Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce Inc
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Talks AI Strategy | Bloomberg Talks
Marc Benioff, Founder/Chair/CEO of Salesforce, unveils his company's artificial intelligence strategy. He spoke to Bloomberg's Emily Chang at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference.
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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 (13 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Bloomberg Interviewer0:00
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio. Mark, it's always great to be here with you at Dreamforce. The star of the show, the rockstar of the show, Agentforce, of course, and you rolling that out is the big thing. I've been talking to some of your customers, they're very excited. Tell us about what LLMs you built this on. Is it OpenAI?
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Marc Benioff0:24
I've never seen the customers more excited. And the reason why is these customers have been convinced something that's not true — that they have to buy an LLM, they have to go to a hyperscaler, they have to get a database, they have to buy a security technology, they have to choose a chip, they have to hook it all together themselves, they have to DIY their AI. It's not true. You do not have to DIY your AI. And when we started the show, they didn't really believe it, so that's why we created a whole factory across the street, as you saw in Moscone West, where we have put more than 10,000 customers through already to show them that on the Salesforce platform, which they've already been committed to for more than 20 years, had great success in sales and service and marketing and communications and commerce and analytics and Slack and all of these technologies, that now they're also building AI. And this is a shock to them, and it's exciting for us because we're showing them how once again we're future-proofing their company with the Salesforce platform.
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Bloomberg Interviewer1:32
So you basically DIY'd it for them. What models have you built it on? Is it...
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Marc Benioff1:35
Well, that's our software company. We have our own, we have many, and they don't need to know. And they don't — why, what chip am I using? What hyperscaler? They don't care. They don't care what I'm using. It's like, what type of flour's in the cake? What kind of sugar did I buy at the store? Why does it matter? Do you like the cake? Is this the final product that you like? And I think that for our customers, they don't want to know all the pieces. They want to know: does this work, and can they make a greater success for their own companies? And so when you see a company like WPP who's here, and they've lowered their cost by 50% day one, right? And that is the power of technology that we're going to help them, make it easier for them, lower their cost, deliver a high ROI, and the Salesforce platform just delivered that for them.
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Bloomberg Interviewer2:32
Let's talk about how it works. A lot of companies are rolling out agents now — ServiceNow, Microsoft. How do we know this isn't just another buzzword like Copilot?
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Marc Benioff2:42
Well, I think we all know now that Microsoft Copilot is basically the new Microsoft Clippy that customers have not gotten value from. These LLMs — this is like we're selling science projects to companies and they're tired of it. They have not gotten the value, which is why you see these customers so excited. They're coming here and they're getting immediate value and they're able to use this next-generation platform to do everything that they've heard is possible. Create an agent is a great example — how do I fine-tune an agent, how do I create guardrails for an agent, how do I ground an agent in data? Well, all the data is in the Salesforce platform, all of the metadata is there, the logic is there, the workflow is there. They're just adding agents into their existing workflow and no one knew it was possible before the show, so we knew that because we hadn't created the product. And now it's so exciting because we've onboarded tens of thousands of customers and we've convinced them: you don't need to DIY your AI, you can just use it, and you're going to get the best AI, the highest accuracy, the lowest hallucination rate. Our customers are saying in many cases it's 2x the accuracy of the best models.
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Bloomberg Interviewer4:07
Look, it's not always going to be smooth sailing. Disney actually just announced they've dropped Slack because they got hacked and said they're switching to an enterprise-wide collaboration tool, which sounds maybe like Microsoft. What are you doing to improve Slack security, and what's your response to that?
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Marc Benioff4:26
Well listen, I think our security is rock solid. This is really important, and also there's no finish line when it comes to security. Companies have to also take the right measures to prepare, prevent phishing attacks, and to lock down their employees from social engineering. So we can do our part, but our customers also have to do their part — that's extremely important. But the second thing that's important is over 25 years we've shown that this model is the most trusted, most secure, most capable model. Disney's a great example — they run the Disney Store on Salesforce, the Disney guides are on Salesforce, all of the sales and service operations, Disney+ call center and contact centers on Salesforce. We are the customer service capability, and they're the proving ground actually for our new AI system. So our next-generation AI was actually proven at Disney. It's amazing. They've shown us incredible metrics, and I'm really looking forward to future success with Disney. But it's incredible that customers are able to see this value. That's what's really exciting.
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Bloomberg Interviewer5:31
Let's talk about the money, because I'm curious about how you got to this two dollars per conversation and just how much additional revenue you think Agentforce is going to drive.
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Marc Benioff5:39
Well, look, our goal is very simple. We want to get what we call a billion agents in place for our customers within the next 12 months, and that means we're going to have to deploy it in hundreds of thousands of customers and get them all to roll this out to build this huge blanket with all of their consumers. And of course the funny thing is we say a billion agents, but it's only one piece of code. The Salesforce platform is automating all your customer touchpoints, building a huge data cloud and all your agents, but it's all one piece of code that you're just connected to. And that idea that it's one piece of code — well, then we've always charged per email or per commerce transaction, and now per conversation, and it's consumption pricing. In some cases it's per-user pricing, like in our Sales Cloud or our Service Cloud. So it's a mix of two different pricing models, but we of course work with our customers and we have tens of thousands of customer-facing professionals who work with them to make the right agreement with our customers every single time.
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Bloomberg Interviewer6:47
All right, well, it's great to be with you here in person and to see Agentforce. You could come back —
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Marc Benioff6:51
Always fun to be with you.
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Bloomberg Interviewer6:52
Salesforce Chair, CEO, and Founder Marc Benioff. Good to have you.