I have probably known Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff for about a decade, with five annual Dreamforces under my belt. Each year this event gets even larger, and each year it brings with it a lot of new product drops from Salesforce and a lot of optimism. I sensed a different tone from Benioff when I caught up with him from Dreamforce this year. One of a company beginning to monetize its many AI investments. A CEO, Benioff, not willing to let AI run amok on the internet. These are good things as Salesforce investors brace for a possible rally in a stock that has been down on the mat for a prolonged period. Here's my convo with Marc.
We're in a transformational moment, Brian. You've seen it really unfold. Of course, we all had our ChatGPT moment a few years ago, but we're still waiting for that to come into the enterprise. But we haven't seen that transformation really happen yet, but we are now. And it's taken us a few years of work with these AI companies and our own systems to get to the point where we've launched this incredible new platform, Agentforce. And we've done that in three incredible versions here at the show. We have Agentforce with Anthropic. We had this incredible moment yesterday with Dario, the CEO, is here. And we launched Agentforce. It was just awesome. This incredible new interface on Salesforce. We also have Slackforce. You know, we own Slack. You're a big user. I know, and we showed a whole new way to look and use all of Salesforce's systems using Slack. And we have Lightning Co-Worker, but it's really just the beginning of what will be a whole new generation of Salesforce capabilities. We even had Jensen Huang here yesterday talking about our brand new Neotron-trained model. So, we got a lot of cool things happening. Brian, everything is amazing here except for we're missing you. That's our number one thing.
I appreciate that. You know, it was another amazing moment. Like you told Jensen, you're like, 'What do you tell Jensen?' We're following you, bro.
I love that moment. You know, Jensen came in and he's like, 'I don't understand.' Now, you know how it is here at Dreamforce. We have a big keynote room, about 10 or 12,000 people in it, and we don't set it up in a patriarchal style. It's a round theater in the round, but then we walk around and talk to everybody, and we want to let everyone know we're with them. And he had never seen anything like that. He's like, 'You got to show me how to do this because I've never done a presentation like this.' So, I was walking around with him, and then he finally says, 'Oh, Mark, you know, okay, you could just follow me now.' And I'm like, you know, Jensen, we're just all following you, bro.
It was good. I was watching it. I'm like, wow, I can't believe that just happened. But let's stay with Jensen because you've known Jensen for eons, Marc. Like for the average investor out there, help us understand how game-changing is the stuff that Nvidia is working on. You know, we always talk about Jensen's chips, his leather jackets, but like what is his real impact right now?
Well, the impact is he's set the fundamental stage for the industry with the GPU. The GPU means that you can train these models and run these models. And David Kirk, who's on our board, you may know, was the chief scientist at Nvidia and ran the group that actually invented the GPU. Did an incredible job with Jensen. Now, that was, you know, almost 16 years ago they invented the GPU, and then the GPU had its moment. I mean, Brian, you have to remember the history of the GPU is that it was invented on the back of what we call parallelism. That is, we could make many things operate simultaneously or in parallel. David Kirk actually wrote the book on parallelism. And then he brought it into the chip. Once he did that, and the reason they did it is to make all the graphics cards run faster, to make the games run faster, the design software to run faster. But then Jensen saw these incredible new AI models coming out of Stanford, especially the vision models, and wondered, 'I wonder if these parallelism breakthroughs and the GPU could be used for AI models.' Well, that was 13 years ago, and the rest is history. Since then, he pivoted Nvidia 100% to AI, and today he commands the AI industry.
Marc, we recently heard from Jensen a couple weeks ago when they reported earnings, and he said our growth for the next year is going to be 70%, and it would be near or over 100% if they could better meet the demand. When you hear him talk like that, what does that mean to a company like Salesforce?
And one more thing, you know, he only has a limited set of customers who are just building these enormous data centers that are material to his business. That's what's exquisite about Nvidia is that they have the product for the moment, and there's just nothing like this. We've never seen anything quite like this in our industry. It's really incredible, Brian. But what it means for Salesforce is that we can deliver another level of value to our customers. And that's why we're introducing Agentforce. The idea that you can take your company's data, all your applications and analytics, or what we call the semantic layer, the agentic layer, you and I have talked about that now exhaustively, you know, Agentforce, and also this new interface, Agentforce, and putting those things together in an incredible new way. And we're using it at Salesforce already. Brian, I can just tell you that our operating unit leaders, the way that they run and operate their businesses at Salesforce, have radically changed in the last 90 days that we've rolled out this technology. And customers are not going to have to wait years for the value. It happens almost instantaneously, and it's pretty awesome. We had Dario here, you know, he's doing incredible work. We had Sam Altman here as well, and we just didn't have you. So, you're the only one we didn't have.
Well, those guys are doing some important work. I'm doing some important work, but like they're, I think, a little bit next level. I thought those guys, I thought Sam and Dario were competitors to you. I thought they were supposed to hurt Salesforce.
Well, I don't know whose narrative that was, but it certainly wasn't mine and it wasn't theirs, but it may be somebody else's who had some other motive. But what I can tell you is when you can take the probabilistic power of an AI and the deterministic power of an enterprise application set like Salesforce and put them together, you can get transformation, and that's what we're witnessing here.
