The New Economics of Revenue | with Sam Chung, Chief Customer Officer, Salesforce

0:00Sam Chung: This episode of CFO Thought Leader is made possible by Planful and Avalara. Bonus episode. These frontier models, these reasoning engines are super, super powerful. But I think one of the things that we have tried to explain to our customers is that they're highly probabilistic, which means like they're kind of right most of the time. But, you know, if you're a finance leader, there are very few places where kind of right most of the time is OK. And so when I talk to customers about, you know, the best places to use AI, there is certainly a quant component to that conversation. Again, getting back to the ROI calculation.

0:46But I mentioned earlier, there's a quality component to this as well. And if you have a particular process or area of the business that you need to be highly deterministic instead of probabilistic, you got to make that call. And then you have to figure out, OK, well, how do I use the AI technology that's in front of me in the best way possible to drive the right level of quality in that particular use case? The best place to talk about this isn't revenue. You know, one of the things that we tell our customers is you can't have probably right revenue. That is not OK. You know, it needs to be right 100 percent of the time.

1:23And I think this is where enterprise software is going to continue to add value.

1:30Sam Chung: Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Sam Chung, Chief Customer Officer of Salesforce.

1:41Sam Chung: For years, one of the attractions of the subscription model was predictability. Finance leaders could see revenue coming, model it, and plan around it. But what happens when customers increasingly pay according to what they actually consume? Recent Salesforce research points to just how quickly that shift is unfolding, and it raises a larger question for CFOs. If the economics of revenue are changing, how much of finance has to change with them? Visibility, forecasting, technology, even the CFO's role in the business may all look different. Sam Chung has had an unusually close view of this transition and some interesting thoughts about where it leads next.

2:32Sam Chung: Our talk with Salesforce's Chief Customer Officer, Sam Chung, begins now.

2:54Sam Chung: Hello, Sam Chung is with us. Sam has spent more than two decades at Salesforce, and what's particularly interesting for our conversation today is the range of perspectives he's had along the way. From leading the revenue operations and being CFO at Salesforce.org, to finance and strategy, enterprise transformation, and now working directly with customers as chief customer officer. Sam, welcome. Jack, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for telling me and reminding me how long I've been at the company. You know, I have my employee badge to prove it, but I had zero gray hair when I started at Salesforce.

3:33Just gives you an indication of how long I've been here. But super excited to be here on the podcast and to have this great conversation with you.

3:41Sam Chung: Well, we'd wager you have a pretty unique vantage point on some of the changes finance leaders are confronting today. And meanwhile, our timing seems particularly good, and it seldom works out this way. But we saw that Salesforce has just put out some new research into the field around what finance leaders are confronting. And given the different seats you've occupied over the years, we know you would have some interesting perspectives. Or we'll find out. And if it's all right, I'd like to just kick things off by zeroing in on one area with you that caught our attention. And that was the revenue complexity.

4:23Sam Chung: and here are some numbers for you 65 % of finance leaders say they're managing more than one revenue model 71 % told you told Salesforce 71 % are selling through more channels than they were a year ago and 87 % expect to add more consumption based products again 87 % that is So when you look at those numbers and compare them with what perhaps you've experienced over the years, what's actually changing here for the CFO? What's happening? Yeah, those are some pretty amazing statistics, Jack. I would say that there's really three things that are happening right now that result in, I would say, kind of the business trends that you outlined.

5:17First, I think the world is operating at a pace and innovating at a pace that I would argue has never happened before. It just feels like our innovation cycles are shorter than they've ever been. And what does that mean for a company? Well, it means that they continually have to reassess how they go to market. How do they think about pitching their products to their customers? how customer expectations around buying products and services and goods are evolving over time. But certainly the innovation pace is leading to some of what you're hearing from that study. The second thing that I think is also happening is that buyer expectations are similarly changing very, very quickly.

6:04And I think this all starts, we believe, at Salesforce, that a lot of what you see happening in the enterprise really happens first in your consumer perspectives. And so as you think about all the websites and the companies that you interact with as a person, forget as a persona at work, but as a person just kind of living your life, I think you've probably never had as many choices or as much interaction with your brands and kind of the manufacturers and the provider of these services and goods that you've had now. And the opportunity you have to engage them in whatever platform you choose, I think also is bleeding into the way that enterprises are thinking about their interaction with their ecosystem of providers.

