Salesforce Founder Gives the Truth on AI Agents w/ Marc Benioff | EP #141

28:05Yeah, I mean the other people don't realize one of the big benefits about these these robot systems humanoid or otherwise is the data gathering really they're They're driving massive amounts of data to train the next generation of agents and AI models I've you've been investing in any of these companies yet. I Am investing in those companies and I you know, I'm a believer in this in the future and I'm not going to jump into the future like you are but I occasionally go there and And I think that, you know, look, we just picked off the top two of the five, you know, the first one is, look, we're moving into an agentic world where human workforce will be augmented by digital labor and that companies, organizations will be able to extend their workforce.

28:54And it's going to be awesome. Like, even in the healthcare area where you're so strongly vested, you know that,

29:04well, And I just regenerated my killies, I'm sure we'll get there. But that idea that I need preoperative care, postoperative care, I need to talk to experts all the time when they're not available, but I can talk to agents. And I'm sure all of us are going to chat to you and asking medical questions as well. And study, that was amazing, right? Where the accuracy level can be higher than a lot of doctors. Well, it's not only that. The accuracy level of the agent alone was higher than the doctor and the agent because the doctor is injecting bias into all the, yes, it's crazy. Yes. Yes. We don't do that, Peter, thank God.

29:44I'm not biased. We're not. We have my bias. We're crystal clear. We have really just moved that right out of our minds. So thank you. So, let's see. You've been owed coast less as a billion robots in the next decade. Brett Adcock, AdFigur and Elon are at 10 billion by 2040. Are you seeing those numbers? Do you think that everyone's going to have one of these? By the way, at $30 ,000 purchase price, that's like at least price of $300 a month. It's $0 .40 an hour. How many robots are you going to own in your home there? Oh, I just talked to the CEO, one of those leading companies, and they said $350 ,000 for their robot.

30:27And it can't do really much, and it's still like two, a couple years away. And I would say that, you know, I'm sure that we are hitting to the point where we're going to come home and say, hey, make me an omelet, make my bed, take care of this, do that, do this. I don't know how fast all of that is exactly is going to happen. and I'm not very good in those areas, but I think we're moving in that direction and I think we're all gonna want that kind of technology and that kind of capability. Look, we already have robot cars, right? So your car made me drove you to the office and it's just a robot on wheels at this point.

31:06I got into a Waymo and I just called it with my phone, jumped in the Waymo, went to my office, boom, it's a robot on wheels, it's the same thing, right? It's like what's the difference? And my Tesla hasn't tried to kill me in many months. It's working pretty well on FSD. That's a science fiction movie I'd rather not watch. You know AI, one of the challenges with AI is its energy consumption rate. And so I'm going to bring us to number three on your top five list, which is small modular reactors. I've said for a while now, I think it's sinful that we haven't invested heavily into nuclear in this country.

31:47The Gen 4 reactors are safe. Talk to me about your thoughts on how do we power this AI revolution and what are you doing in that field? Well, number one is I think we are using a lot of energy that we don't need to be using. We could go into that, but I think that in a lot of the training of these models and how we're doing AI, Salesforce is committed to being a net zero company. and we're doing a lot of things to be not zero. You know that. And this is extremely important. We think we are. I'm sure there could be challenges to that idea already. And even as we implement our AI technology, we're holding that line.

32:23But I think there's people who are using exhaust of amounts of AI energy because they're in various levels of competitive races that is causing that to happen. So let's put that issue completely to the side for just a second and you're right. We need new energy capabilities. You know that I spent a lot of time on the big island. Why that is a place where it's already 60 % renewable. They use wind, they use solar, they have a volcano, which helps them because they've got geothermal and they've got batteries. And what I hope is that a company like a Commonwealth Energy where I'm an investor will be able to offer fusion, which is not fusion, but fusion.

33:07So it's not small, not small modular nuclear. You know, that fusion will be real. I think that that is an absolute possibility. You mentioned the node coast list. It was the absolute lead investor in that company. And then yes, you're right. This kind of smaller nuclear power plants that we've seen start to get deployed. There's even tests of those. I think that's, we're very optimistic. I don't know if you're gonna use that. in an island where there's a high volcanic activity, but you might find a lot of places where you can use that very successfully. And look, how do we know that's a capability?

33:45Well, we know that we have this nuclear aircraft carriers in submarines, and you also know, it's probably one of the highest safety rates that have ever happened of any kind of ship vessel. And we have the ability to just, Think about just taking those aircraft carriers and submarines just plug them into the electric grid on these islands. That's a real thought. Why can't we just do that? And we can, but it's been the three -mile island Fukushima brand of dystopian news that it's held us back in regulations and such. Do you see that changing dramatically soon? I think it's happening. I hope it happens faster.

