Marc Benioff, the co-founder and chief executive of $262bn software giant Salesforce, at all times has rather a lot to say.
The decabillionaire is Silicon Valley’s arch salesman and a ubiquitous figure in San Francisco. His 61-storey tower dominates the skyline and Dreamforce annual conference takes over the town for every week in September, where he’s flanked by celebrities like Will.i.am and Matthew McConaughey.
Benioff’s fortune has allowed him to grow to be a serial angel investor and mentor to dozens of entrepreneurs in tech. He worked under Larry Ellison at Oracle for a decade before establishing the cloud software group in 1999. In 2018, he and his wife Lynne bought Time magazine from Meredith Corporation for $190mn in money.
Most recently, he has bet the longer term of Salesforce on artificial intelligence, counting on digital agents to revolutionise all the pieces from customer support to produce chain management.
In this chat with Stephen Morris, the Financial Times’ San Francisco bureau chief, Benioff discusses how AI is disrupting work and each aspect of our lives. The audio of the conversation is included.
Stephen Morris: Marc, you’ve been around Silicon Valley and the Bay Area for a really very long time. You were born here, you run one in every of San Francisco’s most visible corporations, and have a greater perspective of what’s happening straight away in technology than almost anyone else. So how will you characterise this moment, with AI looking set to disrupt almost every industry world wide. It’s an exciting but overwhelming moment.
Marc Benioff: Well, you’re right. Our industry hits these moments. Every at times, there are these Steve Jobs moments where an entire latest a part of the industry gets invented. So, it could possibly be Tom Watson with the mainframe, it could possibly be Steve Jobs with the notebook computer, it could possibly be Marc Andreessen with the browser. We’re in a moment where we see a level of innovation and capability and funding, and all of the magic of Silicon Valley.
You’re seeing it first-hand. You have to be thrilled to be in Silicon Valley because you may’t understand it unless you’re right there seeing what’s happening. And that magic is occurring mostly in San Francisco, which is form of cool. It is a giant, big deal.
SM: So, the flip side of that’s, all the cash, hype (and) guarantees: you’ve been through bubbles before; is there any a part of you that worries that AI is just the most recent iteration of this?
MB: If you don’t have all those components, you’re not going to get the breakthrough. Because you’re going to should throw rather a lot against the wall before you work out what sticks. And that’s the magic. So you’re like, “wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense. These 10,000 corporations just got funded, and only 100 of them are good.” But you’ve to fund all of them to get to the 100.
We saw that in the web revolution — we didn’t know who was going to be Google and who was going to be Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. It’s a progression. Tactics are going to dictate strategy over time. But you’re in a moment now where there is a large cycle. If you’re not getting a hype cycle or funding cycle — or you would call it a bubble, you would call it a whole lot of things — you’re not going to find yourself with the incredible consequence on the opposite side.
SM: You don’t just run Salesforce, you furthermore may run Time magazine. Recently, you place DeepMind founder Demis (Hassabis) on the duvet of your 100 most influential people. He is one in every of the, if not the, foremost scientist and proponent of technology, whether it’s through AlphaFold or the AI Lab DeepMind. He has some pretty stark warnings about what could occur if humans lose control of this technology, or bad actors deploy it maliciously or unwisely. Where do you sit on this ‘Doomer versus Boomer’ AI scale?
MB: Well, I don’t make the editorial decisions on Time magazine, but I do own it. And you’re right, we made Demis one in every of our 100 most influential people on the earth. That might need also been influenced by his Nobel Prize. People like Demis, especially those within the core AI world — it could possibly be (AI pioneer) Geoffrey Hinton, it could possibly be so many others: I actually have an inventory of people who find themselves, a) incredibly progressive, very excited, after which, b) also, hey, there could possibly be a dark side to this technology.
Technology itself is rarely good or bad. It’s what you do with it that matters. All technology will be used for good and bad. And that could possibly be genetic, nuclear or AI technology.
We could list the films that undergo the nice and the bad scenarios. But it’s good to have our eye on all these items. One of the those who I work closely with is Peter Schwartz, who’s our futurist, and he was a key contributor, author on , on , on .
