Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Let's head over to Davos.
Speaker 3: Salesforce CEO Mark Benyoff speaks with Bloomberg's Bradstone and Mustapha.
Speaker 3: We're not getting along well on panels that they were
Speaker 3: on here at Davos. You can go back and see that.
Speaker 3: I remember one specifical panel that I was in and
Speaker 3: it was thought they were going to come to blows,
Speaker 3: but you know, it didn't happen.
Speaker 1: And so has Larry Ellison, an oracle you think, stepped
Speaker 1: in as a technology partner or a source of funding
Speaker 1: for open Ai.
Speaker 3: I can't speak to those specifics, but what I can
Speaker 3: tell you is that I think it's a big moment
Speaker 3: in the history of open ai that they're not running
Speaker 3: on a Microsoft data center.
Speaker 1: And how does it impact I guess Microsoft's competitive competitiveness
Speaker 1: on AI going forward. We'll talk about Copilot and the like.
Speaker 1: But did you feel like, you know, because of these developments,
Speaker 1: Satya and Microsoft are in an unfavorable strategic position.
Speaker 3: Well, I think, as you know, Microsoft doesn't have today
Speaker 3: their own frontier model, so they rely on open Ai.
Speaker 3: And now open Ai is saying that they're going to
Speaker 3: another data center structure. So it's a big moment.
Speaker 1: Right, and to just close the loop on Stargate. You know,
Speaker 1: part of this is obviously driven by national security concerns
Speaker 1: and the idea that you know that it is vitally
Speaker 1: important for the US to maintain this lead. I mean,
Speaker 1: do you share the concern and the urgency and do
Speaker 1: you think China is close to AI parody?
Speaker 3: Well, you have what six questions in there, let's kind
Speaker 3: of peel it apart one by one. I think that
Speaker 3: we're just seeing an incredible amount of investment in AI overall,
Speaker 3: which is because it's really exciting. Look at what's happening
Speaker 3: here at the conference I just showed you. You know that
Speaker 3: Salesforce has run the information management for the World Economic
Speaker 3: Forum for more than a decade, So all of everything
Speaker 3: that's happening here is running on Salesforce. But and we've
Speaker 3: used our Einstein platform here for years, but this is
Speaker 3: the year that we're using Agent Force. So now you
Speaker 3: have an agent that's run front end of your app.
Speaker 3: Probably that is okay, Well, what it is is you
Speaker 3: have the ability now to use an agent, a kind
Speaker 3: of almost like a digital worker to help you to
Speaker 3: kind of get your job done. So here I am,
Speaker 3: I have my app, I'm on my phone. I'm normally
Speaker 3: just bringing up my World Economic Forum app. I'm going
Speaker 3: through trying to find all my sessions. So when is
Speaker 3: Brad speaking? How do I know Brad? Can I contact
Speaker 3: Brad instead? Now I can just say to the agent, hey,
Speaker 3: when is Brad speaking? And let leave contact him for
Speaker 3: me and help me make this happen. At Salesforce, we
Speaker 3: just deployed our Agentforce technology on help dot salesforce dot com,
Speaker 3: which is how we deliver help to our customers. Thirty
Speaker 3: six thousand customers a week come to help dot salesforce
Speaker 3: dot com. If you had come there a month or
Speaker 3: so or ago, about ten thousand of those customers have
Speaker 3: to move off and get support from human beings, and
Speaker 3: about twenty six thousand got resolved by our software. Now
Speaker 3: with agent Force, only five thousand are going off to
Speaker 3: human beings. So our nine thousand support agents have a
Speaker 3: little bit less to do because the software is able
Speaker 3: to resolve a lot of this on its own. And
Speaker 3: that's a very exciting moment that AI and agents can
Speaker 3: kind of give us this incredible productivity that we couldn't
Speaker 3: have whether we're trying to navigate the World Economic Form
Speaker 3: and Davos or where Mark Benioffice trying to answer his customers'
Speaker 3: support issues. Agents are making a huge difference in our
Speaker 3: ability to be successful.
Speaker 1: I want to come back to that, but I just
Speaker 1: want to make sure we answered the previous question on
Speaker 1: kind of AI parody between China and the US.
