Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Has Thoughts on AI Agents, Automation, and The Future of Your Job

0:00Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff is here to talk about AI agents and plenty more. That's coming up right after this.

0:37Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today because we are thrilled to be joined by Mark Benioff, the CEO and co-founder of Salesforce. Been hoping to speak with him for a long time and we're finally doing it today. Mark, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. So I've been deep in your interviews, your keynotes, your presentations over the past couple of weeks trying to prepare for this, trying to think about what you're up to at Salesforce. And actually what's interesting is through the technology decisions that you've made, you're actually making a pretty strong statement on labor.

1:18And what I mean by that is, I think there's a common view that we're effectively efficient on labor, that everybody in their jobs is doing about the best that they can be doing. They're as productive as they can be. And if you give their tasks to, let's say, AI, they'll be gone. Your approach with Salesforce, especially as you've rolled out agents, and we're going to get into that, is effectively that's completely wrong. And tell me if I'm right on this. But basically what you're saying is we're nowhere near our capacity in our current jobs because so much of our work is spent on drudgery. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to automate and I'm going to extend a lot of what people are doing.

1:59And you're going to see that it's not going to lead to job loss, but it's going to lead to a more efficient ability to work and extension of the way that we work. What do you think about that thought or that takeaway from what you've been up to? Right. Well, I mean, it's been now a few months that we've really been able to start talking about what we're working on. And it's the most excited I've ever been about the software industry. And I think you're kind of touching the third rail of what's going on, which is that we are building software that just isn't helping companies manage and share information, which is kind of what we've been doing for the last three or four decades.

2:35but we're really going to provide software that is really a very much an equivalent of labor. And I think that is a big thought that we really see, you know, unlimited labor and the idea of an unlimited workforce and the level of abundance that that can create for our companies and ourselves and what that can start to mean for our society. And we can talk about some examples that I already see happening with our customers. but we're definitely at an incredible new moment, a new horizon for business. This is an opportunity for us to really look at what is possible with technology and how it really unleashes a new capability within business itself.

3:20And look, we're going to touch on agents, but I want to go back to the point here, which is I want to get your thought really on the productivity of people. You know, we've gone from the industrial era where we're creating widgets, right? Someone creates an idea and then everybody's just executing. Then we went to the knowledge economy where it's supposed to be about knowledge, but still so much of our day is effectively making those widgets. It's filling out reports. It's moving data from a spreadsheet to another. And this is sort of like the most low-hanging fruit. It could also be creating plans, right?

3:50Like sometimes that stuff that we feel is value-add takes very little ingenuity. No insult to the marketing planners out there. I used to be one. So can you talk a little bit about what your feeling is there? Because you're building this set of automation tools with Salesforce, you must feel like there's opportunity out there to make labor better, more productive, more efficient. Well, let's take specific examples and try to tell some stories and see if we can inspire people with these stories. And you can't really tell, but I'm wearing a boot here on my right foot because I'm going to the medical example.

4:28Yeah, let's do it. A couple months ago. I'm almost done with the boot, but it's been an interesting experience. And I'm sure that all of us have had lots of different experiences with the healthcare industry in the United States. And look, healthcare is the largest industry in the United States. That's number one. And we all know that in the United States, we're very much our own advocate for our health. So think about it like this. I'm going in to have my boot scanned, you know, my boot, my ankle, my Achilles scanned. and they say to me, hey, lay here, we're going to do this, that, the other thing.

5:03And a couple of things, we're going to use this contrast and you're going to want to flush this out of your body. You're going to drink eight glasses of water over the next day or two. You understand that? Yes. And we're giving you the meds here and you're going to take those and you'll finish them, won't you? Of course. And then you really don't hear from anybody for a month or two. And so whatever the rehab instructions they're giving you or the medication instructions they're giving you or drinking the water instructions that they're giving you, you're really on your own. You're your own advocate.

