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Big Technology Podcast
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Has Thoughts on AI Agents, Automation, and The Future of Your Job
00:49:47
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- [00:00]
Marc Benioff
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is here to talk about AI agents and plenty more. That's coming up right after this.
- [00:07]
Michael Kovnat
Hey, I'm Michael Kovnat, host of the Next Big Idea Daily. The show is a masterclass in better living from some of the smartest writers around. Every morning, Monday through Friday, we'll serve up a quick 10 minute lesson on how to strengthen your relationships, supercharge your creativity, boost your productivity and more. Follow the Next Big Idea Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Have you been feeling the effects of stress, burnout or anxiety at work? Listen to the Anxious Achiever podcast to rethink the relationship between your career and your mental health. Get the Anxious Achiever wherever you find your podcasts and walk away with practical advice you can implement today.
- [00:51]
Marc Benioff
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today because we are thrilled to be joined by Mark Benioff, the CEO and co founder of Salesforce. Been hoping to speak with him for a long time and we're finally doing it today. Mark, welcome to the show.
- [01:09]
Michael Kovnat
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [01:12]
Marc Benioff
So I've been deep in your interviews, your keynotes, your presentations over the past couple of weeks, trying to prepare for this, trying to think about what you're up to at Salesforce. And actually what's interesting is through the technology decisions that you've made, you're actually making a pretty strong statement on labor. And what I mean by that is I think there's a common view that we're effectively efficient on labor, that everybody in their jobs is doing about the best that they can be doing, they're as productive as they can be, and if you give their tasks to, let's say, AI, they'll be gone. Your approach with Salesforce, especially as you've rolled out agents and we're going to get into that as effectively, that's completely wrong. And tell me if I'm right on this, but basically what you're saying is we're nowhere near our capacity in our current jobs because so much of our work is spent on drudgery. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to automate and I'm going to extend a lot of what people are doing and you're going to see that it's not going to lead to job loss, but it's going to lead to a more efficient ability to work, an extension of the way that we work. What do you Think about that thought or that takeaway from what you've been up to.
- [02:25]
Michael Kovnat
Well, I mean, it's been now a few months that we've really been able to start talking about what we're working on. And it's the most excited I've ever been about the software industry. And I think you're kind of touching the third rail of what's going on, which is that we are building software that just isn't helping companies manage and share information, which is kind of what we've been doing for the last three or four decades. But we're really going to provide software that is really a very much an equivalent of labor. And I think that is a big thought that we really see unlimited labor and the idea of an unlimited workforce and the level of abundance that that can create for our companies and ourselves and what that can start to mean for our society. And we can talk about some examples that I already see happening with our customers. But we're definitely at an incredible new moment, a new horizon for business. This is an opportunity for us to really look at what is possible with technology and how it really unleashes a new capability within business itself.
- [03:34]
Marc Benioff
And look, we're going to touch on agents. But I want to go back to the point here, which is I want to get your thought really on the productivity of people. You know, we've gone from the industrial era where we're creating widgets, right? Someone creates a, with a, someone creates an idea and then everybody's just executing. Then we went to the knowledge economy where it's like supposed to be about knowledge, but still so much of our day is effectively making those widgets. It's filling out reports, it's moving data from a spreadsheet to another. And this is sort of like the most low hanging fruit. It could also be creating plans, right? Like sometimes that stuff that we, you know, feel as value add is, takes very little ingenuity. No insult to the marketing planners out there. I used to be one. So can you talk a little bit about what you're feeling is there? Because you're building this set of automation tools with Salesforce, you must feel like there's opportunity out there to make labor better, more productive, more efficient.
- [04:29]
Michael Kovnat
Well, let's take specific examples and try to tell some stories and see if we can inspire people with these stories. And you can't really tell, but I'm wearing a boot here on my right.
- [04:39]
Marc Benioff
Foot because I know we're going to the medical example. Yeah, let's do it.
