Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce Inc
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Moving Forward Together | Mad Money | CNBC
All eyes were on Salesforce with its strong quarter it just reported. Jim Cramer spoke with Marc Benioff on the company’s rapid growth, and moving on after the election.
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About Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff, the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Salesforce, has been actively discussing the company's financial performance and its strategic pivot toward an "agentic enterprise." In the company's FY27 first quarter earnings call, Benioff reported that Agentforce, Salesforce's autonomous agent platform, has become an $800 million business, and he raised the midpoint of the company's FY27 revenue guidance to between $45.9 billion and $46.2 billion. He also announced a $25 billion accelerated share repurchase program, part of a larger $50 billion buyback authorization, which he described as a move to return shareholder value during a period of "incredible low prices." Benioff has characterized the current market environment as a "SaaS apocalypse," but stated that it is "not my first" such cycle, expressing confidence in Salesforce's position. Benioff has emphasized Slack's role as the central user interface for the AI ecosystem, stating that "Slack became the user interface to Salesforce but even to the whole AI ecosystem." He described Salesforce's strategy as a stack that includes large language models, a federated data layer (including the newly acquired Informatica), applications like sales and service, and the Agentforce orchestration layer. He has also discussed the importance of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard from Anthropic, as a foundational piece of AI infrastructure. In conversations about AI's broader impact, Benioff expressed concern about potential labor disruption from AI, stating he worries that it could operate "faster" and be "broader across the economy" than previous technological shifts. On political matters, Benioff described himself as "an American" rather than a Democrat or Republican, and advocated for "economic entanglement" with China as a path to a "no conflict deal."
Transcript (45 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Jim Cramer0:00
What to do with the stock of Salesforce? Let's go to the man himself, fresh off a great quarter, better than the last one. Here's Marc Benioff, the visionary co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, to find out more about the quarter and his company's future. Mr. Benioff, welcome back to Mad Money.
M
Marc Benioff0:19
Jim, buddy, thanks. Ready to have you in person.
J
Jim Cramer0:24
All right, you again. You put out a number more than 10 million. Who's waiting for that? It hardly happened. When one next year and you're putting out a 20 billion number, which means that you're not just going about this quarter.
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Marc Benioff0:33
Well, it's very exciting. You can see the growth. It's incredible. And you saw 12 billion on off the balance sheet. I mean, that's amazing.
J
Jim Cramer0:39
Now last time you were here, you were actually disappointing yourself. You said that you didn't think that everything should store's business they could have closed that. Didn't I? This is just back on track to the point where you actually are giving a forecast that's much further out than any other CEO I'm dealing with.
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Marc Benioff0:53
Well, last quarter, you know, we had that unexpected foreign exchange headwind when we talked about that fall of the Great British Pound associated with Brexit. You know, past that, and here we are. We had a great third quarter. We're anticipating a great fourth quarter, and we're looking at a great year next year.
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Jim Cramer1:04
I'm seeing. I know you spent a month in Japan. Asia Pacific up 38. Is that what happened? Because I'm us well.
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Marc Benioff1:13
I want to talk about some customers because they seem like big wins. James Gorman at Morgan Stanley's got a tremendous alpha. A lot of big retail, but he's also just been really managed and done a great job. He's brought you in. What are you doing for him?
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Jim Cramer1:24
Well, you look at some of the big wins this quarter, Jim. Morgan Stanley, amazing. PNC Bank, right, also amazing. And Citi, yeah, like me. I brought you. Yeah, three huge financial service wins. That was very exciting for the quarter.
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Marc Benioff1:35
For our viewers, they're going to say, why didn't you talk about Amazon? That's the most well. Amazon was awesome. And T-Mobile, we saw them at Dreamforce and saw them expand again in the third quarter.
J
Jim Cramer1:47
Now I thought one is very quizzical given the fact that we haven't changed at the White House. The Department of Agriculture win. Do you think that those kinds of jobs will still be available for you under a different administration?
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Marc Benioff1:55
I do. I mean, the government is transforming and they're looking to lower their IT costs and to go to the cloud, Jim. And there's no better way to do that than Salesforce.
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Jim Cramer2:05
I know that you regard yourself as an American. You don't talk about Democrat or Republican. That was not before that was before the alack. But do you think that because of some close ties with some work you did with the Democratic Party that it will be more difficult to procure large contracts because you're frankly not a big supporter of Republicans that we know of?
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Marc Benioff2:22
Well, I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat either, you know. I view myself just as an American, right? And I'm looking forward to a great future.
J
Jim Cramer2:31
Will you speak to the president-elect if he gives you a call?