Speaker 3: I don't think there is AI parody today. No. I
Speaker 3: think that the US has a definitive lead, and I
Speaker 3: think most of the analysis and I think obviously you
Speaker 3: have a big shootout going on at the very top
Speaker 3: end of the aron tier models between Google, Open Ai,
Speaker 3: and Anthropic. Salesforce is obviously an investor in Anthropic. We
Speaker 3: obviously have relationships with open ai as and also Google.
Speaker 3: The Google technology I think is amazing. Neil Ferguson just
Speaker 3: wrote a tremendous analysis of the three models and kind
Speaker 3: of said it appears at Google. So Gemini as a player,
Speaker 3: I think Gemini is more than a player. It's probably ahead.
Speaker 1: Okay, And by the way, Dario proceeded you on stage
Speaker 1: earlier this afternoon.
Speaker 3: He has an outstanding model and is doing a great
Speaker 3: job in his company.
Speaker 2: Okay, So back to agent forest.
Speaker 1: He said, few less things for your employees to do
Speaker 1: with agent force, But does it also.
Speaker 2: Mean fewer employees.
Speaker 1: What are the ramifications of this kind of new age
Speaker 1: of agentic models going to unsupervised do our tasks for us?
Speaker 3: No, no question, I mean, of course, in the history, look,
Speaker 3: technology is always getting lower costs in these yer to use.
Speaker 3: There's not any you know, horses out on the streets
Speaker 3: right now going out, and now we have cars now.
Speaker 3: And in the same way, I think we should just
Speaker 3: think about the analogy I just gave you, which is
Speaker 3: that we have a lot less work for our support
Speaker 3: agents to do because we've deployed agent force at salesforce,
Speaker 3: so I can redeploy that resource into other parts of
Speaker 3: the company. That's very exciting for me. I have plenty
Speaker 3: to do, so I can kind of say, Okay, these
Speaker 3: folks can work on this now instead of being over here.
Speaker 1: Has it changed the arc of your hiring plans going forward?
Speaker 1: And what is the widespread deployment of this technology mean
Speaker 1: for you a full employment labor market?
Speaker 3: Well, that is really the powerful thing. We're in a
Speaker 3: labor market where it's really hard to hire people. There
Speaker 3: aren't people to hire I want to radically expand sales
Speaker 3: and service and marketing and salesforce because we are seeing
Speaker 3: a huge amount of demand in moving and deploying our
Speaker 3: new technologies. Finding those people incredibly difficult. That I have
Speaker 3: agents at my disposal is tremendous. So look, I want
Speaker 3: an unlimited workforce. I think everybody does agent force AI agents.
Speaker 3: That's beginning of an unlimited workforce. Giveing an example. We
Speaker 3: have a customer called Wiley. They're a bookseller in the US.
Speaker 3: You probably have picked up some of their books when
Speaker 3: you're in college. You know them well, and you know
Speaker 3: they have this moment every year called back to school,
Speaker 3: and they have to normally hire a lot of gig
Speaker 3: workers to go into sales or into service or whatever
Speaker 3: it is. This is a year they did not have
Speaker 3: to do it. There were one of our launch customers
Speaker 3: on Agent Force. They have the ability to just scale
Speaker 3: their sales and service when they needed it and then
Speaker 3: bring it back down when that demand spike ended. And
Speaker 3: we have now you know, lots of examples of that.
Speaker 3: So we've now released the code late October. We did
Speaker 3: about two hundred deals in.
Speaker 2: Our third quarter.
Speaker 3: In our fourth quarter, we'll see thousands of agent Force deals,
Speaker 3: and I've never seen anything go as fast at Salesforce
Speaker 3: as this. I've never been as excited about the technology
Speaker 3: industry as I am right now.
Speaker 1: So in the tech industry, we love a good old
Speaker 1: fashioned feud. We used to have a lot of them,
Speaker 1: like Larry and Bill Sparring. You know, Kendrick Lamar and
Speaker 1: Drake had had nothing on the tech industry. But recently,
Speaker 1: you know, you've been tweeting or posting on x as
Speaker 1: you describe agent Force and drawing juxtapositions with Microsoft and
Speaker 1: co Pilot. Not to do more Microsoft pashion here, but
Speaker 1: I think you compared it to Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, but I want you to because I don't know
Speaker 2: that I really fully got my brain around it.