34:32And this is a great, you know, we have all this great technology, we should use it. But we have to use it in a safe way. Look, trust and safety have to be our highest values and everything that we do. Nothing is more important than the trust that we have with our customers. It's our highest value at Salesforce. And I think that when we talk about energy, whether it's fossil fuels or whether it is nuclear or renewables of any type, trust and safety have to be number one. So as long as you have trust and safety, I am all in it, all in. Do you ever see yourself delivering agents to the individual?

35:09I mean, versus the corporation through Salesforce, do you think I'm going to wake up one day and be able to call on my Salesforce agent to support me throughout the day? I mean, for me, the vision is a version of Jarvis, right? This is you know in AI that that I give permission to read everything I look at all my emails You're really love going into the future Peter and you know You really need to talk about that. You gave me your psychologist phone number. I'll help you with that, but I would just say You know Peter I think that we will probably supply that to our customers to do I mean in some cases we're doing it you know But I would say that it's for our customers but I think we want to empower others to provide that technology where a platform, where a platform that you can build your own agent now.

35:57This is not some future idea. Like you can get onto Salesforce and we have thousands of companies right now building agents. And one of our customers is one of the largest home builders in the country and they're amazing. They don't want me to use their names so I won't. But yeah, we already do all of their sales and service and their marketing automation and, you know, They're like, you know, we need to do 24, seven service for our homes. We need to sell mortgages. We need to do all these things. We don't have enough people to do it. And they're building a completely agentic platform around their company to be a better home builder, a better bank, a better media company.

36:37And to that point, then that vision that you have, you know, gets expressed through those companies, I think in many ways. Mark, would you come out on AI is going to decimate jobs? Well, I think in some cases, like all technology has, there will be a change in jobs that we've seen in technology throughout history. This will be true. Look at my company. I mentioned it already once in the podcast, which was that we have 9 ,000 support agents and we'll probably take a couple thousand and move them into other jobs at Salesforce because we've built a new agentic layer on all of our customer support and service.

37:14This year we'll also build an agentech layer on our sales and sales development capabilities and business development capabilities. So that will have implications as well. And so, yes, that's what you want. You want to be constantly looking for the opportunity to make things lower, it's cost and easier to use, and that can have implications for jobs and jobs will move. And that will be true in every industry from healthcare to consumer product goods, to retail to the government across the board. And that's a great thing. And let's balance our workforce because as you said earlier as well, we have declining birth rates.

37:53We have less labor. We have less capability. And the United States is already very hard for me to hire sales and service professionals. I'm trying to hire 2 ,000 more salespeople right now at Salesforce. I'm trying to find the best enterprise software executives in the world to come to Salesforce. There aren't that many in our industry at scale. So, we're gonna have to build some digitally. Yeah, now I get that. I just have a lot of fear out there as humanoid robots come online and agents come online. And I think it's gonna be an interesting future of how we up level people. One of the challenges I think about is if you've got AI agents doing a lot of the work for you and humanoid robots taking care of you, sort of like a social, technological socialism, Are we still going to have the struggles that make us human?

38:41Are we still going to have the ability to have fine purpose at a level like that? What do you think about that? Let's just really get into the future, shall we? The way out there to evaluate our existential existence as human beings and what is life about in the fundamental meetings? I just think you're such a refined, and we should just move right there to that moment where None of us have jobs and we're just sitting in a home saying, well, we're in an abundant, credible world with everything is happening around me with the robots and the and this now what is life about? So let's just go there and oh wait, let me just check.

39:23Pull it. Oh, there's no robots here actually. So I don't know what happened to my robot. How about at your house? Can you call your robot over so I can see I've got what your robot like to 13 year old boys who are robots and they're They're on virtual. I want to know what your robots look like. Let's all be yeah, it's all Meditate on the existential you know, I'll show them to you in the universe and you know whether we're gonna Who deeply commit to our religion and our spirituality and our belief in God or move to a nihilism It's this is that moment that we should all go for Let's move some places we could be in the now And we could be a present moment reality that we are living in where we can be happier and healthier today Where you want to be with your mind right now out of you I could totally would be so proud of you my friend.