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Marc Benioff2:35
If he calls me, I'm happy to call him back.
J
Jim Cramer2:36
All right, fair enough. Now I want to talk about what the world is like out there because there had been a feeling that things had slowed. You, all of your geographies, tell me that that's wrong. Now we had a very difficult conversation today with Chuck Robbins at Cisco where they actually said that there were macro headwinds pretty heavily. I'm not to denigrate Cisco because it's a great American company and you know that better than most, but they didn't. You don't see any macro headwinds?
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Marc Benioff3:01
I think that if you remember, Jim, in our last conversation that we had about quarter results, we were here in the second quarter and we told you at the very end of the second quarter, at the very end, we saw a little bit of headwind. I think maybe that's what Chuck Robbins felt in this quarter and other companies like him. You know, if they had seen some of that this quarter, I think we picked it up early. We had to make some shifts, changes in our business, and now we have these great results in the third quarter.
J
Jim Cramer3:29
Now, Chuck also said this morning to me on Squawk on the Street that I mean there's a kind of a different feeling now. Maybe it's just post-election, didn't matter who won. I know it's only been a week for you, but are you? I mean, you speak with more clients than anyone. You've been in New York. You're in touch among Democrats and Republicans. Different feel?
M
Marc Benioff3:46
Look, I think that everybody wants progress. Everybody wants things to move forward. Everybody is still, I mean, we've talked about this, Jim. We're still coming out of the 2008 problem, you know. There's a huge tail on that. But, you know, also I've been a huge bull around growth in 2017, 2018, 2019. I feel that when you look at the global economy and you've talked to these global customers, whether it's here in the United States, whether it is in Japan, right, whether it is in Europe, I see in a lot of those customers they've burned off a lot of the 2008 problem, and I'm optimistic for what's coming in the future. So optimistic that you can see we've given guidance for more than 10.1 billion, and you know there's only been three software companies in history that have done that.
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Jim Cramer4:30
All right, well they don't have to name them, right? What I think is important is that there was also when I saw you at Dreamforce, there was a belief that Marc Benioff was on a buying spree of new kinds of companies because his growth was not holding up. And I think if you're giving that long a forecast, that whoever felt that way is probably going to be discreet about that.
M
Marc Benioff4:51
At Dreamforce, that was, I felt those comments were mostly coming from our competition. The reality is our core is so strong, and we have these incredible opportunities to pick up these awesome companies. I mean, you saw Quip, right? You know, this incredible startup that was created by Bret Taylor, the former CTO of Facebook. He wants to sell us his company. You cannot turn that down, Jim. And now you can go to the App Store, you can download Quip, and have the most incredible word processing, spreadsheet, and productivity environment in the history of business. The enterprise is awesome.
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Jim Cramer5:22
All right, now let's talk about Salesforce's future. On the November 14th Recode, our friend Kara was interviewing you, and I love Kara. I know well, happy or not, we all love Kara. But she did talk about the evolution of your relationship with Microsoft, which seemed very odd. Such a good friend went from kind of I'd say like friend to frenemy to frankly, with what you're doing with LinkedIn, I can only call you guys enemies.
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Marc Benioff5:50
Well, we just had a surprise, that's all that is. We thought there was a new Microsoft. We got a call from Satya, said, 'Hey, you know, we're so excited to work with you. Would you spend some time with Scott Guthrie? He runs Azure. You're going to love him. Tell him about your strategy.' We've met with Scott Guthrie, and then two weeks later, read in the newspaper that Scott Guthrie is now in charge of their CRM business. I'm like, 'Well, that was good to know ahead of time.' And then I kind of was like, you know, maybe the new Microsoft is actually the old Microsoft. And look, these were the mid managers, okay, but during that era, now they moved up in the culture. Back in the old Microsoft under Steve Ballmer, who was with me at Harvard, was a bit of a monopolist.
J
Jim Cramer6:33
And I think that your LinkedIn complaint would indicate that you think that could happen again.
M
Marc Benioff6:37
Well, I think that you see the commissioners in Europe have also stated that this is a very sensitive acquisition because Microsoft has stated publicly at that Deutsche Bank conference, which I read. You're right. What did they say, Jim? I faked attending. What did they say?
J
Jim Cramer6:50
Well, they said they intend to use it to take on business. What was that? Is that fair? And is that now? There you go.
M
Marc Benioff6:57
I don't know. No, it's called done. And if there were, I see we have our general counsel there, probably would've been saying, well, the Europeans also read that, not just do I read it too. And other software companies like Oracle and Sage and others have read that and made the same conclusion. That is something that the industry is not going to stand for. And look, we want a fair playing field, and we want everyone to have a good chance.