6:52And then I think the third thing, and this is really, I think, very, very important for CFOs to keep in mind, is that we're also in a very heightened state of volatility. Maybe not the most volatile. Like I remember back in the 70s where there were some very, very serious shocks happening in things like supply chain and energy. I'm sure you remember those, Jack, as well. And so we're not necessarily maybe at peak volatility, but certainly if you think about the last 10 years, I think the volatility that we've seen really, really kind of amplified through the pandemic and now continuing on after through things like logistics, again, energy costs, tariffs.

7:33I think that all really forces a CFO and a company to really think about their go-to-market strategy in a fundamentally different way than they have in the past. And I think these things are unfortunately are here to stay. These are not, I think, blips in the way that we think about running our organizations. I think this is really the new normal. And so I think companies need to continually think about the ways in which they can support their company's growth objectives as well as kind of their margin objectives that they're looking for for their company and their products.

8:03Sam Chung: I want to just come back to that 87 % expect to add more consumption-based products. And as companies add consumption and create these hybrid models, where does maintaining visibility into the revenue transaction become more difficult for finance? Well, let's start, Jack, with why this is happening. And I think, you know, if you think about the world through a series of just pure economic principles, right, if you think of the correlation of value, right, what does a buyer want versus what are they going to pay for it? I would argue that consumption models provide the highest level of correlation of value, right?

8:49So you are literally paying for what you use. And I think there's no better spot to see this play out than if you go into technology as a sector and you think about a lot of the AI technology and the agenda technology offerings that technology companies are looking to try and market to their customers. You know, if you think about Salesforce, our traditional model was using, you know, a user per user, per license model, and then using that as the basis to monetize our services. But in the world of AI, who is the user? There is no user. It's an agent. It's a digital user. And so I think when you think about how do companies go to market with kind of AI technology and agentex technology, there's no better and more relevant, more appropriate go-to-market approach than to sell using some sort of consumption-based model.

9:43Now, it doesn't mean that it's pure play consumption. It's everything is pay as you go. But that's really the heart and the foundation of the way that companies are going to market for these new services that they're providing out to their customer base. And when you think about kind of, you know, this, not just the theory of technology companies, but more broadly, you know, think of a manufacturing company. Think of General Motors. General Motors has a multibillion dollar subscription business in a company that has traditionally obviously been known for selling cars. Right. And so you see this explosion of operating models and this and kind of the complexity that you have in an organization to support all of this.

10:22And to your point, Jack, these models all have a different set of consequences for finance. I think at the very heart of it, I grew up at Salesforce in a mode where we essentially pioneered software as a service and our subscription selling model. And some of the benefits that we really believed was fundamental to our success was the predictability of that business model. Well, consumption is not predictable at all. It really depends on what a customer decides to use. how quickly they decide to adopt or not adopt those services that generally leads to an economic outcome and the ability to generate revenue and cash flow for your organization.

11:01So there's less predictability in the model itself that you have to then deal with. And then as you think about the operational infrastructure you need, I think one of the things that is, I think, a real requirement for companies today that really want to sell consumption products is they had to provide visibility to their customers on that usage because it's not predictable. Because you don't have the same amount in an invoice every period, you have to tell customers what they're doing and how they're calculating their bills in a much more real-time transparent way than you would have had to in a more traditional business model, whether that's like a pure play subscription model or even a transaction one-time model.

11:45And so that's just an example, Jack, of like where you see that complexity really growing, especially in the eyes of finance. One of the things that I really believed in when I was the CFO of Salesforce.org was, you know, I care about all the financial outcomes that matter, revenue growth, profit, cashflow. Well, let's talk about cashflow. I mean, cashflow is really, I don't think there is another function in the organization that I think feels as accountable to cashflow as the finance organization. but you could really see DSOs impacted because if your invoices amounts are different, there isn't that kind of transparency that you're giving to your customers around consumption products.

12:24They're going to have a lot of questions on their invoices. They're going to have a lot of disputes on what you're charging them. That's going to lead to aging issues with your accounts receivable, more disputes, maybe more write-offs, definitely more frustration with your customers and that's going to affect your ability to optimize your cashflow. So these things, I think, all have to be taken into consideration as companies are looking to launch products using these new selling models.