- [04:42]
Michael Kovnat
Couple months ago I'm almost done with the boot, but it's been an interesting experience. And I'm sure that all of us have had lots of different experiences with the healthcare industry in the United States. And look, healthcare is the largest industry in the United States. That's number one. And we all know that in the United States, we're very much our own advocate for our health. So think about it like this. I'm going in to have my boot scanned. You know, my boot, my ankle, my Achilles scanned. And they say to me, hey, lay here, we're going to do this, that the other thing, and a couple things. We're going to use this contrast and you're going to want to flush this out of your body. You're going to drink eight glass of water over the next day or two. You understand that? Yes. And we're giving you this, the meds here, and you're going to take those and you'll finish them, won't you? Of course. And then you really don't hear from anybody for a month or two. And so whatever the rehab instructions they're giving you or the medication instructions they're giving you, or drinking the water instructions that they're giving you, you're really on your own. You're your own advocate, you're in charge of your health. And no one is exactly going to call you the next day and say, did you drink the water? Did you take the drugs? Did you do you are feeling okay? Do you need to come back for another scan? Do you need an appointment with your doctor? Do you need your labs redone? Because there aren't enough people to do that. You go and talk to any major hospital or medical institution. I don't. You know, I work with UCSF in San Francisco. It's a great institution even there, and it's one of the largest employers in the city. There just aren't enough people to do the jobs. I mean, these are jobs where patients need very specific detailed coaching and information and ideas. And how are you going to provide that? And the answer is with technology. That software has really gotten to the point where software can deliver another level of the workforce and agents, like we're calling, or an agentic layer on top of ucsf. You know, so that as I'm interacting with ucsf, not only do I have to wait for somebody to call me back or to actually get an appointment with a doctor, but I'm interacting with that agentic layer and it's able to kind of mitigate for me on all the medical information. But Also all the UCSF services and all the scheduling and all the things that I really want to get done with ucsf. So that idea that even in our largest industry, we don't have enough people to really achieve the healthcare, or that you could really have not just an advocate for yourself, but a guide that would help you become healthier, that idea, that's a big thought. And when you start to apply to other industries like financial services and how you're managing your wealth or education and how you're managing, you know, how your children are being educated or even, you know, how you're dressed across the board, who are you really working with to kind of achieve your goals? And in many cases, there's going to be an opportunity to do that through this agentic layer and through agents and this idea that you're going to have a limitless workforce and that you're going to have a level of abundance, not only as a consumer, but on the flip side, as a CEO, that my company can do things that it couldn't do before, where it was trapped by labor. So this is the unlock, this is the opportunity, and this is the new horizon for business.
- [08:11]
Marc Benioff
Yeah. And I'm going to let the labor angle go in a second. But I have to keep talking about it, because the way that you describe what's happening in medicine is not AI replacing a doctor, it's a doctor simply cannot get on the phone with you. Because honestly, and at least in the US Their time, and probably everywhere, their time is so prescribed by insurance and billing that they have to be seeing as many patients as possible and filling out as much paperwork as possible. And you can't, you don't have time to be a doctor anymore. And what this could do is it doesn't replace. It just enables the workers to be able to do the activities that they do want to do otherwise. In fact, we did a story in big technology not long ago, speaking with Mayo Clinic, because remember the example of how radiology was going to be totally automated by computer vision? Well, they had 11 computer vision models working at the Mayo Clinic and they're hiring radiologists. That's the future I think that we're looking at.