5:34You're in charge of your health. And no one is exactly going to call you the next day and say, did you drink the water? Did you take the drugs? Are you feeling okay? Do you need to come back for another scan? Do you need an appointment with your doctor? Do you need your labs redone? Because there aren't enough people to do that. If you go and talk to any major hospital or medical institution, I work with UCSF in San Francisco. It's a great institution. Even there, and it's one of the largest employers in the city, there just aren't enough people to do the jobs. I mean, these are jobs where patients need very specific, detailed coaching and information and ideas.

6:15And how are you going to provide that? And the answer is with technology, that software has really gotten to the point where software can deliver another level of the workforce and agents, like we're calling, or an agentic layer on top of UCSF, you know, so that as I'm interacting with UCSF, not only do I have to wait for somebody to call me back or to actually get an appointment with a doctor, but I'm interacting with that agentic layer and it's able to kind of mitigate for me on all the medical information, but also all the UCSF services and all the scheduling and all the things that I really want to get done with UCSF.

6:54So that idea that even in our largest industry, we don't have enough people to really achieve the healthcare or that you could really have not just an advocate for yourself, but a guide that would help you become healthier. That idea, that's a big thought. And when you start to apply it to other industries like financial services and how you're managing your wealth or education and how you're managing, you know, how you're children are being educated or even, you know, how you're dressed across the board. Who are you really working with to kind of achieve your goals? And in many cases, there's going to be an opportunity to do that through this agentic layer and through agents.

7:37And this idea that you're going to have a limitless workforce and that you're going to have a level of abundance, not only as a consumer, but on the flip side as a CEO, that my company can do things that it couldn't do before where it was trapped by labor. So this is the unlock, this is the opportunity, and this is the new horizon for business. Yeah. And I'm going to let the labor angle go in a second, but I have to keep talking about it because the way that you describe what's happening in medicine is not AI replacing a doctor. It's a doctor simply cannot get on the phone with you because honestly, at least in the US, their time and probably everywhere, their time is so prescribed by insurance and billing that they have to be seeing as many patients as possible and filling out as much paperwork as possible.

8:21And you can't, you don't have time to be a doctor anymore. And what this could do is it doesn't replace, it just enables the workers to be able to do the activities that they want to do otherwise. In fact, we did a story in big technology not long ago, speaking with Mayo Clinic, because remember the example of how radiology was going to be totally automated by computer vision. Well, they had 11 computer vision models working in the Mayo Clinic, and they're hiring radiologists. That's the future, I think, that we're looking at. Well, that's exactly right, that this is about humans with agents working together.

8:58And that idea that the labor force and productivity is going to expand because of that is real. In the third quarter, and in 2024, we haven't had a labor force expansion in the United States. It's stagnant. But we had a productivity expansion in the third quarter, and economists are attributing it to the growth and expansion of artificial intelligence and what's happening right now as tools that we're all using. So we're able to expand productivity, which is linked to GDP, and we're able to expand our labor force without hiring more people. This has never been done before in the history of business.

9:32So we are definitely at a threshold moment. We are able to look at what's happening in a new way and come up with new ideas. In the past several weeks, as we've been rolling this out to our customers and we have put this in 135 ,000 Salesforce implementations, customers just need to turn it on. We're talking to so many customers, but some of the folks that I'm talking to are a lot of bank CEOs. And bank CEOs are interesting because when you talk to bank CEOs here in the US or maybe Canada or Australia, in many cases, they've expanded their business with lots of new products, but they haven't expanded geographically.

10:09Maybe you see a Canadian bank expanding in the United States, but rarely do you really see these banks really attempting to go global. And the reason why is because of the labor issues associated with going into new markets or providing very high quality financial services and capabilities in new geographies that can benefit them. The same analogy can be in healthcare, by the way. But this idea that those banks could expand and grow, when I am actually able to tell this exact story to a bank CEO and say, you're not going to have to hire those people to expand your U.S. bank into the U.K., that you can take your trusted brand, your systems, your ideas.