12:48Sam Chung: Yeah, and we're wondering, you mentioned how predictability is just not there. I mean, what does finance need to see maybe earlier in that transaction than it did before? Well, I think, you know, in today's world, Jack, I think, you know, we're operating in a period of time where, again, there's a lot of technology providers that are out there. There's a lot of solutions that all play a part in one process, whether it's the revenue process or the cash flow process. And I think what are some of the implications of companies that choose to use a heterogeneous application environment to help solve a process or to govern a process is that you create these issues around data lineage.

13:35You create complexities in your organization because data models that are inside these applications are a little slightly different from each other. And then you have all this complexity built into the way that you're managing your overall process. And really what is happening is your employees are kind of stitching this all together. You know, the term we use at Salesforce to define this approach is the messy middle. We call it the messy middle sitting between CRM and ERP. Now, you know, we know you need an ERP, right? You have to be able to close the books. You have to be able to generate your financial statements out of your financial systems.

14:09And many companies understand that CRM solutions like Salesforce are equally important and critical for their organization. But if you think about customer relationship and you think about how do you then take that customer relationship through, you know, accounts and contacts and opportunities and ultimately drive economic value to your organization through revenue and cash flow. That is where we've seen a lot of companies take, you know, in some cases, dozens or hundreds of applications to stitch them together. But that is a suboptimal way to do this, Jack, because that doesn't help you with the visibility that you need into your overall process.

14:49It doesn't help you manage the data that you have that's sitting potentially in all these different applications that then have to get stitched together in a way that can drive real business outcomes, real business insight through one particular process, in this case, revenue and or cash flow. So we really believe that a better approach to all this is that customers should employ, they should have a unified revenue infrastructure that they use to govern this very critical part of their organization that allows you to kind of harmonize your data model. It ensures that your data can go for all the way through from, you know, an account executive or a customer that is looking to be a prospect all the way through to being able to make sure that you can generate that invoice and collect those invoices quickly and, you know, according to your policies in that lead to cash process.

15:41And so I think that's what we talk to our customers about. Start with that unified revenue infrastructure. That's going to really help you optimize the way that you can then build your insights strategy, your data strategy, and then ultimately, how do you make better decisions using that information to help you manage your growth objectives?

16:01Sam Chung: In quite a few of our recent interviews, CFOs have more or less expressed the same thought, which is that they find themselves inviting themselves to meetings across the organization that they haven't participated in before. And what does all this now demand from the CFO that wasn't necessarily part of the job 10 years ago? And I think it means getting invited to meetings that perhaps you weren't. But what is it, you know, through your eyes, what is this all now demand of the CFO? I think every CFO, their objective, if you think about what do they care about, they always want to be considered a trusted advisor to the CEO and to the rest of the C-suite.

16:46That is the goal of every CFO. But I think historically, if you go back decades, I think the real role, like the actual thing that the CFOs have done is they're the financial stewards of their organization. That has been kind of their primary role. And that obviously is still the primary job, right? No one else is accountable for the financial results and those financial results being accurate than the CFO is. But I think CFOs today are realizing that they have to kind of move outside of the back office if they want to be really effective. If they want to be able to achieve that goal of being a strategic advisor and a trusted advisor to the rest of their peers and to their manager, the CEO, they have to go into the front office.

17:27They have to be part of the product conversation. They have to be part of the innovation cycle of their organizations. And they just can't do it through the eyes of a budget. They have to do it by deeply understanding the operations that are there across the rest of the organization. And I think one of the things that every CFO feels very proud of is that they are one of the very few executives that has a 360 degree view of an organization. And it's because they really, I think, start with how do they think about allocation of funds inside the organization through a budgeting process? And then ultimately, how do you think about key performance metrics that you're going to hold each line of business or each function accountable for as they think about performance against their expectations?

18:12You know, so having that 360 degree view of the organization is super important and it gives them a an amazing opportunity to provide insight to any given particular part of that organization if they are going through a particular strategic initiative. And I think CFOs today, the ones that are really doing a great job, they're the ones that are leaning into this new approach, Jack, where they're just not sitting in their office. They're not just in the back office. They're not thinking just about kind of reporting the news, but they're really trying to influence how the news is created because they are a huge part of advising the rest of the company on how to grow, how to innovate.