- [09:07]
Michael Kovnat
Well, that's exactly right. That this is about humans with agents working together. And that idea that the labor force and productivity is going to expand because of that is real in the third quarter. And in 2024, we haven't had a labor force expansion in the United States. It's stagnant. But we had a productivity expansion in the third quarter. And economists are attributing it to the growth and expansion of artificial intelligence and what's happening right now as tools that we're all using. So we're able to expand productivity, which is linked to gdp, and we're able to expand our labor force without hiring more people. This has never been done before in the history of business. So we are definitely at a threshold moment. We are able to look at what's happening in a new way and come up with new ideas. In the past several weeks, as we've been rolling this out to our customers and we have put this in 135,000 Salesforce implementations, customers just need to turn it on. You know, we're talking to so many customers. But some of the folks that I'm talking to are a lot of bank CEOs. And bank CEOs are interesting because when you talk to bank CEOs here in the US or maybe Canada or Australia, in many cases they've expanded their business with lots of new products, but they haven't expanded geographically. Maybe you see a Canadian bank expanding in the United States, but rarely do you really see these banks really attempting to go global. And the reason why is because of the labor issues associated with going into new markets or providing very high quality financial services and capabilities in new geographies that can benefit them. The same analogy could be in healthcare, by the way. But this idea that those banks could expand and grow, when I am actually able to tell this exact story to a bank CEO and say, you're not going to have to hire those people to expand your US bank into the uk, that you can take your trusted brand, your systems, your ideas, and yes, you might have some people on the ground, but it's not going to be absolutely constrained to the labor force that you're hiring, that this is a new opportunity for you that is very exciting. And I think we can start to reconceptualize business itself. The products that we're in, the geographies that we're in, the size of our workforce, that we're working with humans and also agents together. Just like you said, this is a big thought. This is not science fiction. This is not the future, this is now, this is the present. And we're seeing some great examples.
- [11:35]
Marc Benioff
And whenever I get optimistic about this stuff, I always have to like bring myself back to reality and say, okay, the best companies, like the Mayo Clinic, of course they're gonna use this to be better at diagnostic. They are gonna expand and they're gonna be better at what they do. But then there's a lot of like bottom line driven, every company's bottom line. But like ruthlessly bottom line driven companies, short thinking companies that basically want to milk the margins. They might use this stuff to really cut workforces in a big way. You worried about that?
- [12:03]
Michael Kovnat
Well, for sure, people could rebalance their workforce. Let me give you an example. As the CEO of a large company. Yes, I'm a very large company, 75,000 people. We're a Fortune 100 company. We're the second largest software company in the world. We're the number one largest provider of CRM and over 75,000 people. One of the things that we do is we interoperate with our customers, 135,000 companies who basically ask us about 2 million questions a year. And they do that online and they also do that on the phone. And it's not unlike the medical organizations that we're working with, like the one that I was just talking about. They do 24 million basically technology based inquiries a year and 12 million phone calls. So all of us have this mix of phone calls and emails. And you know, we've tried our best to kind of use deflection systems to kind of reduce the emails and reduce the phone calls. But it tends to be a very kind of constraining thing and can start to take up a lot of your employees time, energy, focus and it's not the best use of their time. So now that we've deployed AgentForce internally and if you go to help.salesforce.com you'll see Agent Force running or if you go to the front of our website, you'll see Agent Force running in the United States. And then you know, we can say, all right, we've got maybe 8 or 10,000 people who are in support who are working on this. Some number of them now are going to get freed up to be able to do other things. And let me tell you, we're an incredible, fast growing, exciting company with a lot of opportunities. I can rebalance my workforce and put those people who have those very good skills working with customers to do other things. They can be business development representatives, sales development representatives, they can do lots of other things. And so we can rebalance, you know, what we're doing so that we can grow, we can get more market share, we can innovate. We're obviously fighting the number one software company in the world, which is Microsoft. So we want to be able to do more and expand and go faster. And that's very important to us.
- [14:08]
Marc Benioff
Right. And I Guess the best run companies are going to take that route. But then I worry about the ones that aren't run well. But let's get deeper into this agent force rollout that you guys have been doing. So, you know, there's this like, what is Salesforce meme. I think it's pretty clear it's a system that will enable companies to do customer service sales. I used it when I was in sales, locking all of our interactions, letting my manager know what I was going to close and what I wasn't, which is probably why I ended up moving away from sales. There's also marketing and there's commerce. So you have all the data that is within an organization in terms of like the way that they're interacting with customers and prospects. And so for you, it totally makes sense to have create agents within a company based off of AI that let's say I'm interacting with customer service. They can actually go into the records and go into the policies and then decide what to offer me or what not or help resolve my issue. But when I first heard that Salesforce was building agents, I said, well, that's kind of a slimmed down version of what I thought agents were going to be, which is I always thought that agents were going to be something that comes from me, the individual, as opposed to something that effectively interacts on a company's behalf to better handle my needs. And so I'm curious, do you, do you agree that your version of agents is maybe smaller than the broader vision of agents? And if so, why did you decide to go that route outside of maybe it was just convenient to do it as the company you are?
