Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. No, let's hood over
Speaker 1: two doubles where Bloomberg's Emily Chang is stunning.
Speaker 2: My Emily, Fawnie, thank you so much. I'm here in
Speaker 2: Davos with Mark Benioff, CEO and share and founder of
Speaker 2: course of Salesforce. Good to be with you in another country.
Speaker 1: You, Emily, Aloha aloha from the slow or the Comma
Speaker 1: of Davos.
Speaker 2: All right, so this is my first Davos. This is
Speaker 2: your twenty fourth, right, Davos.
Speaker 1: What's it like being a nice Hawaiian girl here in Davos.
Speaker 2: No, it's chili, but I'm liking the vibes. What's the
Speaker 2: mood this year? Are people anxious? Are they optimistic? Or
Speaker 2: are they confused about the future.
Speaker 1: Well, it's an exciting moment, There's no question. This is
Speaker 1: just an unbelievable amount of change. And I think when
Speaker 1: there's this much change and this much excitement, people are
Speaker 1: a little frenetic. And I think that, you know, some
Speaker 1: times Davos is like a measurement of the economy. That's
Speaker 1: not what's going on. Well, is the economy good? Is
Speaker 1: it bad? How are people feeling about the economy? More.
Speaker 1: This is more like, well, what's happening exactly in the world,
Speaker 1: because you have the AI situation, you have the political situation,
Speaker 1: You've got you know, these very broad shifts, and I
Speaker 1: think that is what's really happening here. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of discussion. And you know, Davos was built on the
Speaker 1: concept of a multi stakeholder dialogue, the idea that we
Speaker 1: bring in lots of different kinds of people political leaders,
Speaker 1: business leaders, spiritual leaders, cultural leaders and have a conversation.
Speaker 1: And this year's Davos is about the spirit of dialogue
Speaker 1: and that is playing out in spades.
Speaker 2: Well, talking about that spirit, we're waiting for President Trump
Speaker 2: to arrive. You've said you want you want to see
Speaker 2: him prioritize US businesses. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Well, I think the number one thing is, you know,
Speaker 1: for the US president is as he is doing his
Speaker 1: job all over the world, he needs to support you
Speaker 1: businesses and make them successful. And I was with Macron
Speaker 1: yesterday and his job is to make French businesses successful.
Speaker 1: And there's no different you know, that's the role of
Speaker 1: the nation state leader is to help the people of
Speaker 1: their state. And so I have a lot of respect
Speaker 1: for President Trump and how he always supports the businesses
Speaker 1: of the United States.
Speaker 2: So you're using Davos sort of as a live demo
Speaker 2: for some of Salesforce's new digital labor tools. You know,
Speaker 2: I know you were prepping on slack bot, but a
Speaker 2: lot of AI customers are saying, supposed.
Speaker 1: To give away my secrets. Believe that's not right.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's too big a secret, but a
Speaker 2: lot of customers are saying they're sort of stuck in
Speaker 2: AI pilot purgatory, like they're not They're trying stuff, but
Speaker 2: it's just not working.
Speaker 1: Fortunate because there is so much that you can do
Speaker 1: right now in AI. Unfortunately, there's so many false narratives.
Speaker 1: So I think because so many companies and pundits have
Speaker 1: said things that are not true, it kind of freezes
Speaker 1: certain customers and they don't know who to believe. So
Speaker 1: that's why, like we were talking before we went on
Speaker 1: that ramone is here the Sea of Pepsi. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a new generation, and he just deployed one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five thousand of his salespeople, one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand, supporting millions of businesses, a lot of
Speaker 1: small and medium businesses all over the world. Is sell
Speaker 1: pepsi using new AI generation tools that we've built for him.
Speaker 1: Really only took us a few months and they're getting
Speaker 1: fantastic results. And that all started actually last year. I
Speaker 1: saw ramone and he once said I'm ready to get
Speaker 1: a new level of efficacy in pepsi. And another Baraj
Speaker 1: is here from FedEx, the CEO of fed X. We
Speaker 1: just finished with him. He was a year ago saying
Speaker 1: I've got trouble selling internationally. We identified all of his
Speaker 1: domestic customers that when they start to work with his salespeople,
Speaker 1: his website and they haven't done international. Now we surfaced
Speaker 1: them as an opportunity for international. It's generated hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of dollars for Fedexso there is great opportunities right
Speaker 1: now to deploy AI. And look, that's our job. Our
Speaker 1: job is to sell it, to convince, show the use cases,
Speaker 1: make people excited about it, and that's what we're doing here.