18:57how to get more disciplined, how to think about things like AI as part of their operating model. I mean, that's a huge area, Jack, I know we'll talk about. But these are company-level, enterprise-wide initiatives that companies are dealing with today. And I think a CFO today, they're all thinking about how do they add value in this new paradigm.

19:21Sam Chung: That actually highlights for us another finding in the research. 74 % of finance leaders say the scope of their role has expanded just in the past year. I like that 12-month span. Sam, when you think about what CFOs are being asked to own today, where have you seen the expansion show up, perhaps most pronounced, most significantly? Yeah, well, I think definitely in, I would say, overseeing their company's AI and agentic strategy. That is certainly a place, Jack, where we see a number of CFOs being asked to lead the charge on behalf of their company. And I think part of the reason why this is happening, Jack, is, you know, I mentioned, you know, you have this holistic view of the organization.

20:09That is certainly helpful. But I think the other thing about AI and this new wave of AI, because it's not obviously the very first time we've heard AI being mentioned in enterprises. But this agentic wave that we're in right now, I would say started off with a lot of skepticism. There's a lot of companies that experimented that were very aggressive in adopting AI usage. You heard about phrases like token maxing as an example that came from all of this. But the question was, what value did you get from that investment? And I think a lot of companies are really questioning whether or not they got any meaningful value from the increased spend that is happening with this new opportunity that they have to drive productivity and effectiveness in their organization.

20:59So if you think about what are the characteristics and capabilities of a CFO, well, I mean, ROI calculations are kind of like, you know, second nature to a lot of us. We understand how to deal in a quant-driven world. Obviously, it's not just about quant. There's a quality aspect to AI that's equally important. But I think this is also why CFOs are being tapped on the shoulder to kind of lead the charge, Jack, because there just really hasn't been, I think, a sufficient amount of rigor placed on understanding the real business value and the outcomes that are being driven through this additional investment that a lot of companies are spending a lot of money focused in on.

21:38Sam Chung: Well, as someone who's journeyed from finance leadership into enterprise transformation, we wonder what that progression taught you about where CFOs can have impact or the greatest impact? Yeah, I very much learned a lot during my own career progression, Jack. You know, I think it's also probably why I have as much gray hair as I do. But those opportunities to really deeply understand how you take a strategy, how you then boil that into execution, how do you then think about transformation at a size and scale that Salesforce was at back in 2023. Not an easy thing to do. I think, like anything else, it all really starts with winning the hearts and minds of your employee base and really having to deeply understand the road ahead and the change management that needs to happen in order to make that transformation successful.

22:39I think the other thing that we learned at Salesforce around transformation is that you can't really start with all engines running hot at the same time. You kind of have to build muscle. You have to build the muscle within your organization to then go faster over time as you iterate through transformation. And so what I learned going through this, and this is something that I probably wouldn't have known had I just stayed in the office of finance, is that you really have to think deeply about your change leaders. You have to think about places in your organization where you feel like there is the right baseline of metrics and performance so that you can really quantify that value proposition that we've talked about earlier, Jack.

23:24But starting small, iterating, learning, and then expanding, I think is a very, very important lesson that I learned as part of our transformation journey. Yes, it could come down as a top-down mandate, but it doesn't necessarily mean that employees will believe it or adopt it or kind to commit to that change. And I think you have to really show that value. And for us, we learned, you know, through some lessons that happened at our company that you have to start small, you have to start with pilots, you have to continually iterate on the experience that you have, and then you can then go faster over time.

23:58And this really played out for us when we thought about our own authentic journey at Salesforce. You know, we started by boiling the ocean, and then we kind of pivoted down to a few use cases that really mattered the most. And now I think we are moving faster than ever before because of that shift.

24:14Sam Chung: Well, we'd love to ask you a question that, you know, I guess our interviews are always trying to expose this. But again, your perspective is awfully unique. So as the CFO mandate expands, what must finance leaders become better at that wasn't necessarily expected of them? 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago. What might that be? Where I start with this, Jack, is you have to really deeply understand the way your company works. And it's not just, again, through the eyes of your budget or through the numbers, your expense types. It's really understanding deeply how does your organization make money?