10:47And yes, you might have some people on the ground, but it's not going to be absolutely constrained to the labor force that you're hiring, that this is a new opportunity for you. That is very exciting. And I think we can start to reconceptualize business itself, the products that we're in, the geographies that we're in, the size of our workforce, that we're working with humans and also agents together, just like you said. This is a big thought. This is not science fiction. This is not the future. This is now. This is the present. And we're seeing some great examples. And whenever I get optimistic about this stuff, I always have to like bring myself back to reality and say, okay, the best companies, like the Mayo Clinic, of course, they're going to use this to be better at diagnostic.

11:32They are going to expand and they're going to be better at what they do. But then there's a lot of like bottom line driven, every company's bottom line, but like ruthlessly bottom line driven companies, short thinking companies that basically want to milk the margins. They might use this stuff to really cut workforces in a big way. You worried about that? For sure, people could rebalance their workforce. Let me give you an example as the CEO of a large company. I have a very large company, 75 ,000 people. We're a Fortune 100 company. We're the second largest software company in the world. We're the number one largest provider of CRM.

12:06And of our 75 ,000 people, one of the things that we do is we interoperate with our customers, 135 ,000 companies, who basically ask us about 2 million questions a year. And they do that online, and they also do that on the phone. And it's not unlike the medical organizations that we're working with, like the one that I was just talking about. They do 24 million, you know, basically technology-based inquiries a year and 12 million phone calls. So all of us have this mix of phone calls and emails. And we've tried our best to kind of use deflection systems to kind of reduce the emails and reduce the phone calls.

12:46But it tends to be a very kind of constraining thing and can start to take up a lot of your employees' time, energy, focus, and it's not the best use of their time. So now that we've deployed AgentForce internally, and if you go to help.salesforce.com, you'll see AgentForce running. Or if you go to the front of our website, you'll see AgentForce running in the United States. And then, you know, we can say, all right, we've got maybe 8 ,000 or 10 ,000 people who are in support who are working on this. Some number of them now are going to get freed up to be able to do other things. And let me tell you, we're an incredible, fast-growing, exciting company with a lot of opportunities.

13:24I can rebalance my workforce and put those people who have those very good skills working with customers to do other things. They can be business development representatives, sales development representatives. They can do lots of other things. And so we can rebalance what we're doing so that we can grow. We can get more market share. We can innovate. We're obviously fighting the number one software company in the world, which is Microsoft. So we want to be able to do more and expand and go faster. And that's very important to us. Right. And I guess the best run companies are going to take that route.

13:56But then I worry about the ones that aren't run well. But let's get deeper into this agent force rollout that you guys have been doing. So, you know, there's this like, what is Salesforce meme? I think it's pretty clear. It's a system that will enable companies to do customer service sales. I used it when I was in sales, locking all of our interactions, letting my manager know what I was going to close and what I wasn't, which is probably why I ended up moving away from sales. There's also marketing and there's commerce. So you have all the data that is within an organization in terms of like the way that they're interacting with customers and prospects.

14:32And so for you, it totally makes sense to have create agents within a company based off of AI that let's say I'm interacting with customer service. They can actually go into the records and go into the policies and then decide what to offer me or whatnot or help resolve my issue. But when I first heard that Salesforce was building agents, I said, well, that's kind of a slimmed down version of what I thought agents were going to be, which is I always thought that agents were going to be something that comes from me, the individual, as opposed to something that effectively interacts on a company's behalf to better handle my needs.

15:08And so I'm curious, do you agree that your vision of agents is maybe smaller than the broader vision of agents? And if so, why did you decide to go that route outside of maybe it was just convenient to do it as the company you are? Well, Salesforce, you know, helps companies connect with their customers in new ways. That's our fundamental mission. And we do that, first of all, through automating every customer touchpoint. So that could be managing sales, like you mentioned, or customer service and call centers or marketing and emails. It could be their commerce on their website. It could be their analytics.