When you take a look at movies like those in regards to the future, yes, there are dark scenarios. That’s how we attempt to work out how you can get to the best place. We should speak about what could go flawed also.
SM: Are you more optimistic than pessimistic?
MB: I’m naturally more optimistic. But I believe that folks do take a look at what these potential dark side scenarios are and make adjustments. Even our friend Elon Musk, who’s form of a tremendous visionary, he began a few years ago with an incredibly dark vision of AI. He’s grow to be more optimistic over time.
So things are consistently changing. It’s how persons are using it and the way they’re adjusting. Look, none of us desire a Hiroshima moment. Nobody wants a moment where the technology is utilized in a horrible way, and other people find yourself dying. That is the worst possible situation. Or a human-engineered virus that finally ends up killing a whole lot of people. Nobody wants these items, and no person wants a dark AI scenario either, where you lose autonomous weapon systems.
People wish to be pleased and healthy and maintain their children and their families. I do know you do, and I do. And that’s what we would like. We wish to be sure that that technology is used for good. But there are a whole lot of different actors on the earth, you recognize that.
SM: You have made a giant bet along with your own company on AI. We’re not talking about killer robots or genetically engineered viruses here, but you, last 12 months, relaunched it under this brand Agentforce. I’m wondering how that’s going. There’s a whole lot of talk in regards to the potential of the technology and a whole lot of questions on the revenue generated on all sides of the equation, from the model builders to those deploying agents. Are you seeing meaningful customer pick-up and a tangible increase in your revenues in consequence?
MB: We are. We’re constructing a multibillion-dollar business on this straightforward idea, which is we’re seeing what will be a multitrillion-dollar opportunity in digital labour. That’s unfolding before our very eyes. This concept that the world will find yourself spending $3tn to $12tn on types of technology, including agents such as you mentioned but in addition robots and others, to supply digital labour, to usher on this latest world of abundance: that’s a really real idea.
SM: Could it even be a threat to what you are promoting model? For an extended time we’re really locked in to big corporations through (customer relationship management) systems selling software as a service. You helped corporations organise their data and provided them with software solutions. We’re attending to the purpose now where you may ask AI to design a chunk of software or piece of code. You can provide it access to your organization’s data, direct to one in every of these model start-ups, form of obviating the necessity to buy these big systems, which for years have underpinned what you are promoting. When you began Salesforce in 1999, you said it was the top of software. How are you fascinated about this moment? Could or not it’s the top of SaaS (software as a service)?
MB: It’s at all times the top of something and the start of something latest. But you hit on it while you said these agents are going to have access to all your organization’s data. And for our customers, banks, insurance firms, governments, tech corporations, media corporations, they’re all managing their data. And that data is a federated resource. Federated means connected, a resource inside their company where they’ve connected these data sources together. Because inside a giant company, you don’t have success if that AI isn’t fed with the best data.
SM: One of the problems that a whole lot of persons are concerned about on the more social side is that actually there’s a whole lot of productivity, and potentially a whole lot of money to be made, through selling corporations these agents. But there are going to be some job losses over the subsequent decade as these models and agents grow to be more capable. Do you think that government and society is doing enough to organize for this upheaval?
MB: I don’t know if it’s an upheaval. I might say that it will be important to understand that, when latest technologies appear, there will be changes within the workforce. And this one is not any different, especially once we talk in regards to the emergence of digital labour: you would have fundamental productivity increases in GDP without adding more people. That hasn’t happened too again and again in history, in order that’s very exciting.
That can get to a brand new level where a whole country could also be more successful and more productive because they’ve deployed the best level of capability. You talk in regards to the US going through this transformation, wanting to bring back more manufacturing than ever. It’s going to have to come back back through digital labour because we don’t have people to placed on those factories. So it’s going to should be a robotic and an agentic layer to make those factories more successful and deliver those products.
You’ve been in a Waymo and so have I. There was nobody driving. I’m sure the primary time you were in there, you’re going, “wait a minute, what’s happening?”
You can call the automobile, it comes and picks you up. There is not any one within the Uber, it’s called a Waymo, and off it goes. It’s a robot on wheels. That’s digital labour. This concept that our society goes to vary with AI and transformation, that’s happening, and we have now to be ready for it. We should take into consideration what those implications are. And we shouldn’t attempt to hide those conversations. We should say, yes — similar to it might need gone from the horse and buggy to the automobile, to the taxi driver, to the Uber driver, to the Waymo.