24:59How do your products work? How do you market and position those products to your customers? What is your distribution strategy look like? How do you think about marketing those products and services to your organization? How do you think about internal processes that happen in your organization? Again, through the eyes of like agentic capabilities, you really deeply need to understand this. And I think for, you know, not just CFO, but for every member of the finance organization, Jack, there's a sense of curiosity that I think really has to be there if you're going to be effective kind of in the roles that you have.

25:34just talk about where we started with the ways that companies are going to market today. I think it's really important that if you're in finance, you need to understand why your product managers or your product leaders are choosing to or want to offer a particular selling model to your customers in order to maximize the revenue from that particular product line. because that conversation, I don't think it's just, it's not just one directional. It should be a dialogue between, in this case, the product leaders and the operations folks that are looking to enable and execute and support that decision because maybe there actually are many permutations of how you choose to go to market.

26:21We talk a lot with our customers around, something I see right now happening a lot is that you could have one product that you sell, but you're actually going to sell it five or six different ways, depending upon who your customer is. If you're, you know, maybe in a finance organization that was around 20, 30 years ago, you know, that level of understanding may be lost on you. You don't really, maybe, maybe you just didn't understand it. But if you can really understand it through the eyes of the outcomes that matter, in this case, looking through the eyes of your customers and your competitors and the product and the market fit, But, you know, that's what that's I think that's what finance people need to be able to kind of prepare to do right now.

27:01And it comes back to having that sense of curiosity, being able to engage with the rest of the organization. And then how can you, again, use that very coveted, holistic view of the organization to drive value in a way that maybe that particular individual or that colleague of yours doesn't have exposure to so that you can apply best practices in your organization. to help that person execute on their goals.

27:28Sam Chung: Yeah, so there is another interesting tension in the research when we turn to AI, and that is, well, 90 % of finance leaders using AI report positive ROI, and more than 90 % of those using agents are seeing benefits, as you outlined, in areas like productivity and cost savings. those are pretty striking numbers. At the same time, finance leaders are clearly thinking about security, governance, and integration. So as CFOs move from experimenting with AI to actually deploying it, what should they be asking to determine whether it's creating real business value here? Yeah, yeah. It's a great question, Jack.

28:17And, you know, again, I think those statistics, they've certainly changed in the last 12 months. I don't think we would have gotten the same results if we did the survey that you're referring to in early 2025. I think you would have seen a lot less positive reaction to the investments that people are making. But I do think that we've come a long way, you know, and I think there are a lot of companies and a lot of CFOs right now that are obviously very aggressively moving. down the path of implementing AI as part of their overall operating model. At the same time, Jack, I was just, you know, we were just a dream force not too long ago here in San Francisco.

28:57I had an opportunity to host a roundtable with about 25 CFOs. And I all asked them the question, like, how are you using AI in your organization? And not many of them raised their hand. And they all felt like they were behind. And I think that's, you know, that's just reality today. I think everyone feels like they're behind. And I don't actually think many people are behind because there are not a lot of people who are that out in front of us or in front of the rest of us. But everybody's feeling this tension, right, around how to get started. And I think part of the reason why there is this hesitation besides really being able to quantify business values, exactly what you talked about, there's risk.

29:33There's risk like, oh, if my agent makes a decision and that decision leads to, let's say, inaccurate financial results, like how do I manage that risk? and how do I kind of ensure that I can maintain control in a situation where humans are no longer just the only people that are doing the work. You know, we really believe that in today's world, there are these great tools, right? I mean, every week I hear of a new model that comes out, a new reasoning engine, a new interface that, you know, you can use as a user to try and make yourselves more productive, to kind of use AI a little differently, differently.

30:14These frontier models, these reasoning engines are super, super powerful. But I think one of the things that we have tried to explain to our customers is that they're highly probabilistic. They're probabilistic, maybe I didn't say that right. Which means they're kind of right most of the time. But if you're a finance leader, there are very few places where kind of right most of the time is okay. When I talk to customers about the best places to use AI, there is certainly a quant component to that conversation. Again, getting back to the ROI calculation. But I mentioned earlier, there's a quality component to this as well.

