy middle where I think the blossom, you know, of the lotus is going to happen, because that's where customers are going to see for the first time: I'm not going to throw everything away that I have. I'm not throwing away my SAP, I'm not throwing away my Microsoft, I'm not throwing away my Salesforce, I'm not throwing away my data lake. I've made these huge investments, but I'm going to make them better. I'm going to amplify them. I'm going to build new composite interfaces on them. There's going to be a new level of dynamism on top of them.
And that is going to be the awesome part of AI over the next, as I said, 12 to 18 months as people see this, I think, for the first time. Just six months ago, the AI could not render a dynamic interface, so we were only on the structured interfaces. Now it can. This is the big breakthrough. We are using Cowork. We can see it.
Are you saying that the world is guilty of hyperbole and that we are zero-summers? I mean, I'm literally listening to you talk, and I started hearing it in Pat, and I started hearing it in you. It's like, "So, wait, we're going to end up with hybrid?" Like, remember when every infrastructure company that sold infrastructure said we're going on-prem, and every cloud company said every workload's going to the cloud? And then you had Dario—who, you know, you're an investor in Anthropic, so to some extent, if that company becomes worth a hundred trillion, that's great; I mean, you kind of win. But coming out and saying every industry, every kind of technology was going to just be consumed by Claude. And then you saw the cybersecurity industry got its biggest gains in years on the back of Mythos. You saw a massive pivot back towards people going, "Holy crap, we need rules and rails of business. We need our deterministic systems." So you're basically saying we are just zero-sum, hyperbolistic press, media, and sensational definers, and then the reality ends up being somewhere in between.
Here's what I think: We're all at the AI amusement park, okay? And we're all on the roller coaster, and it is one hell of a good ride. And you guys and I, we've been in this industry a long time. And this is a moment of extreme innovation, and we all love it, and we love reading about it, and a lot of the stuff that we read is so cool. And a lot of it is true, and a lot of it is not true. And that is okay, because the history of our industry, as you guys know, the stories have been about what's true and what's not true. And ultimately, what gets true is it's about customer success: either the customer is successful, or they are not. And that's the truth.
So that's what I'm really seeing. When I'm with our super large customers all over the world, or even us—look at us as customer zero, for example. I gave you help.salesforce.com. If you go there right now, you will see this help agent, and it will help you, and it will resolve your issue. And if it can't, it will auto-escalate you to our call center. But if you just go to salesforce.com, you'll meet a whole another agent built on the same platform called Piper. And Piper is a little person that comes up and is talking to you, and it's an avatar and it's very cool, and you can talk to Piper. And that's another world. But they're running on top of deterministic systems. That is, you still have to log into Salesforce Support for Casey, the help agent, to work. And when you log in, it gets authenticated through your phone and this and that. Now you're in, and then it auto-escalates to you. By the time it gets to a support agent, they can see a whole screen, like I have in front of me, of everything that's going on with you.
This is now where we're getting this amplification through AI of our enterprise systems. Are all enterprise systems going to get replaced? No. Will some get replaced? Yes. And will some get hybrid or amplified? Absolutely. And can that happen maybe faster than we anticipated? Without a doubt.
Why is it? It's because we're moving into AI 3.0. We're moving into not just the prompt and the model, not just the agent, but in the interface. And if you haven't used Cowork, really, I think everyone should get on Cowork. And look, I was with a very large customer of mine in Europe. They're a very, very large tire manufacturer. I won't go through their names because I don't want to embarrass anybody. And they're amazing, and they use us for everything: their dealers, and we have all their CRM data, and we've got all their competitive data and their dealer network. Okay. And I'm with the CEO and the COO, and they're saying, "We're addicted to Cowork because every day we're hand-feeding in our supply chain information and we're doing scenario planning." And I'm like, "But guys, now through CLI and MCP—that is the computer language interface and the Model Context Protocol..."
Look, we had REST protocols, we had XML protocols, we had the SOAP protocols, we had all the different APIs to get into our systems for decades. But now we have the new APIs. Fine. Now if you take that interface and apply it, wham, all that investment you've made is going to appear right in Cowork. That has never really been true of anything before, where all your metadata and your data and your application data all magically starts to render on the screen. Awesome.