Speaker 1: We will meet with more than five hundred CEOs one
Speaker 1: on one here.
Speaker 2: You know, you obviously have also taken on a sort
Speaker 2: of you know, a policy bent. You recently apologized for
Speaker 2: endorsing President Trump, sending the National Guard to San Francisco.
Speaker 2: How will you what did you learn from that moment,
Speaker 2: and how will you continue to reconcile the sort of
Speaker 2: Salesforce Ohana values with the administration's policies, whether it's ice
Speaker 2: raids in Minneapolis or taking over Greenland.
Speaker 1: That's such a great question, you know, Emily. The way
Speaker 1: I look at it, and I think that this is
Speaker 1: probably the right way to look at it is I've
Speaker 1: been doing this for twenty six years now. Salesforce, amazingly
Speaker 1: is twenty six years old, eighty thousand employees, will do
Speaker 1: more than forty one billion in revenue this year. Presidents
Speaker 1: are constantly changing, but our core values are not changing,
Speaker 1: and so we're just anchored down into our core values
Speaker 1: and then we just speak to that and what we're
Speaker 1: trying to achieve as a business, to reflect back into
Speaker 1: our customers and our communities what those values are. As
Speaker 1: you know, in San Francisco, where we are the largest
Speaker 1: tech company, there have been a lot of challenges, and
Speaker 1: so yeah, I always have anxiety about safety for our employees,
Speaker 1: and I think that that anxiety just manifests into how
Speaker 1: can we create a greater San Francisco? And so I'm
Speaker 1: excited to be working with everyone from Mayor Lurry to
Speaker 1: President Trump to do that.
Speaker 2: You're really focused on AI and especially it's impact on teams,
Speaker 2: and you've been sort of raising the alarm about AI
Speaker 2: influencing team suicides, which is, you know, it's horrible that
Speaker 2: we even have to talk about this. You've called them
Speaker 2: suicide coaches. Like, what should companies be doing about this?
Speaker 1: Well, I think we should talk about that. We are
Speaker 1: dealing with a new kind of very unwieldy technology which
Speaker 1: by left by itself, these large language models, they can
Speaker 1: do all kinds of terrible things. I mean, they can
Speaker 1: do a lot of great things too. You've used them,
Speaker 1: you know, they can summarize things, and you can ask
Speaker 1: them queries and you can get information. But unfortunately, we
Speaker 1: saw this year this horrible example or this company character
Speaker 1: AI specifically started to find that their product was turning
Speaker 1: into a suicide coach for their customers. And one of
Speaker 1: the most horrific things I've ever seen in technology is
Speaker 1: these children, you know, died and it was completely unnecessary,
Speaker 1: and I think it needs to be a wake up
Speaker 1: call that you know, we're letting all of this AI
Speaker 1: technology out fully unregulated. And by the way, you remember
Speaker 1: that's true what we did with social media as well.
Speaker 1: And you probably remember what I said in twenty eighteen here,
Speaker 1: you know, which was social media was becoming the same
Speaker 1: kind of very dangerous technology. And look, a lot of
Speaker 1: governments have made changes around social media now, so you
Speaker 1: go to a lot of countries, if you're not seventeen
Speaker 1: eighteen years old, you're not going to use social media.
Speaker 1: They're our controls or our protections. We need to get
Speaker 1: there with AI now. There doesn't need to be any
Speaker 1: more deaths. You know, we need to be like taking
Speaker 1: this seriously. And AI is great, it's incredible, but these models,
Speaker 1: you know, they're inaccurate, they hallucinate, they're kind of hard
Speaker 1: to control.
Speaker 2: So what should we do? I mean, should CEOs be
Speaker 2: held personally liable? Should I was talking to Demis Hassibus,
Speaker 2: the CEO of Google Deep Mind, and he I asked, look,
Speaker 2: if we knew every company in every country would pause,
Speaker 2: should we pause AI so society and regulation can catch up?
Speaker 2: And he said yes, he would be in favor of that.
Speaker 2: Would you be in favor?
Speaker 1: Emily? Number one? Tech hates regulation? You know that they
Speaker 1: hate it, right? They get people on, oh, it slows
Speaker 1: down innovation. They hate regulation, they hate it, they hate it,
Speaker 1: they hate it except one regulation they love, Section two thirty,
Speaker 1: which basically says they're not held responsible or accountable for
Speaker 1: these deaths or for anything that their social media or
Speaker 1: their AI does. And that needs to change because here
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg, if you say something, you're held accountable, and
Speaker 1: you know, I own time, and if we say something,
Speaker 1: we're held accountable. But these companies are not held accountable
Speaker 1: because of a very specific federal regulation called section two thirty.