15:46It could be Slack, a Tableau. These are all connection points between companies and their customers. and we're managing and sharing that information using a sharing model and a security model to help our customers do that, whether they're in, like we talked about, healthcare, financial services, or technology, or consumer product goods, et cetera. So that first layer is, are we automating all those touch points? Because for years, we've been automating their sales forces and service forces and marketing forces and their commerce forces. And now you're right, We're about to automate their agent forces.

16:20So first step is automate all the customer touch points. So a great example is Disney. I love talking about Disney, that Disney, you know, we run the Disney store. So if you go to store.disney.com, you know, that's Salesforce. And if you go to the call center at Disney +, that's Salesforce. So the folks that are managing the sales for the real estate and the cruise ships and all the different customer interactions are all Salesforce, including the Disney guides and the parks are all Salesforce. They'll all be using tools from Salesforce to manage the customer information. And the second part of that story is not only automating all those customer touchpoints, we're building the data cloud, we're helping put all that data together in an amalgamated way, including the federation, or it means the connectivity, with other data sources in the company.

17:07And why that's important is as we get into this next level of AI, it needs the data to be intelligent. It can't just run off of a large language model, which is an intelligence model. It has to be what we call grounded or connected into the customer data itself. And not just the customer data, but the metadata. The customer data is like your phone number. The metadata is that it's a phone number. So metadata, as we know, it's a phone number. Here it is. This is the customer. Now the LLM or the large language model, the AI, can put it all together and be smarter. Now that you have all the data and the AI, the top layer is the agentic layer or the agent layer.

17:45So you have the agents that are able to reach out, and you also have the database, and you have all the automated touchpoints. All of this for Salesforce is one piece of code. It's our core platform. It's operated on by what we call our trailblazers, who are Salesforce administrators. There's millions of them all over the world. Now, let's say we're back to Disney and we're in the parks and we're having this great experience and we're using a Disney guide and we're cutting the lines and we're having a great time with our kids and we're doing our best and we're really enjoying the day and we're on our way to Galaxy Edge, which is Star Wars land, and the Rise of the Resistance ride that we love.

18:24It's super high tech, but the ride breaks. And all of a sudden, the agent contacts our guide and says, hey, we know you're on the way to Rise of the Resistance with Mark, but that ride is broken and a couple things you need to know. I just looked at flow control across the entire park. I also just looked at Mark's ride history and I put these two things together and the ride that Mark needs to go on next is Toontown. We just opened it up. It's the same technology as Rise of Resistance. Mark is going to love it. Take a right turn, walk five minutes, you're going to be there. There's no line, you're going to go right inside.

19:00And that idea that the agent could do something that that guide could not do, that is look across flow control and my ride history and instantaneously make a recommendation. And then the guide says, hey, Mark, let's go to Toontown now. And we have that great experience. That's everything we're talking about. That is agents and humans working together to drive customer success. And this is the big fundamental thought of how are we going to interoperate with these agents in this physical world? And I think it's another really great example. Do you anticipate that consumers are going to have their own bots and they're going to interact with AI bots and it's just going to be AI dialogue time forever?

19:44I think that you already can start to see that now on your phone where I have like about a dozen of these AIs on my phone from all these companies. They're kind of commodities at this point. You know, Google has Gemini, there's ChatGBT, there's u.com, there's Perplexity, there's Copilot, there's all these things. You know, they're just on your phone. You're just talking to basically the same data set through a very similar algorithm, and it's a commodity product. At some point, you're going to be able to set up preferences and do things with those, you know, tools which you can't do today where you're going to ask them to run projects for you.

20:23Hey, I'm going away for Christmas. I need a hotel. I'm looking at different options. Maybe I could go take my kids on some kind of incredible tour. Give me 20 ideas. And you come back the next day and it says, here, I researched this. I looked at it. I laid this out. Here's the ideas for your Christmas vacation. That's one idea. But now let's say I'm one of those vendors. I'm Disney. I'm Hilton. I'm Marriott. I'm Ford. I'm General Motors. you know, I'm United Airlines, I'm American Airlines, I'm whoever it is, you're going to interoperate with us and our company as well. And you might do that through an agent.