So, if I hear you right, though, then the phraseology of headless—I mean, I'm kind of following you here because you could say that some of your peers across enterprise software are probably somewhere between where you are, which I would say is progressive, and on the other side of it, in complete denial about the fact that this stuff is going to be disruptive. But if I heard you right here, you're kind of saying that Salesforce is going to show up in Cowork, Salesforce is going to show up in tons of different—basically wherever you work. It could be Slack, it could be Teams, it could...
It is already. It is today. It has to, and we have to do this. Look, we're not going to stop innovation; we're going to amp it. And you have to understand my position is this one: Of course, I'm expanding distribution worldwide because I believe so heavily in this model, number one. Number two, you've seen I've bought some really cool companies, like this company Piper. It's a bunch of Salesforce alumni who had this company called Qualified that helps you qualify your prospects on your website. We bought it; we built it into our core platform. We bought that company Regrello that became the heart of the supply chain. But we built also some things like Agentforce, we built Slackbot. So, we're buying, we're building, but we're going to amplify this movement to take all three phases that are happening simultaneously, number one.
Number two, the amount of innovation that you can have in your enterprise today is extreme. And you have to preserve, though, security, control, governance, and compliance. This is the heart of how enterprise systems run. So this is what is going to happen, and this is the next phase of AI. And this idea of a dynamic UI, it's just awesome. And for us, we're excited because we've always been headless. Headless is not something that just happened. There never was a head on Salesforce. All those apps were always being generated dynamically out of our platforms. It wasn't a fixed client-server application where we had a fixed client and a fixed server. And we have this new application API that just renders inside Cowork or other interfaces.
So I think Cowork is maybe the first and the best right now, but within 12 months, we'll have ours that you'll be able to use Slack. I'm sure there'll be a hundred of them, because like there are 100 models now, there's also 100 agent platforms and there'll be 100 interfaces. And this then will sit on top of our core systems, our deterministic systems, and then that is what will create the intelligent enterprise, because the deterministic and non-deterministic systems will merge. They're going to get married and have a baby. And that is going to be what we're talking about, and we should be getting pretty pumped right now that we're all going to witness this as the next step of enterprise. And we're not going to toss all this stuff away; we're going to use what we have to make it all happen.
Yeah, Marc, it is an exciting time. I mean, somehow I've seen the conversation move to more negativity in AI, and I understand how we got here and I think I understand what we have to do to get us out of here. And one of the discussions was this notion that our young people would not be able to get jobs. And you doubled down, right, hiring thousands of new grads. What is the vision for your...
Oh, God. Well, you know the story. I was sitting there at MIT with 25 kids who were, "Well, should we change our major? What are you guys doing? Computer science. Isn't it over? I read about it on X. It's over, right?" Like, no, I'll hire you all right now.
And let me explain to you that we need you to put all these things together. Who's going to put this together?
And who's going to create these highly governed systems for governments and enterprises? There are so many exciting pieces to talk about, but who is going to put it all together? Who is going to make all that magic happen?
This idea that—look, number one, what are the four pieces? One, you've got to get your data right, everybody. You've got to get your data right to get your AI right. That's why we bought Informatica to harmonize the data. That's why we bought MuleSoft to integrate the data. That's why we have Data 360 to have our own data lake, and we federate and integrate that data out into every other data lake as well. So you can bring in your Databricks or your Snowflake or your BigQuery or your Redshift or whatever it is, because phase one: get your damn data right.
Phase two is now you take your application and semantic layers. So yes, we have our sales app and our service app and our marketing app and collaboration and analytics Tableau. Well, that's a semantic layer that we badly need to ground this data to create the accuracy in the app. I have a friend of mine who just left—I just had lunch with him—and he has this Claude app, and he's like, "Oh, this app is great. Look what I built. But this number just keeps changing and it's not accurate." I said, "Because you're trying to run it in the probabilistic system. What you need to do is get that running in a semantic layer. Build it on Tableau, and it'll be the same number every single time."