Speaker 1: How the agent Force model is different than the coilet mind.
Speaker 3: I can make it very similar. Well, first of all,
Speaker 3: you're right, Microsoft has disappointed you know, a lot of
Speaker 3: customers with Copilot, and the reason why is.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure everybody agrees.
Speaker 3: But okay, well, I mean you can read the Gartner analysis,
Speaker 3: you can read a lot of the media, but I'm
Speaker 3: sure you're a big Copilot user yourself, Is that right?
Speaker 1: I try to moderate my Oh, I see you know
Speaker 1: I don't want to, all right, but you're like most people,
Speaker 1: you don't use it, all right, thank you, thank you
Speaker 1: for making my case.
Speaker 3: But anyway, the point of it is all Copilot is
Speaker 3: is repackaged chat GPT. So in a chart I just
Speaker 3: saw like the twenty most used apps currently on the Internet,
Speaker 3: like open Ai was very much at the top. Co
Speaker 3: Pilot was not on the list. I just retweeted it. Actually,
Speaker 3: so when you look at that, why that is is
Speaker 3: because why use it? It's not really offering me any value.
Speaker 3: So agent force is really what AI was meant to be.
Speaker 3: The ability to give a company, a user, a customer,
Speaker 3: really the value of artificial intelligence. That's why I was
Speaker 3: excited to bring it to the show. Excited that Davos
Speaker 3: has deployed it and we can really show customers here
Speaker 3: this is a really great opportunity. In an example, yesterday
Speaker 3: we were in a session with Rollbank Canada who just
Speaker 3: deployed it for their wealth management. Look their ability to
Speaker 3: scale and compete against the big US banks when their
Speaker 3: wealth management is augmented because they're using agent for us.
Speaker 3: That's very exciting for them. They're CEO Dave McKay is here.
Speaker 3: It was really a great, a great moment to hear
Speaker 3: you know what they're doing with this.
Speaker 1: So before you mentioned the abundant capital flowing into AI,
Speaker 1: you know, anthropic to even today there was news of
Speaker 1: another one hundred one billion dollars from Google. Is there
Speaker 1: any case to be made that AI is over invested
Speaker 1: at this point?
Speaker 3: No, there's not. I would say that we are really
Speaker 3: at a point where everything is changing. I think the evidence,
Speaker 3: like we just did a demo with your associate in
Speaker 3: the back here where I just took out my phone
Speaker 3: and we were demoing the World Economic Forum app. And
Speaker 3: if we were here a year ago, we'd be looking
Speaker 3: at a very similar app kind of going through what
Speaker 3: sessions are we going through? Who's coming to the conference?
Speaker 3: I need to contact this person, all the typical things,
Speaker 3: and instead I have this agent that I just can
Speaker 3: go right to and say, hey, do all this for me.
Speaker 3: That level of productivity, that's why in the third quarter
Speaker 3: of last year we saw productivity rise in the US
Speaker 3: without any additional workers. That really hasn't happened in a while.
Speaker 3: That very society margin there that I think that is
Speaker 3: exactly what is going on. I think AI is kind
Speaker 3: of kicking in Right now, I'm writing the business plan
Speaker 3: for my next fiscal year, which starts February one, and
Speaker 3: this will be the third year in a row that
Speaker 3: I'm working with an AI to write my business plan
Speaker 3: for the year. So I'm I have a colleague. I
Speaker 3: will write different parts of the plan, and then I
Speaker 3: will talk to the AI and I will say, hey,
Speaker 3: what do you think of this? How does this compete?
Speaker 3: We have our we have some great technology. And then
Speaker 3: I'll say, hey, how does this How does this affect
Speaker 3: this competitor? How does it affect that competitor? And I
Speaker 3: have been shocked at how it's impact me. That it
Speaker 3: has made me more productive, but also expands my own
Speaker 3: consciousness on what I should be doing and leading and
Speaker 3: moving forward. So AI is definitely a part of I
Speaker 3: cat to be.
Speaker 1: A little bit more skeptical, and when I are.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that. How long do I know you for?