40:15I'm just saying you can just think about where you want to be right now You want to be here? Do you want to be somewhere else? Yeah be here now? I definitely appreciate that I love Ramdas. He was actually I actually got to meet him a few times incredible person And listen, I meditate about the now most of my meditation. And then I look at the future, just this sort of thing. That's why I'm here in this podcast just to remind you that we can all come back to the present moment with our breath. Yes. And we are in the present moment. An area of common interest that we, you know, we'll get on the phone for an hour or two sometimes and talk about what pills you're taking, what pills I'm taking, what you're latest scientists you've been backing and you've done incredible philanthropy in the biomedical space for the Benioff microbiome work that's been done.

41:14You backed Shinwai Yamannaka who developed the Yamannaka factors for creating induced blue -poll and stem cells, probably one of the most important technologies developed over over the last decade plus and the implications are phenomenal. How do you think about regenerative medicine? What's your, why are you there? Is it for your own personal health? How long do you wanna live? I'm curious, Mark. What's your number? Well, I think number one is, I only do what I enjoy, Peter. That's where I am in my life right now and I am focused on, what are those things that I'm enjoying, those five things and trying to do less of the five things that I'm not enjoying.

41:57And look, I've been very excited that I've been able to endow, you know, five hospitals now. You know, our children's hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, our hospital in Hilo, Honolulu, and our new one in Puna, Hawaii. And that idea that we can bring high quality, accessible health care to everybody is very important to me. That some of those hospitals are developing next generation, and therapeutics like what we've done in Oakland, where we saw a dramatic ability to cure sickle cell and other things that have been haunting our society for so many years and the tremendous advancements like you've said in the microbiome and immunotherapies in all of these incredible areas.

42:43And as you said, very well, the regenerative biology. And I think, you know, surprise here I am, you know, I'm just having a nice little scuba diving trip because I also love the ocean and I'm also focused on the ocean and the trees and I jumped off a boat in The French Polynesia and the two Amote Islands and an island called Fakarava and I jumped off the boat in Fakarava with my tanks and my fins and my this and my vat and I jumped as hard as I could into the ocean and I hit it exactly wrong as I went in and my fin then went up at a 90 degree angle and snapped my right Achilles. And that was September 26th of 2024.

43:27And I went, wow, did I hit the boat on the way down? And I didn't, I just gave that much force to my Achilles that I should not have done. So then I got on the phone with my friends and said, I don't exactly know how we're going to do this because part of my Achilles is up on this side of my leg and the other part the other side of the leg. And half of my friends said, very easy. We're gonna slice you open, and we are going to operate and take part of your toe and reconnect your Achilles, and it's gonna be great. And then half of my friends, because I have very unusual friends like you, who do all kinds of crazy things and say, no, no, we're not gonna do that.

44:09We are going to regenerate your Achilles, and we're gonna figure out how to entice your Achilles is to find itself, come back together and be stronger than ever. And we're going to try to activate the parts inside you to indicate to your Achilles to regenerate itself. And of course, I'm into that idea very much so. And I kind of have done it a little bit on my left Achilles and now I've done it on my right side. And I used the incredible human performance lab at UCSF in San Francisco, you've been there, you've met some of our folks like people like Anthony Liu, Consolva Leita, and you mentioned Chienya Yamannaka.

44:51I just wanna thank them for everything they're doing to contribute to the body of science called regener biology. Because we are in a moment where we realize, yes, we're regenerating parts of ourself all the time. If you took out, and I don't anticipate, then hopefully no one will do this, and took a small knife and cut your skin. And then you put a little bandaid on the skin and you came back in two weeks, you know your skin would be healed. So we know that we can regenerate ourselves and heal ourselves. And in certain areas, we know how to do it in other areas we don't. And Yamann Akassan, who's based in Kyoto University Half -Time and UCSF the other half -time, did win the Nobel Prize because he showed how we can regenerate our eye.

45:37And also take these skin cells from our body and turn them into these stem cells and do amazing things with it. And he's been able to build these organoids, he's been able to do all these amazing things. And then, yes, the other person that you met, I think, saw the Leda at UCSF, through the parabiosis where he took the blood from a young mouse and put it into old mouse and the old mouse got young because, and then he discovered with Anthony Luke, this PF4, you know, agent in our plasba, that's there, that if you have it, regenerating, I mean, this is cool stuff. And this is all like real right now.

46:18And yeah, we should be trying to use more of that. And that's, I think, very exciting. And so I'm grateful to be able to fund and invest in these brilliant and scientists in a philanthropic way at UCSF and in Kyoto and in different places in the world to see that. And regener biology, I just invested in another company called parallel bio that's... Yeah, so... Yeah, you know that company? Yeah, yeah. And that company, they're building a lymph node organoid and that idea that they can test pharmaceuticals on basically a part of our biology without being in a human being, and that idea that that's real, you know, Niamh and Akka's doing the same thing with intestines, that the idea to be able to test drugs on what looks like a part of a human being, but it's not.