SM: You touched on the most important topic on the earth: tariffs and the economic policy of the second Trump administration. US tech corporations, including yours, have enjoyed a de facto global dominance for many years now, based on the ideas of free markets and globalisation.
Is there a danger to incumbents, resembling yourself, that the shock and awe of those tariffs, the policy flip-flops, the attacks on all the principle of globalisation, the singling out of China, will result in a general lack of confidence of the remainder of the world in American decision-making and stability?
MB: Every single one in every of our customers has to wrestle with this latest reality, that we have now a democratic system within the US so we will get a brand new president. And that president can are available with different policies and concepts, and that those presidents change over time.
So our customers should be ready to vary. Rarely does a day go by where I’m not helping customers manage their tariff situation. It requires an enormous amount of knowledge management. Guess how they’re going to administer that. They’re going to administer it with our technology. That’s an especially necessary a part of what’s happening.
It’s a shift in where we were and where we’re going. But those shifts are happening everywhere in the world on a regular basis. That’s what makes life more interesting. If all the pieces stayed static, it will be quite boring, and I assume there wouldn’t really be a use for or need for the FT or Time magazine.
SM: Salesforce hasn’t been immune from the market sell-off, and its stock is down 25 per cent this 12 months. Is this just market moves, or is that this also a mirrored image of fears that customers, of each company, each US and international, are beginning to get nervous about spending on this economic environment, and so they might in the reduction of on services?
MB: We’re going to rise and fall with the market, there’s no doubt about that. We delivered 1 / 4 with record revenues and profits, and guidance that was appropriately conservative. Our money flow was as strong because it’s ever been, I believe one in every of the strongest money flows of any company within the history of business.
We should proceed to do what we’re doing, which is making our customers successful. Nothing is more necessary than that, and guiding them through this incredible period of change and transformation. They’re going to construct all types of recent systems and capabilities.
SM: Could you talk more broadly in regards to the changes in politics? Many, but obviously not all, of your peers in Silicon Valley campaigned for Trump from the enterprise capital community. We’ve seen a number of tech CEOs like (Meta’s) Mark Zuckerberg and (Google’s) Sundar Pichai try to rebuild bridges with the brand new president. You’re a Democrat, you’re a giant donor. How do you explain the changing national political environment, but in addition the connection of massive tech with it?
MB: Well, I’m not a Democrat, but I do live in San Francisco. I’ve never been a Democrat, which could surprise you . . . I worked within the Bush administration.
I used to be the chairman of the president’s IT Advisory Committee. That was my round of labor with the presidential administration. I used to be glad to have my time within the barrel with that, and I’m grateful for others who’re willing to do their time now.
In California, it’s heavily Democratic, and in San Francisco. But a few of that would change for a whole lot of the explanations that you simply’re talking about it. Things change, the world changes, political tastes do change. Things have gotten more conservative. People want certain issues addressed that weren’t being addressed by the Democratic party, which is why you saw such a big red wave.
After my time with the Bush administration, I became more independent and decided that I wasn’t going to grow to be a Republican or a Democrat, that I used to be going to be more of an American. When I purchased Time Magazine, it reinforced that for me, because I made a decision I wasn’t going to make political contributions any more.
It’s been a metamorphosis for me. When I believe back, it’s been about 20 years since I used to be working in Washington and dealing on things like cyber security, healthcare and computational sciences. When I look forward now, over those twenty years, it’s a totally different Republican party.
I don’t think I’ve really resonated with either party for quite a while. I’m pleased to be more in the center.
SM: How were you navigating this? Have you been to Mar-a-Lago or the White House yet?
MB: I haven’t done that because I do must keep that political balance. I’ve been cautious on how I’ve approached not only this administration but in addition the last several. Because since I purchased Time magazine, I assumed I needed to be more impartial.
SM: We know journalism is an increasingly difficult job. You’re the owner, not the editor, but you continue to should be sure that the publication you own walks this tightrope between robust, honest and potentially critical coverage, while also not coming under attack from the Trump administration or anti-mainstream media figures like Elon Musk. That’s a difficult path.