Speaker 3: I never knew this, But I'm so happy to know
Speaker 3: this about you.
Speaker 1: When I when I hear things like Larry, your former boss,
Speaker 1: Larry Ellison saying today that there will be targeted vaccines
Speaker 1: for cancer using AI within forty eight hours, I mean
Speaker 1: it just feels like the exuberance is.
Speaker 3: I don't think he means in the next forty eight hours.
Speaker 3: So I think what he's saying.
Speaker 2: Is we understand forty eight hours within diego okay.
Speaker 3: So what is okay? So I've actually talked to him
Speaker 3: about what he's doing. It is pretty incredible. His vision,
Speaker 3: you know, his vision is that, you know, there's these
Speaker 3: amazing kind of cancer tests that have kind of been developed,
Speaker 3: like GRAYIL and others, where you could get a blood
Speaker 3: test and it shows you if you have these fragments
Speaker 3: of cancer in your bloodstream and so forth, and then
Speaker 3: they go to try to find the cant in this case.
Speaker 3: And I'm not going to describe it as beautifully as
Speaker 3: he did today, but because it's his vision, his idea
Speaker 3: is that you're gonna be able to run that same
Speaker 3: test and then use AI to have much more affinity
Speaker 3: on what's really going on, and then be able to
Speaker 3: use our mRNA technology to develop a highly personalized vaccine
Speaker 3: for that cancer and eradicated from your body. That is
Speaker 3: pretty extraordinary. Obviously it hasn't happened yet, but the vision
Speaker 3: is awesome. And you know what, I think we should
Speaker 3: be looking for innovation in the world, and it's exciting
Speaker 3: to see someone like Larry Ellison having a huge vision
Speaker 3: for cancer. He has invested lots of his own money
Speaker 3: and cancer treatment and has centers in la and in
Speaker 3: Oxford and it's been very impressive. Okay to see what
Speaker 3: he's done.
Speaker 1: I want to hit a couple more topics before we
Speaker 1: are supplanted by a head of state. I think last
Speaker 1: year we talked about social media and you sounded the
Speaker 1: alarm on misinformation and you.
Speaker 2: Know, the lack of proper oversight.
Speaker 1: You've viewed some salty language, and in the last few
Speaker 1: months we have seen a retreat on moderation. You know what,
Speaker 1: what do you make recent moves at Meta and the
Speaker 1: company formerly noticed Twitter, And do you think it's dangerous?
Speaker 3: Well, I think, you know, my thoughts on social media
Speaker 3: is really well known. But I think that you know,
Speaker 3: we need to continue to look at from the fundamental
Speaker 3: reshaping of you know, section two thirty. I think if
Speaker 3: we are going to let these organizations go to every
Speaker 3: possible extreme, then they should be held accountable and liable
Speaker 3: for whatever the content is. And I think that when
Speaker 3: we look at section two thirty, it wasn't written for
Speaker 3: this kind of moment, and especially with the age of AI,
Speaker 3: this is a time when that we have to go
Speaker 3: back and do that. And I hope that the Trump
Speaker 3: administration will evaluate that they've made a number of comments
Speaker 3: along that along those lines, and I think that that
Speaker 3: is appropriate to to get rid of that regulation so
Speaker 3: that these organizations can be held accountable. I think you're
Speaker 3: a journalist, you're held accountable for you what you write
Speaker 3: and what you put on your platform, So should they.
Speaker 1: You have come to Davos in years past and made
Speaker 1: some pretty strenuous.
Speaker 3: One thing we said was yes, positive, Well.
Speaker 1: We've still three and a half minutes and you've made
Speaker 1: some pretty strenuous laid out some strenuous climate goals. I
Speaker 1: think there was planting a trillion trees by twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: I mean, how in fact today right now, actually we're
Speaker 3: announcing that we're delivering the largest forest reserve in Earth's
Speaker 3: history in the Congo, and President of the Congo's making
Speaker 3: the announcement part of the trillion tree announcement that we
Speaker 3: did five years ago. And we're almost at two hundred
Speaker 3: billion trees, so we're not quite at a trillion, but
Speaker 3: we got to keep going, I will se question twoga
Speaker 3: cont Okay, I'm glad you're excited about that.