30:54And if you have a particular process or an area of the business that you need to be highly deterministic instead of probabilistic, you got to make that call. And then you have to figure out, okay, well, how do I use the AI technology that's in front of me in the best way possible to drive the right level of quality in that particular use case. The best place to talk about this isn't revenue. You know, one of the things that we tell our customers is you can't have probably right revenue. That is not okay. You know, it needs to be right 100 % of the time. And I think this is where enterprise software is going to continue to add value.

31:33Because enterprise software provides you a place where you've codified all your rules, you've codified your policy, you've codified all of your workflows, flows, you've codified all of the history that has kind of helped you operate as an organization. And that software is a huge part of the value proposition to complement what's happening through these AI reasoning engines, which are, again, probabilistic. And it's really the marriage of these two things, Jack, that I think are going to give companies what they really need, which is the ability to use AI in a way that is grounded, that leads to the right level of precision and accuracy and quality that you want, depending upon that use case that you're focusing on, and then still being able to take advantage of the innovation that's happening out in the market.

32:20But this is a big part of what we believe to be the case, right? You can't just use a frontier model to run revenue. It won't give you the precision and the determinism that you need to run that business model. You need the underlying infrastructure and the engine in complement with that reasoning engine to make that really truly work for your organization.

32:40Sam Chung: We wonder what evidence would convince you that an AI investment is genuinely changing the economics of a business. In other words, not just simply making a process a little faster. What would that evidence be to you? That's a really good question. I mean, I think it kind of depends, again, on what you're focused on doing. But I'll tell you, I'm an optimist on AI. I think AI is going to do wonders for organizations. I think it's going to do nothing besides boost productivity. I don't think it's going to result in, let's just say, the disaggregation of all humans in the workforce. I just don't see that happening.

33:34You know, I think of it a lot like what happened when the internet was announced in the late 90s and everyone thought, oh my, oh my Lord, like what's going to happen now that we don't have to go to the library anymore. And we have, you know, an indexed, you know, database full of all the information in the world. And there were more jobs created in the last 20 years than there were in the 20 years before that. And, you know, in the late 20th century, I kind of see us in that same situation again, Jack. You know, I do think that I think what needs to happen to AI really to get a foothold is that we have an established pattern of tangible use cases that become, I think, again, that the place where companies experiment first.

34:17And then those things just become part of the way that companies operate, you know, and then you can continue to see that expand and continue to grow within an organization. But I feel right now there is a lot of different point of view on how companies should get started and where should companies get started. One of the things that we talk about at Salesforce is take a place like your customer support organization, where those leaders have unbelievable metrics. They have full visibility in many cases to their operational KPIs for that support organization. And use that so you can determine your baseline.

34:58And then use help.go and use one of our AgentForce agents that is focused on servicing support organizations, like our service agent or like FIN, which is a technology we just acquired through recently, and employ it. And then measure those results because you have that baseline and you can very easily see, did this add value? Did it add to my ROI? Did it make my employees more productive? Did it still have the same quality metrics that I need to to make sure that my customer satisfaction didn't dip or it's kind of maintaining that level or it's achieving what I wanted to achieve? And use that as a place to start.

35:45And I think the more you can do that, the more than you build your operational rigor in the organization, the operational structure, the managerial structure, the interplay between humans and agents together, because that still is going to have to happen. And then you can, again, go faster after that. But, you know, we really believe that you have to start somewhere. You should start with those places where you have as much visibility to kind of like your baseline as possible and then go from there.

36:09Sam Chung: Where do you see perhaps agents having the clearest near-term application inside finance and the revenue operations? I think it's in places where you have a lot of operational processes in finance. I think one of the things that most people who don't work in finance understand is just how diverse the work is within the office of the CFO. You know, certainly there are folks who are, you know, dealing with analytics and managing your budget. There are some folks that are very technical. They're managing your revenue recognition policies. They're thinking about the SEC regulations around things like your public financial disclosures.

36:56but every finance organization also has a set of operational processes that they oversee, things like accounts payable, managing your travel expense reimbursements, managing your order management process and your fulfillment processes and your billing processes and your collections processes. To me, those are the places that make the most sense, Jack, because you have enough volume in those areas for AI to really make a meaningful difference. Let's be honest. I have yet to meet a company that has told me that their first priority for investment is in finance employees. So what does this mean? That means if your business is growing and you're doing well as an organization, every day you're getting outscaled in those operational areas of finance because your employee count is growing faster than your finance account is.