- [15:37]
Michael Kovnat
Well, Salesforce, you know, helps companies connect with their customers in nuisance. That's our fundamental mission. And we do that first of all through automating every customer touch point. So that could be managing sales like you mentioned, or customer service and call centers or marketing and emails. It could be their commerce on their website, it could be their analytics, it could be slack, a tableau. These are all connection points between companies and their customers. And we're managing and sharing that information using a sharing model and a security model to help our customers do that, whether they're in like we talked about, healthcare, financial services or technology or consumer product goods, et cetera. So that first layer is, are we automating all those touch points? Because for years we've been automating their sales sales forces and service forces and marketing forces and, you know, their commerce forces. And now you're right, we're about to automate their agent forces. So first step is automate all the customer touch points. So a great example is Disney. I love talking about Disney. That Disney, you know, we run the Disney Store. So if you go to store.disney.com, you know that Salesforce, and if you go to the call center at Disney plus, that's Salesforce. So the folks that are managing the sales for the real estate and the cruise ships and the all the different customer interactions are all Salesforce, including the Disney guides and the parks are all Salesforce. They're all be using tools from Salesforce to manage the customer information. And the second part of that story is not only automating all those customer touch points, we're building the data cloud. We're helping put all that data together in an amalgamated way, including the federation, or it means the connectivity with other data sources in the company. And why that's important is as we get into this next level of AI, it needs the data to be intelligent. It can't just run off of a large language model, which is an intelligence model. It has to be what we call grounded or connected into the customer data itself. And not just the customer data, but the metadata. The customer data is like your phone number. The metadata is that it's a phone number. So metadata is. We know it's a phone number. Here it is. This is the customer. Now, the LLM, or the large language model, the AI can put it all together and be smarter. Now that you have all the data and the AI, the top layer is the agentic layer or the agent layer. So you have the agents that are able to reach out, and you also have the database and you have all the automated touchpoints. All of this for Salesforce is one piece of code. It's our core platform. It's operated on by what we call our trailblazers, who are Salesforce administrators. There's millions of them all over the world. Now, let's say we're back to Disney and we're in the parks and we're having this great experience and we're using a Disney guide and we're cutting the lines and we're having a great time with our kids and we're doing our best and we're really enjoying the day. And we're on our way to Galaxy Edge, which is Star wars land, and the rise of the resistance ride that we love. It's super high tech. But the ride breaks and all of a sudden the agent contacts our guy and says, hey, we know you're on the way to Rise of the Resistance with Mark. But that ride is broken. And a couple things you need to know. I just looked at flow control across the entire park. I also just looked at Mark's ride history. And I put these two things together. And the ride that Mark needs to go on next is Toontown. We just opened it up. It's the same technology as Rise Resistance. Mark is going to love it. Take a right turn, walk five minutes, you're going to be there. There's no line. You're going to go right inside. And that idea that the agent could do something that that guide could not do, that is look across flow control and my ride history and instantaneously make a recommendation. And then the guide says, hey, Mark, let's go to Toontown now. And we have that great experience. That's everything we're talking about. That is agents and humans working together to drive customer success. And this is the big fundamental thought of how are we going to interoperate with these agents in this physical world? And I think it's another really great example.
- [19:50]
Marc Benioff
Do you anticipate that consumers are going to have their own bots and they're going to interact with AI bots and it's just going to be AI dialogue time forever?