MB: Oh, I actually have an excellent story for that. Time magazine has been around for greater than 100 years. We do a Person of the Year. We have one other one called our Time 100. Person of the Year was Donald Trump this 12 months. We have a practice of putting the elected president on the duvet and saying he’s the Person of the Year, since it’s a robust case that he’s.
I can’t inform you what number of indignant emails I got from friends saying that I must have never done such a thing. And, in fact, they’re very big, heavy Democrats. When we did that Person of the Year cover, we sent one in every of our greatest photographers to Mar-a-Lago, our editor, our CEO, an entire team. We made sure it was a wonderful cover, perhaps one in every of our greatest ever.
If you go to Mar-a-Lago, which I haven’t done: friends of mine have sent photographs of partitions of Time magazine covers. I believe Donald Trump will soon be on Time’s cover greater than another human in history.
That concept that it doesn’t matter what we write — and I’m sure you’ve this experience yourself — you’re accused of being too left or too right.
I just ignore it. Our editors do a remarkably good job. We wish to be objective. We wish to be more centrist. I’m sure that because a few of them are in New York City, they’re more left-leaning than they realise. But it’s hard to be a journalist today and never be aligned with one political party or the subsequent. And yet, that must be a key goal of being a part of a significant media organisation.
SM: One of your higher qualities, from a journalistic perspective, is your outspoken nature. And there are a couple of issues you haven’t sat on the fence on. You’ve been critical of a few of your rivals’ products, specifically Microsoft Copilot, which is their version of an agent, based on OpenAI’s GPT models. You flat out called it Clippy 2.0, which ruffled quite a couple of feathers in Redmond, with one in every of their executives firing back: “Marc doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
You talk ceaselessly in regards to the breakdown within the OpenAI and Microsoft Data Centre relationship. Tell me what’s happening here. What’s your beef with Satya (Nadella)?
MB: I noticed that those executives stopped saying those things when it turned out that what I used to be saying was right. There are a few belongings you’re hitting on, probably two of a very powerful. Number one, you’re right, Microsoft did disappoint a whole lot of customers with Copilot. It looked more like Clippy, customers didn’t find value in it.
In the developer productivity area we saw this incredible latest company Cursor appear out of nowhere. In the center of Silicon Valley, you saw OpenAI announce they’re going to purchase Cursor’s competitor, Windsurf, for $3bn. This is because Microsoft’s Copilot and GitHub also failed, so it didn’t deliver the extent of productivity that it could have.
The second point which you hit on was this concept that Microsoft is only a ChatGPT reseller. That’s their AI strategy at its very core. They’ve grow to be very frustrated with that. So they hired Mustafa Suleyman, Demis’s partner in DeepMind, to run a brand new Microsoft AI division, to construct a brand new model, which is a component of their Prometheus programme. This concept that they’re going to have their very own models, and never going to have ChatGPT at the guts of Copilot.
And you saw it also play out where Sarah Friar, who’s a former Salesforce executive, now the (chief financial officer) of OpenAI, did a presentation at a Goldman Sachs conference. She laid out a stack diagram, which is the normal tech way of explaining your strategy. In the info centre level and the appliance level and the API level and the model level, there wasn’t any Microsoft software in any respect. And the Azure data centres weren’t even mentioned.
I noticed that Microsoft’s executives (have) stopped saying I don’t know what I used to be talking about. It’s all playing out right in front of our eyes that there’s a huge breach between Microsoft and OpenAI. It’s a full proximal rupture. And it’s not coming back together.
SM: Within that, there’s a bigger criticism. You’re saying that these large language models, whether or not they’re built by Anthropic or Google or OpenAI, have gotten increasingly commoditised? Customers ultimately don’t care which model they’re using. They consistently leap over one another in capabilities and league tables. OpenAI, specifically, has a $300bn valuation, and a number of the others usually are not far behind. Then you’ve the astronomical sums being spent on data centres, power and the opposite infrastructure needed. Are you fearful a couple of bubble in that exact side of the tech sector? And if it pops, what’s the collateral damage?