37:46Maybe your customer account is growing faster. Your vendor account is growing faster. Your invoice counts are growing faster. And so these are the great, I think these are the greatest opportunities for finance employees to really think about these agentic capabilities to boost the scale issue that they're dealing with today. And again, a lot of these, the finance leaders who are in charge of these operational processes, they have built the right visibility, the tooling, the measurement. They have all of that already because they're in a volume game. and they understand that they need this in order to really optimize their workforce, that I think is the best place for folks in finance to get started.

38:26And then eventually, you're going to see this continue to grow over time. Again, I think there's hardly a place in finance where I think agentic capabilities and AI can't help.

38:40Sam Chung: Well, as we see agents begin performing more work, where should accountability sit and what new controls will CFOs need? Yeah. Well, the accountability doesn't change, I think, is really the short answer, Jack. If you're the chief accounting officer and you're using an agent to make a decision on a revenue treatment for a transaction, as a chief accounting officer, you're still accountable for that decision, whether it's a human who made it or an agent who made it. And I think that's just kind of what people need to expect heading into this world. You know, Mark Benioff is famous. He's been saying this lately.

39:27I think he's gotten some questions around things like the Saspocalypse, which was a narrative that really started probably late last year, but it's certainly earlier this particular calendar year. And the statement that Mark says is that, you know, enterprise software is not dead. but we may be but you know what may be dead is enterprise software that assumes that only humans are going to interact with it and I think that's a very true statement you know it's humans and AI working together to really solve these problems on behalf of the companies that employ them but just because you have an AI agent using doing the work doesn't mean that you should in any way feel yourself removed from liability from accountability from oversight and so I think it's important that you build the internal controls as you mentioned to oversee the activity that's happening, whether that activity is happening through a human or that activity is happening through an agent, we really believe that you need that visibility.

40:23So a lot of the technology that we're providing through Salesforce gives you the kind of the dashboard, the console, the view as a manager so that you're understanding what is happening regardless of that activity is happening through a human or through an agent. Because it's important to find these technology providers, Jack, that really believe that this is the future. You know, not every technology is built the same. Not every technology vendor believes in the same principles. And so I think it's really important that if you're a CIO or you're a CFO and you're looking at your technology partners, that you're thinking about this as you make your vendor selection and you're figuring out which of those technology providers really believe in this idea of humans and AI working together, or if there's some that make a different call and they have a different set of values.

41:11Sam Chung: So, Sam, we'd like to maybe bring this back home a little bit. You just mentioned Mark Benioff. Salesforce itself has had to navigate these same challenges and across these areas that we've been talking about, the complexity around revenue, the expanding CFO mandate, and now AI and agents. But what has Salesforce learned from going through some of this? uh well probably that nothing ever stays the same uh for too long jack i think like a lot of companies you know we've experimented on uh the way that we're thinking about our own agenda technology and what's the best uh selling model uh and pricing model that we want to uh to use to um you know to really have a um an effective conversation with our customers around how they perceive value from those products and what makes the most economic sense for them as they think about monetizing those products moving forward.

42:14I think we have always tried to stay nimble as an organization, even though we're now 83 plus thousand people strong. I think we still feel like we operate like a very large startup and we have that entrepreneurial spirit, Jack. So I think We continue to respond to our customers to say, okay, what do we get right around our ability to position these products? What do we still need to work on? I think hearing and deeply understanding what our customers are saying to us is super important. And again, I think it's not one customer type. I think, as I mentioned before, just like our customers that I talk to, Salesforce, we're selling the same product in many different variations because we are trying to really deeply understand what are the value drivers for each customer and how do we make sure that we're responding and we recognize what those value drivers are as we think about our engagement with that particular customer.

43:12Sam Chung: And so we provide them with options, right? How they want to partner with us, take advantage of the tools that we've created. But that whole practice, I used to tell this to customers a lot. I don't say it as much anymore. But for a lot of times, Jack, I think we've probably felt at Salesforce, we felt somewhat lucky that we didn't have to go through the last major disruption that hit enterprise software, which was the transition from, you know, on-premise to cloud. That was something that we never really had to deal with because we were kind of, we were born in the cloud. And so we would look at some of the older legacy technology providers and sometimes we'd be like, wow, like that's really hard.