47:10I think that's very exciting for the future of by pharmaceuticals. And again, I'm in your area now. Why are you not talking about this? This is your category. This is my category. Well, and I do appreciate. I know almost nothing about this area. I do appreciate our conversations on the subject of the community and we've got Dean K. Men with his regen valley using Shinwaz, I mean, not as factors to generate new organs. I mean, the ability to build a liver lung kidney, you know, pancreas. That's right. Yeah, that's right. I just talked to David Agus at USC and he's just generated a liver using the Ammonocca factors.

47:49So, wow, what a world we're in. It's exciting and fun. It is. And by the way, I think this is the most exciting time ever to be alive. And when people say, well, why are you so focused on longevity and health span extension is because I want to see as much of this as possible. You will. I assure I will. You're doing great. You know, one of the things that will allow us to see as much of this extraordinary world as possible is making sure that the world stays healthy itself. health. And that takes us to your fifth area, which is planetary health. What are you doing in that realm? You've got the Trillion Trees project, you're doing work in oceans.

48:31What's driving you there? Well, I mean, there's so many simple things we can do to make our life better. I mean, I think about, and like your feedback, but I mean, I think about these LA wildfires and how horrible it is. And when I looked at all of those homes that that torched, I know a lot of them are testless outside them because they're high value homes in Los Angeles. And those all that battery and all that stuff went into a big toxic plume that then went into the water supply and the soils. And I don't know where it is or what that means for health. But a lot of it also probably went into the ocean.

49:07And we also know that that means it gets consumed into our food supply and to the fish. We also know that we're dumping all this plastic in the ocean. and there's a lot of stuff we could do that maybe can improve our health and one of them is our lungs are the ocean and That's where we're getting our oxygen and when we look at we're dumping this plastic into the ocean So for more than a decade I've been working with incredible people like boy and slad at the ocean cleanup He's great to figure out how do you get this plastic out of the ocean and also to like find these we talked about robots He's got robots that we've funded in rivers that are preventing the plastic from getting in the ocean, which is really neat.

49:53And that's one thing, of course I think about overfishing, I think about the coral bleaching and the acidification of the ocean and all of those pieces as well, we can talk about any of those pieces. But a healthy ocean is about a healthy humanity. And you mentioned regenerating agriculture, and you know we're also introduced this concept of the trillion trees, this idea. Could we get a trillion trees on the planet to sequester 200 gigatons of carbon? We know that we've deforested so much of the planet already. I heard a stat that if we added a trillion trees to the global count, that it would take take us back to pre -industrial levels of carbon.

50:39Do you have that number in the back of your mind? Uh -huh. That's right. Yes, I do. I just gave it to you. It's about 200 gigatons of carbon. And the way to think about it is like this, Peter, I think we had 6 trillion trees on the planet. Okay. When? How many are left? I'd guess half. About half. Less than half. Three trillion. And if every trillion trees Peter is 200 gigatons of carbon and we deforested Three trillion trees how much carbon Peter was released into the atmosphere? 600 gigatons So that doesn't sound very good It's our carbon bank the trees are our carbon bank the trees are carbon and Why do we not focus on putting our carbon banks on the planet the ocean right now is do you know how much ocean Do you know how much carbon is stored in the ocean?

51:33A lot, but I don't have the number now. About 20 ,000 gigatons. And do you know how much in the soils? No. About 3 ,000. So if you have, now I'm not talking to somebody as an expert in the series, so all these numbers may be slightly wrong. But some of this comes out of our lab at the University of California Santa Barbara, very close to you. Doug McColley is our chief scientist there. And he said 20 ,000 gigatons, a carbon are stored in the ocean. Now, when all that stuff went up in horrible fires in LA, a lot of it is going to get into the oceans, and a lot of it then gets reabsorbed into the ocean.

52:10And that's why the ocean is getting hotter because you get the acidification of the ocean as it is absorbing more of the carbon. So that we don't want, we don't want a hot ocean, we want the carbon in the trees, we want more trees, And this is how I think about simply, and then I know you are also working on your own carbon ex -price. Yeah, we're gonna be awarding. So about four or five years ago, I got Elon to put up a hundred million dollars for large -scale gigaton carbon capture. It was a fun conversation. He was getting a lot of flack for not being philanthropic on the day he became the wealthiest person.