20:59Right now, you might just be talking directly to us because that's the most trusted path. And we're in a new world where, yes, your technology that you're using on your phone is going to be smarter. And also the technology of these companies is going to be smarter. And eventually, they're going to interconnect and collaborate and share and help you to achieve your goals and achieve that level of abundance that we're talking about without all of a sudden having another person in your life who's going to make all those things happen. You're going to be able to have it all done with the technology and the agent.

21:33Yeah, I think it'll be all fun and games until my bot and some companies' bot, they start to fall in love with each other. They talk with with each other. They don't do what we need. Well, we saw Minority Report just like 20 years ago. Minority Report and War Games and Her and Space Odyssey, all these things. So, you know, we, like Minority Report and War Games was one of the writers and folk creative people who were involved is actually our futurist at Salesforce. And that idea that we've seen a lot of that play out in science fiction, we can see where that could potentially go. But we could also see where we are right now.

22:14And this is just an incredible moment that we're living a new part of the future and we can start working with technology in a whole new way. Definitely. Okay. Disneyland question. When you're on the rides, hand on the rails or hands in the air? For me, I'm 6 '5 and 300 pounds. So I'm just holding on and hopefully not get thrown out of anything. That is a good strategy. Your agents are, if I'm right,$2 per conversation. The co-pilots are like 30 a month. So explain to me how the math is gonna work for companies that are spending too. I mean, they have lots of conversations with customers. You were talking earlier, just about how many times you're interacting with customers.

22:55That seems like it's gonna get pretty expensive pretty quickly. How's this gonna work? You know, our customers who are buying from us, they've traditionally paid like a per user fee, like, you know,$1 ,000 a year to use our sales cloud or our service cloud. And then, of course, when we moved into new products like our commerce cloud or what we call our sandboxes where you can kind of, you know, build your products or, you know, even our data cloud, we started to do what we call consumption pricing. You pay as you go or pay as you use or pay, you know, pay how you're interacting. And so for our customers who are now using our agent platform, they're paying between, call it 50 cents per conversation to$2 per conversation depending on the volume of conversations that they're doing.

23:41And this is, I think, very attractive to them because the comparison might be a customer interaction today that's costing them$7 or$10 or$20. Or in some case, I talked to a customer that the customer interaction was costing them$700. So this is a very different level of interactivity. And our job is to provide value as well as the trust, safety, and security, privacy associated with our technology. and that's kind of the next generation of the pricing model as well. So it's definitely a new technology model. It's a new business model. And we couple it with our new philanthropic model. You know, 25 years ago, we put 1 % of our equity, profit, and time into a 501c3 foundation.

24:26That was easy because we had no equity, profit, or time, or people, or anything. But today, we've done 10 million hours of volunteerism. We run 100 ,000 nonprofits for free on our service. we've given away about a billion dollars and we also run a lot of these non-profits and NGOs and we meet these incredible folks and one of them is a NGO called College Possible and College Possible which you can kind of find on the net it's amazing where they kind of help get the college advisor going in the high school to work with your kid to kind of say hey what are you interested in and we're building a profile of your kid and here's the profile of the college and the counselor is there and boom, all of a sudden you get a college recommendation.

25:07And the way college possible works is that, well, how many college counselors do you think there are in California per one, basically per 100 kids? Maybe one? There's one per 500. Okay. So there's not too many. And it's a little bit like what we're talking about in the labor thing. Like there just isn't enough college counselors. And so you're kind of like wondering, hey, is my kid going to get that counseling in high school or not? So all of a sudden, College Possible using agent force, and they're building an agent and an agentic layer on College Possible. Look, they already have the data and the metadata and they're already automated all the customer touch points.