- [19:58]
Michael Kovnat
I think that you already can start to see that now on your phone, where I have, like about a dozen of these AIs on my phone from all these companies. They're kind of commodities at this point. You know, Google has gem, there's chatgpt, there's u dot com. There's Perplexity, there's Co Pilot. There's all these things. You know, they're just on your phone, you're just talking to basically the same data set through a very similar algorithm. And it's a commodity product. At some point, you're going to be able to set up preferences and do things with those, you know, tools, which you can't do today, where you're going to be able to, like, ask them to run projects for you. Hey, I'm going away for Christmas. I need a hotel. I'm looking at different options. Maybe I could go take my kids on some kind of incredible tour. Give me 20 ideas and you come back the next day. And it says here, I researched this, I looked at it, I laid this out. Here's the ideas for your Christmas vacation. That's one idea. But now let's say I'm one of those vendors. I'm Disney, I'm Hilton, I'm Marriott, I'm Ford, I'm General Motors, you know, I'm United Airlines, I'm American Airlines, I'm whoever it is, you're going to interoperate with us and our company as well. And you might do that through an agent. Right now you might just be talking directly to us because that's the most trusted path. And we're in a new world where yes, your technology that you're using on your phone is going to be smarter and also the technology of these companies is going to be smarter and eventually they're going to interconnect and collaborate and share and help you to achieve your goals and achieve that level of abundance that we're talking about without all of a sudden having another person in your life who's going to make all those things happen. You're going to be able to have it all done with the technology and the agent.
- [21:47]
Marc Benioff
Yeah, I think it'll be all fun and games until, you know, my bot and some companies bot, you know, they start to fall in love with each other, they talk with each other. They don't do what we need.
- [21:57]
Michael Kovnat
But we saw a minority report like 20 years ago.
- [22:00]
Marc Benioff
Exactly.
- [22:01]
Michael Kovnat
Minority Report and War Games and her and you know, Space Odyssey, all these things. So, you know, we, the like Minority Report and War Games was one of the writers and folk creative people who were involved is actually our futurist at Salesforce. And that, that idea that we've seen a lot of that play out in science fiction, we can see where that could potentially go, but we could also see where we are right now. And this is just an incredible moment that we're living a new part of the future and we can start working with technology in a whole new way.
- [22:34]
Marc Benioff
Definitely. Okay. Disneyland question. When you're on the rides, hand on the rails or hands in the air.
- [22:41]
Michael Kovnat
For me, I'm 65 and £300, so I'm just holding on and hopefully not get thrown out of anything.
- [22:47]
Marc Benioff
That is a good strategy. Your agents are, if I'm right, $2 per conversation. The copilots are like 30amonth. So explain to me how the math is going to work for companies that are spending two. I mean they have lots of conversations with customers. You were talking earlier just about how many times you're interacting with customers. That seems like it's going to get pretty expensive pretty quickly. How's this going to work?
- [23:13]
Michael Kovnat
You know, our customers who are buying from us, they've traditionally paid like a per user fee, like $1,000 a year to use our sales cloud or our service cloud. And then of Course, when we moved into new products like our commerce cloud, or we call our sandboxes, where you can kind of, you know, build your products or, you know, even our data cloud, we started to do what we call consumption pricing. You pay as you go or pay as you use, or pay, you know, pay how you're interacting. And so for our customers who are now using our agent platform, they're paying between, call it $0.50 per conversation to $2 per conversation, depending on the volume of convers that they're doing. And this is, I think, very attractive to them because the comparison might be a customer interaction today that's costing them $7 or $10 or $20 or in some case I talked to a customer that the customer interaction was costing them $700. So this is a very different level of interactivity. And our job is to provide value as well as the trust, safety, and security, privacy associated with our technology. And that's kind of the next generation of the pricing model as well. So it's definitely a new technology model, it's a new business model. And we couple it with our new philanthropic model. You know, 25 years ago, we put 1% of our equity, profit, and time into a 551C30 foundation. That was easy because we had no equity, profit or time or people or anything, right? But Today we've done 10 million hours of volunteerism. We ran 100,000 nonprofits for free on our service. We've given away about a billion dollars. And we also run a lot of these nonprofits and NGOs, and we meet these incredible folks, and one of them is a NGO called College Possible. And College Possible, which you can kind of find on the net, is amazing where they kind of help get the college advisor going in the high school to work with your kid to kind of say, hey, what are you interested in? And we're building a profile of your kid, and here's the profile of the college, and the counselor is there, and boom, all of a sudden you get a college recommendation. And the way College Possible works is that, well, do you. How many. How many college counselors do you think there are in California? Per. One, basically, per a hundred kids, maybe one, there's one per 500. Okay, so there's not too many. And it's a little bit like what we're talking about in the labor thing. Like, there just isn't enough college counselors. And so you're kind of like wondering, hey, is my kid going to get that counseling in high school or not? So all of a Sudden College Possible using Agent Force. And they're building an agent and an agentic layer on College Possible. Look, they already have the data and the metadata, and they're already automated all the customer touch points. So they were able to do this, like in a day. And all of a sudden, they're able to take their human workers and extend them.