52:49So I texted him, I said, how about doing an ex -price? He said, how much? I said a hundred million for what? But for carbon extraction, he wrote back, sure, S -A -S -U -R -E, and then we're off to the races. We're awarding it actually at your event at the time 100 this April. How exciting. Yeah, and thank you for keeping time alive and for having time celebrate incredible moments, but the positive news, not just the negative news in the world. We have so much dystopian press out there. There are people's neural nets. Yeah. Well, I'm very grateful to all of our folks at time. They do an incredible job and we're doing the best that we can to support them.

53:31Yeah. You know, I want to close out with the notion of what we started, which is you've identified five things. Did we hit all five areas? We did it all five times. Wow. I didn't think we could do it. So in the now, we hit them in the now. It's incredible. We're in the now. Thank you, Peter. This has been therapeutic for you, hasn't it? It has been incredibly therapeutic. But the idea for, you know, listen, this is a podcast called Moon Shots. But therapeutic podcast, we didn't even go out deep breathing exercise. I'm gonna call you back tonight. We'll talk about this more. But, you know, this is called Moon Shots.

54:11And the entrepreneurs listening are looking to do big and bold, significant things. What's your advice for entrepreneurs who want to take moon shots on like you've done. Get really clear about what you want. You know, I think number one is, do you really know what you want? Because look, we're all creating exactly what we want every day, and we need extreme, radical, focus on our intention. And that is the most important thing. And you mentioned your friend Elon, quite a few times. That guy's got some crazy radical, you know, focus on his intention across many categories. And it seems like as, you know, we've known him for a while, he comes up with new intentions all the time.

54:55But wow, we knew that same idea like what is our intention? And then what are our values? What are our core values? What are our principles to help us? I mentioned trust is important, especially we talked about energy or when we bumped into nuclear on this call that you know, surfaces my core value of trust and then three is, you know, how are we going to get these things? What is our actual plan? But let's not jump into the plan before we get clear about the intention and the values that are going to guide us. And of course, the obstacles will surface what is preventing us from achieving our success in the fifth area that, you know, I focus on as the KPIs.

55:34How do I know I'm going to be successful? But when we go to the KPIs too fast, I think we can lose sight of our intention and our values, our vision and our values, our plan, our clarity of our obstacles that we're going to have to overcome. And then look, we can all write down exactly how we know we will be successful. And those five areas, I think, is the most important thing for every single entrepreneur. So when you start your day as an entrepreneur, you're starting your fiscal year, that's what I'm about to do on February 1st, then I'm going to write down those five things. And part of it gives you the opportunity, you might say, yeah, one of my values is giving back.

56:14So, well, how are you going to give back? What kind of things? We have our 111 model. You know, that we have 20 ,000 companies that have followed us. Billions of dollars have floated into philanthropy through our 111 model. We're just so grateful that that has worked out so well. Well, we have done 10 million hours of volunteerism. We run 50 ,000 nonprofits for free. We have given away a billion dollars philanthropically. As a company, I've done it personally as well. That idea that when you get clear about your values, it's easy to make a decision to say, this is my value, giving back. This is how I am doing it.

56:53That's really the power of entrepreneurship is getting clear about those five things. And one of your friends, Tony, you know, he gave you his Bosphorus for helping teach me and hone me on some of those questions because I think the quality of your questions is the quality of your entrepreneurship. You can ask those right questions. It's going to give you the ability to be a better entrepreneur and have a better outcome. And that's that came from our good buddy. And I will say that this is kind of how I lead for the last 25 years. I'm constantly working with our employees. asking them those five questions, so if I had to meet a manager or a divisional executive or somebody working on a new product, that's where I start with those five questions.

57:38You have to be one of the youngest, longest -lived founder CEOs out there in the tech sector. I said that properly. I'm 60 now, so I'll take it anytime somebody tells me that I'm young. I'm all in. How old are you now, Peter? I'm 63. I'm living in your future. That's why I'm so focused. Well, I get exercise every day and I wrote this book. We made fun of each other's books before we got this book. So that's our two books. Anyway, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. and we're so grateful aren't we? It's very clear doesn't it? We're living in this dream. I mean this is the 99th level of the gameplay.

58:31Health is number one right Peter? Health is the new wealth. And gratitude is in there too. Gratitude the mindset's right. And I know family is so important to you. I have my two third year old boys in the virtual school right next door. Beautiful. Love them dearly and listen. and thank you, my friend, for your friendship, person, foremost. Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you for everything you're doing. I love being friends with you. You're so much fun. Same, buddy. You well. Bye bye now. So holding it is to be bright off.