Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce Inc
Salesforce CEO discusses company earnings, vaccine distribution, and the future of the workplace
Salesforce Founder and CEO Marc Benioff sat down with Yahoo Finance’s Julia La Roche to discuss the company’s latest earnings report, its shift to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic, and the future of San Francisco and the work experience.
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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 (12 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
J
Julia0:10
I'm pleased to bring in Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, fresh off a record year and another record quarter for the cloud computing giant and customer resource management provider. Mark, a huge year for you guys and also raising guidance for fiscal or full year 2022. Talk to us about what worked and what gives you the confidence that this will continue.
M
Marc Benioff0:37
Well, we had a great year. You can see these phenomenal numbers, well over $21 billion in revenue, and here we are, we're quite confident in delivering more than $25.5 billion in revenue. The reason why, of course, is we're operating off a deferred revenue model that is all the contracts we signed this year we haven't recognized the revenue until we're actually delivering the service, and so that flows very nicely into this year and also the years to come. You know, no one had a pandemic playbook obviously, and I think you've talked about having to rip up your business plan, rolling out new products like work.com, Vaccine Cloud for example.
J
Julia1:18
How big of a part do those play in your overall business and revenues?
M
Marc Benioff1:25
Well, this has been a year where we're all fighting the pandemic, and that is a huge part of what we're working on every single day. And you can see that with the rollout of Vaccine Cloud. Vaccine Cloud is at the heart of the distribution of many of the vaccines all over the world, especially here in the United States, whether it's New York City or here where I am in the State of California, where we've built My Turn, which is the vaccine distribution system, which has been very successful. This idea that we have a tremendous logistics and information technology challenge, which is to get everybody vaccinated and get this pandemic behind us.
J
Julia2:01
I know you're also doing something around vaccines in Louisville, Kentucky. That was one of the more recent ones. It is interesting to see the role that businesses are playing in the point of the vaccine. Talk to us about the responsibility businesses have. I know this is something you care deeply about, and what is working and what do businesses really bring to the table?
M
Marc Benioff2:21
Well, our real heroes in the pandemic are first responders, we all know that, and our healthcare workers. I mean, they have really done everything to keep our whole world up during this pandemic, and also businesses had a major role to play, first in maybe just acquiring a lot of the essentials like PPE, and then moving in and providing contact tracing systems so we knew where the virus was, so that we could directly address it, and now in delivering the Vaccine Cloud so that we can make sure that everybody gets vaccinated. And that's true at the city level or at the state level or even at the nation-state level. And this is a critical part of our work every single day. We want everyone to be healthy and well, and we want everyone to work together to get this pandemic behind us. And through that, there's also a whole new work environment that's getting created that is, you can see we need success from everywhere, success from anywhere. We have to work from home, sell from home, service from home. I'm at home right now, I think you are as well, and this is not where we were just a year ago. You know, we were in a studio and so were you. I was in my office. Well, that has not happened in a year. And we need now to get the pandemic behind us so we can create this kind of new world, a world where we're going to work from home and also be able to be in the office.
J
Julia3:46
Yeah, your chief people officer Brent Hyder put out a blog post talking about how the nine to five is dead. I do want to talk to you about that, but there's something else in the earnings release that I have never seen, Mark, and it was in the safe harbor section, and you all talked about basically the importance of your ability to preserve workplace culture, including as a result of your decisions regarding your current and future office environments or work from home policies and those sorts of things. So I want to understand from your viewpoint, because it looks like you look at pain points for your employees and how you think about what their future looks like. What is that?
M
Marc Benioff4:18
Well, Julia, I would say that we are in a world still that we're creating in the future. You know, we know the past is behind us and the future is definitely ahead, and it's going to be a new work environment. So, you know, I'm not going to just be in my home. In fact, in the last month I've actually been in Singapore. I've been with my employees there. Yesterday I was actually at the top of Salesforce Tower here in San Francisco, and I plan to be able to get back into the work environment and into my office and back with my customers. But I also know I'll probably be working a lot at home as well. I've developed a lot of new skills. I don't have to roll to the studio to have an interview with you. I can do it right here at home. So that's exciting to me. I have both the ability to work in the office and the ability to work from home, and I need to put that together.
J
Julia5:10
And one final question before I let you go. I do want to bring this up because San Francisco, Salesforce Tower, really the biggest employer in the Bay Area, and the future of work. What do you make of the future as relates to California, your home state?
M
Marc Benioff5:24
Well, I'm very optimistic about California. I'm in California right now. It's a gorgeous day here in San Francisco. I think San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And hopefully everyone will be able to come back here and visit us soon and see how beautiful our city is. And of course, we have not only these beautiful vistas, we probably have one of the best medical systems in the world with the University of California, San Francisco. We have one of the top educational systems in the world with Stanford and Berkeley, as well as some high performing public and private schools. And we have just a great place to live and work. So I expect the future for California and San Francisco is very bright. But if you're asking me, are we going to survive the current or the last gold rush? Well, we have a history of surviving gold rushes here in San Francisco, and I'm sure that this one will be no different. And we'll get back to the Summer of Love also, a creation of San Francisco.
J
Julia6:26
Well, it'll be great to be back together in person soon. Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, I thank you so much for your time. Bye.
M
Marc Benioff6:34
Julia, see you. Thank you.