43:58You know, there's, think of how many of these companies that are out there, Jack, very familiar household enterprise software names where they went through multiple years of disruption because they were moving and shifting their business model from being on-premise, maybe selling through a channel on-premise and now going to a subscription model. In many ways, we felt blessed that we didn't have to do that, but now we're doing the same thing. We're in the same transformation, the same disruption as everyone else is. If you think about things like consumption and outcome and all these other selling models that are not necessarily replacing subscription.

44:33They're being done in complement to subscription as a way to kind of think about a holistic selling model to their customers. And so that level of disruption we're dealing with internally at Salesforce as well, again, we're trying everything we can to really, as a first principle, how do we listen deeply to what our customers really want? And then we use that as a way to think and inform our strategy. I think that has been something that Mark has been really, I think, a strong proponent of since day one. I think we always want to be customer first. We want to really understand deeply what's going on with our customers and what they want from us.

45:09And this is a moment where I think we're leaning into that as we think about changes to the way that we market some of these new products that we're offering.

45:17Sam Chung: We always like to end our finance leader interviews by asking our guests to look ahead, Sam. and I do have a question for you. I do want to also mention that those of you who'd like to dig deeper into the research we've been discussing today, you can find Salesforce's CFO report at salesforce.com slash CFO report. Now, Sam, as you look ahead, what's one change you think CFOs should be preparing for now that may be much more consequential two or three years from today, what's one change you think CFOs should be preparing for? I got a question the other day at Dreamforce, Jack, to help predict what was going to happen five years from now.

46:09And I gently reminded him that we had Tony Robbins in attendance at Dreamforce, who I think basically has a 36-month window on his horizon. And I was like, well, what do you want from me if Tony Robbins can only give you three years? Um, I'll, I'll, I'll tell you what, Jack, I do think, you know, the, the, uh, the evolution and the transformation that CFOs and finance organizations are having to deal with. It's again, it's real, it's happening. It's not going to stop. It's, it's only going to continue down this path. Um, I, I think if I were to advise a CFO today, like say you were talking to someone who's a, you know, first time CFO, uh, in the job and, you know, what's really important and And how do you be effective kind of in the role?

46:55The thing that I would really spend a lot of time focusing on is, again, getting back to understanding deeply how your business operates. Not just, again, through the eyes of your financial performance or your budget. But I think you really need to go deep. You have to really understand the operations of your organization. And you have to also be, I think, you have to be a technologist today. I think a lot of CFOs in the past didn't have to really focus as much. I think, you know, CFOs, if they think about their, you know, their suite of technology providers, it pretty much starts and ends with their ERP provider.

47:32Like if you go back to the 80s, like that was the only technology vendor that mattered to a CFO. That is no longer the case. You know, I think companies are looking at their ERP footprint. It's continually getting smaller and smaller. There's a concept called the Thin GL strategy, Jack, which I'm sure you've heard of, where you really use your ERP to do what it's primarily set to do, which is generate external financial reports. That is what that primary objective is. But because it's so rigid, because it really optimizes for compliance and for control, it's incredibly hard to use that technology in places where your business is changing and moving faster than your fiscal calendar is or your chart of accounts is or your currencies are.

48:19And I think this is the tension point that CFOs are dealing with now. And so if you're a CFO in today's world, you have to be well-versed in technology. You have to be well-versed in technology providers and you have to be well-versed in the trends that are happening across technology, whether it's AI or not AI. And it's no longer just okay to have a friend at the backbone who is your CIO any longer. You have to really, I think, go deep as a technologist to really understand how your organizations can continually deal with scale problem that I talked about earlier in a fundamentally different way than you did in the past.

48:59And so I hope CFOs across the world are really kind of leaning into this. I think there's so many opportunities for CFOs to learn about these new technology choices that are out there and the options that are in front of them. but it's a big part of the way that I think they're going to be able to either be successful or not successful kind of in the work that they do. Sam Chung, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Jack, thank you so much for the time. It was great to meet you, great to be on the call and really appreciate the opportunity.

49:47Sam Chung: Hello, we're benchmarking the CFO path. Join 500 finance leaders helping define how today's CFOs rise and lead. If you're a CFO or senior finance executive, contribute your experience. It takes just a few minutes and you'll receive early access to the findings. visit cfothoughtleader.com benchmarking.