J
Jim Cramer7:17
All right, now I'm not going to let Benioff go without talking about Benioff and the corporation and where that stands with the world. First, let's start with the fact that I know you think that Twitter was instrumental in electing a new president. I do think that's true, and that makes to me Twitter a more valuable franchise. But when I saw you, Twitter was at 24. Now it's at 18. Their shareholders didn't like it. If you had to pay 29, but at 18, maybe you get it for 23, 24. You're a persuasive man. You persuaded many people. Why don't we just say let's do it and get it done?
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Marc Benioff7:48
Because as I've said, you know, I think that it's an amazing company. I'm a great CEO, but you know, companies like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price who are shareholders said that was not for them.
J
Jim Cramer7:57
That was before they elected a president.
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Marc Benioff7:59
Well, you know what? I operate this company in partnership with our employees, with our partners, and I have to listen to them and work together. It's my pleasure to do so.
J
Jim Cramer8:10
Okay, on that leak, we saw a bunch of companies: ServiceNow, NetSuite, Tableau, Data, Pega Systems, Veeva. That was chatter. I just wanted people said, 'Oh, you might buy any one of those.' You were always really in all of our directors' emails. Why not? I mean, they put them online wherever you want, but yeah, just things that we're setting up right. It's an open kimono at Salesforce. All of our secrets are online. It's all good.
M
Marc Benioff8:37
Okay, now you can also see we run a really clean shop. Everyone, I think, was surprised how clean the process was.
J
Jim Cramer8:41
Absolutely. Now you famously, I think, started and were able to put a stop to some legislation that you regard as discriminatory in Indiana. Joanna was preparing. Is now go?
M
Marc Benioff8:50
That was a bad law. You know that I wasn't just done. Did he ever tell you it's a bad law? Because I thought it was bad. Walmart thought it was bad. They kind of represent another part of the country besides San Francisco. We were the first one to say that law needs to change. And then I knew Mike Pence before that. I called him and said, 'The law needs to change.' And then, when we're in the state, we are the largest tech employer in Indiana. It's a very important state to us. And then hundreds of other CEOs also called him and said, 'Please change that law.' To his credit, he changed the law. The credit of the governor in Georgia, he did not sign the law. And as you know, North Carolina, there is a recount happening right pretty much because of the law.
J
Jim Cramer9:31
Okay, now I listen and I certainly hope that, you know, as we move forward, and we think about equality for all, I think this is what our country is founded on, that everyone has the absolute divine right to have an incredible life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
M
Marc Benioff9:49
For sure. Madison checked off all night. I get those. All I'm trying to do, like you're an estimate, but I know I run for office. I saw that. But I need to know something. I need to know the role of Salesforce doing good. Business somehow vilified last week. Howard Schultz said he felt the business somehow became vilified during this election. Where is business and where are you in terms of business' positive role?
J
Jim Cramer10:10
Well, I think business is the greatest platform for change. You know that, Jim. I think that these businesses are amazing, and when you pivot them not just to your stockholders, not just to your employees, not just to your partners, but to also your community, you can do amazing things. Look what we're doing in the San Francisco public schools, right? Oakland public schools. Your gratitude. 25,000 nonprofits that we run for free. Hundreds of millions of dollars that we've been able to give away with our 1-1-1 model. I mean, this is amazing. So we have a business president, so I think that's awesome.
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Marc Benioff10:44
You do? Let's sure.
J
Jim Cramer10:45
Absolutely. I am someone who is, let's move forward. Let's move forward. Let's have an open mind. Let's have an open heart.
M
Marc Benioff10:52
Well, but before we move forward together, okay? Tech did kind of band together against this man. Are you saying that this is kind of like a platform? There was an election. You know, I certainly respect the results of the will of the American people. I respect our process. I demand to move forward with an open heart and an open mind. And others like yours are people because, you know, a lot of people on Wall Street feel that somehow this new president might retaliate and therefore have sold stocks that they felt like that. Silly, silly. And you can't wait to break bread at the White House again?
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Jim Cramer11:25
No, I'll tell you what I'm really excited about. What I'm really excited about is that, number one, this election is behind us. Progress. Let's move forward together.
M
Marc Benioff11:34
Fair enough. Let's even like what? Let's go. Let's leave it there. Is there anything more important than that?
J
Jim Cramer11:37
No. Thank you, right. That's Marc Benioff, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. Today's not some huge. Comes to you in San Francisco. My buddy's back in the brain. We are Jim Cramer here from Mad Money. Thank you for watching CNBC on YouTube. Click here to subscribe and get the jump on my exclusives with CEOs, plus market news, investing advice, and a whole lot more.