Speaker 2: I love trees. We love trees.
Speaker 3: If I'm not sure you do based on that, but
Speaker 3: we spent exactly about five seconds on trees and a
Speaker 3: lot on Larry Ellison. I think you like Larry Ellison
Speaker 3: more than trees. Brad. My question is I'm just saying.
Speaker 1: That is required to run these AI data centers. If
Speaker 1: the industry is sort of conveniently waving it away talking
Speaker 1: about nuclear if we've really accounted for the requirements that
Speaker 1: these companies are.
Speaker 2: Going to need as they scale up their operations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think that that whole idea that energy
Speaker 3: still needs to get rationalized against what's happening with these
Speaker 3: data center demands and some of the stuff that's happening
Speaker 3: I think is kind of there's some kind of indiscriminate
Speaker 3: kind of development and people just using them as much
Speaker 3: as they can and so forth. I think it's salesforce.
Speaker 3: We continue to try to do our best to be
Speaker 3: in that zero company, including in the work of our
Speaker 3: AI will deliver about two trillion AIS actions this week.
Speaker 3: You know we've been doing that for about a decade.
Speaker 3: You mentioned Einstein now agent force, and even in development
Speaker 3: of our own models and all of these things, we
Speaker 3: have not had these same exhaustive energy demands. And part
Speaker 3: of that's because of how we operate our own systems.
Speaker 3: But I think for everybody there's probably an opportunity for
Speaker 3: another level of efficiency.
Speaker 2: And what is the solution? Is Is it nuclear? Is
Speaker 2: it fuel cells?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: How does the industry catch up to the energy use
Speaker 1: that will be required?
Speaker 3: I think that it's going to How are we going
Speaker 3: to get more energy in the world. I mean, I'm
Speaker 3: not really an energy expert. I'm obviously a huge bowl
Speaker 3: on fusion. I think what Commonwealth Energy is doing is incredible.
Speaker 3: I'm an investor in the company and I hope that
Speaker 3: it's a huge success. And then yes, I also think
Speaker 3: these kind of SMR nuclear modular nuclear plants. I think
Speaker 3: there's a new one just going in Texas for example,
Speaker 3: right now in other places. I mean, if you think
Speaker 3: about it, you know we've run small nuclear for a
Speaker 3: long time. Everyone knows about nuclear submarines or nuclear aircraft carriers, right,
Speaker 3: and that's basically what we're talking about. Why don't we
Speaker 3: just take one of those and just plug it into
Speaker 3: our grid. We just don't think that way. But that's
Speaker 3: all we're really talking about, being able to just use
Speaker 3: the energy that we have in the world that's available
Speaker 3: to us, and deliver in the clean way. I think
Speaker 3: obviously we have to think about the amount of carbon
Speaker 3: we're putting in the atmosphere. It's very significant, not just
Speaker 3: from our emissions, but as you mentioned, the trees. And
Speaker 3: I hate to go back there because I know you
Speaker 3: have it to test for them. But you know, we
Speaker 3: used to have six trillion trees on the planet. Now
Speaker 3: we have less than three trillion. Every trillion trees is
Speaker 3: two hundred gigatons of carbon, so that's six hundred gigatons
Speaker 3: of carbon that we emitted through deforestation. And connecting that
Speaker 3: back to industrialization, we've only admitted about two hundred gigatons
Speaker 3: through all industrializations, so you can see deforestation remains a
Speaker 3: major issue.
Speaker 1: Last question, you could give me a yes, Ordain, you're
Speaker 1: the owner.
Speaker 3: I know we've probably exited the trees now once.
Speaker 1: Well, no, this is actually understand you're the owner of.
Speaker 3: No one's going to accuse you of being the Laura.
Speaker 1: You're the owner of Time magazine, a tree based publication
Speaker 1: at a time where it's very uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: For media owners.
Speaker 1: There were reports that you're going to sell, are you?
Speaker 3: Are you going to There's no deal on the table
Speaker 3: for time, so if that we do sign something, I
Speaker 3: will call you right away.
Speaker 2: Mark Benieff, thank you very much.
Speaker 3: Thank you,