Speaker 1: It needs to be reshaped, reformed, you know, basically restructured
Speaker 1: to really reflect social media and AI and the dangers
Speaker 1: that we see. And that is something that we should
Speaker 1: all be pushing for that these these companies need to
Speaker 1: be held accountable, and right now they're not going to
Speaker 1: be held accountable because of this regulation.
Speaker 2: And right and like what regulation is the right regulation?
Speaker 2: Like California try to regulate. David Sax has his own version.
Speaker 2: I know you've you've just chatted with him, like is
Speaker 2: there any regulation?
Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to have a one on one conversation
Speaker 1: with David is a close friend of mine later today.
Speaker 1: I hope you tune in and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about that because, look, I think social media kind of
Speaker 1: is almost like a best practice that we can learn
Speaker 1: from that if we look around the world, you'll see
Speaker 1: that a lot of countries, not necessarily ours, but a
Speaker 1: lot of countries have made really good changes, and we
Speaker 1: could make those changes to because you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of funny. I'm like a large language model myself. You know,
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm putting one word together, but I
Speaker 1: have context. I have a life. I was born, I
Speaker 1: have a childhood, I have friends, hopefully you're one of them.
Speaker 1: And you know, I have a creator. I have a
Speaker 1: higher power than I'm connected to. These large language models.
Speaker 1: They're running by themselves. They don't they were not born,
Speaker 1: they don't have a childhood, they don't have context, they're
Speaker 1: not connected to a creator, so that they're running kind
Speaker 1: of in a different way. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it feels very familiar. It feels like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: my friend. It's not your friend. So we need to
Speaker 1: like step in now and look, we can kind of
Speaker 1: see where it's going. It's not completely out of control.
Speaker 1: So now is the moment. And I think people like
Speaker 1: you and others should be aggressive about this.
Speaker 2: Last quick question and it feels almost going to the stock.
Speaker 2: But you know, you're trying to build your company on
Speaker 2: this new emerging technology. Wall Street's really down on software.
Speaker 2: Wall Streets salesforce is taking salesforce stock taking a beating,
Speaker 2: you know quickly what I mean what needs to happen.
Speaker 1: For twenty six years and every now and then the
Speaker 1: software sector kind of falls out of favor. It doesn't
Speaker 1: mean our financials are out of favor. I mean we'll
Speaker 1: do more than forty one billion in revenue this year,
Speaker 1: more than fifteen billion in cash flow our margins or
Speaker 1: more than thirty four percent all record numbers, by the way,
Speaker 1: and we just introduced an amazing new version of Slack.
Speaker 1: You know that with slack Bot, the new AI enabled
Speaker 1: Slack that have the context and the AI built in.
Speaker 1: We have Agent Force helping our customers deliver customer agents.
Speaker 1: So we do employee agents and customer agents. We've rebuilt
Speaker 1: our architecture to have a data layer and application layer,
Speaker 1: the agent force layer, and then these agents that sit
Speaker 1: on the top and the ecosystem. That's been a lot
Speaker 1: of work in the last three years, selling a lot
Speaker 1: of huge deals. But you know, you sometimes have to
Speaker 1: wait around for Wall Street to realize, well, this is
Speaker 1: a huge opportunity and we're just going to keep executing that.
Speaker 2: Yes or no? Are you at one billion yet? One
Speaker 2: billion agents?
Speaker 1: I think we're beyond that. I haven't actually counted them all,
Speaker 1: but you know we're here's the way to think about it.
Speaker 1: We now just passed and I think we're number one
Speaker 1: or number two enterprise software company, or maybe software company
Speaker 1: overall in the use of tokens. You know, tokens are
Speaker 1: what these models generate to generate their intelligence. We just
Speaker 1: passed eleven point one trillion tokens. And you remember we
Speaker 1: talked after our earnings and we were about three trillion tokens.
Speaker 1: And that idea that as an enterprise software company, we're
Speaker 1: publicly reporting and talking about the number of tokens. And
Speaker 1: I know all of those people, you know who love
Speaker 1: Bilbo Baggins are wondering if that's the tokens. It's different tokens.
Speaker 2: All right, Mark, next time, we'll have to do this
Speaker 2: in Hawaii. Thank you, Yes, thank you. Okay, I'm good,
Speaker 2: I'm surviving.
Speaker 1: Thank you, it's a beautiful day. Thank you for joining
Speaker 1: us next time it's Waikiki Beach, let's do that.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Mark Benioff's CEO of Salesforce,