MB: This is one of the crucial misunderstood elements of this complete AI revolution, which is the role of the model. AI has got to where it’s during the last twenty years through open source. Salesforce is a large contributor to the body of labor, including the prompt engineering and other critical parts of those model technologies. Open source has made all of this possible. It is the driving force of the innovation.
To that time, let me add that DeepSeek might be probably the most fundamental transformation this 12 months. This incredible (Chinese) model got here along, an open source model with an MIT licence, which implies it’s mainly free, and you may put it in your product. And Salesforce, for instance, could easily do that and reduce our cost of using our model by 90 per cent because they got here up with very progressive latest ways to deploy models that can save corporations billions.
The current commercialised models had not provide you with these approaches. They were moving to those. It’s a metamorphosis from a technical model called transformer to a different technical model called MOE (mixture of experts) that’s like, “wow, if we do that, we’re going to avoid wasting a whole lot of money”.
It’s forcing other corporations — not only Meta but all of them — to have their very own open source model. Quite a lot of this magic and capability is accessible without cost in open source. And so that you’re right while you say, “hey, don’t you think that that these corporations needs to be fearful about this or that piece?” But at one level, they provide an open source-capable platform that’s perhaps interchangeable. At one other, they provide a consumer service that’s branded.
I exploit ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, You.com, which I actually have an investment in. There’s one other one called Anthropic that Salesforce has an investment in, their product known as Claude. And then we make a few of them available inside our product Slack (which Salesforce acquired in 2021). But you don’t even know which one we have now there. We just pick the one which’s best for us and our customers.
The model will increasingly be a commodity. They’re all mostly doing the identical thing. I’m sure an impartial observer would agree with that. And they’re following one another inside six months. The corporations are great. I’m thrilled they’re doing the work, and it’s an accelerant on AI. But the final word accelerant is that the overwhelming majority of the work has been in open source.
SM: Now, your first job after graduating was for Larry Ellison, Oracle. He became form of a mentor to you over a few many years. He’s made a giant bet on Sam Altman and OpenAI alongside (Masayoshi) Son of SoftBank. Are you in touch? Do you continue to chat about AI and business? And what do you make of this Stargate partnership to spend half a trillion dollars on data centres in the subsequent three to 4 years?
MB: An enormous mentor for me, Larry Ellison. Incredible person. I began my very own software company in highschool. Then, I worked at Apple. I wrote a number of the first assembly language natively on the Macintosh in 1984. And then in 1986, I went to work for Oracle for 13 years. He had a big impact on my life and taught me all types of wonderful things that I still use.
We talked about Mar-a-Lago in Florida. He lives right there, in the guts of all the pieces that’s happening. It’s quite amazing. I’m just stunned. He’s 80 years old, and he’s as progressive and as pioneering as I’ve ever seen. And you’re right, he just announced this latest Stargate data centre, where he’s going to assist Sam Altman separate from Microsoft, and offer him the technology platform and the info centre platform.
That concept that he found this company, Crusoe, who was constructing this data centre in Abilene, Texas, after which helped, together with his friend Masa Son who runs SoftBank in Japan, to place together the $500bn in a partnership with OpenAI. No one saw that coming. And it was a White House announcement. It was a surprising thing. Only Larry Ellison could have pulled it off. I’m as big a fan and admirer of his as ever.
SM: Do you think that there’s an inherent risk? You were early in saying there’s a whole lot of money and power going into these data centres. But we also see analyst reports every week saying Microsoft, Amazon, Google are pulling back on this and that data centre. There does appear to be a softening and real concern about overspending.
MB: We talked about this in Davos. It’s all played out, similar to we thought it was going to, which is the models are commodities. They’re going to be relegated to certain consumer services. Enterprises are going to have their pick of the litter when it comes to selecting what’s best for them. It’s going to get dropped down into this line of business solution.
Our job at Salesforce is to make those solutions, not only help them pick the best technology but to future-proof them. They’re selecting our products and platform so that they don’t should make that model decision. They’re going to have the opportunity to decide on what model they need over time and alter it in the event that they run it on the Salesforce platform.
That’s the guts of how Agentforce is built. I’ve put my philosophy into my technology as well, in order that my customers won’t get burned as winners and losers are chosen by the market over time.