- [26:09]
Marc Benioff
So you're saying basically, big thought.
- [26:12]
Michael Kovnat
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:13]
Marc Benioff
That it's worth it to spend that $2 per conversation because you're getting so much more productivity.
- [26:18]
Michael Kovnat
I think you're getting something that you could not get through at any other vehicle.
- [26:23]
Marc Benioff
Yeah. I want to ask you about the future of business software, because there's been a meme that's come up, we've talked about on the show that maybe business software is just going to change. And instead of being in Excel, you just put all your numbers in a chatbot and you talk to your chatbot instead of Excel. And some people have suggested, you know, Marc Benioff is so out front about this because he sees that the future of business software may end up looking very different from a salesforce, where you have all your data somewhere, but you have a proactive agent itself that's sharing it with you and connecting with you and connecting with your customers. So do you think that we're going to see that fundamental shift in business software? And is this part of it? Is part of this a reaction to that?
- [27:08]
Michael Kovnat
Well, we could. But let's talk about where we are right now and what could happen. You know, we manage our data on something called disk drives, and we have these disk drives, and that's where we store our data. And then there's an operating system, and then on the operating system, there's a database, because all the data has to be kind of logically stored in the database and secure. And there also has to be a sharing model so we know who can see what data and who. What data cannot be seen. We have another vendor, you know, who's delivered some of this technology, Microsoft. And I just saw a story today, just put on my Twitter feed, where.
- [27:43]
Marc Benioff
Like a thousand times you tweeted it.
- [27:45]
Michael Kovnat
Yeah, well, the wrong data got in the wrong hands. And the reason why is because there was no sharing model and the data was not locked up correctly. And that's something that you don't want to have happen, especially like in a regulated industry. Like we talked about healthcare, financial services. Like, for example, my banker can't see your balance, and your banker can't see my balance. And that's how financial services is set up. And that's a security, security and sharing model. So again we have the disk drives, the operating systems, the databases, the security and sharing model. Then we have the apps and then we have the agentic layer. On top of all that, you put a big bow around it and that's how it should work now, how it's going to look and how you're going to interoperate. And I know that you are one of our sales cloud users and you can get on Salesforce today. You go to salesforce.com and see how it interoperates. But if you're in the US right now, we're running a test and if you go on your phone right this very second and you go to salesforce.com you'll see at the bottom right hand side of the screen a little like talking bubble. And if you touch it, we're writing a test with Agent Force right on your phone And Agent Force will come right up and front end our website. And instead of looking around our website and our products and all that, you can say, hey, what do you think about Salesforce? What do you think about Agent Force? How does it work in financial services? How does it compare to that Microsoft copilot? And what we did was we took all of our customer interactivity and all of our product marketing information, all that put in our data cloud and then just unleash that on AgentForce in front of our, you know, WordPress website. And it's, I think a really good example. It's you're not authenticated so it doesn't know who you are. There's no, you know, basically it isn't able to kind of put it together that this is the products you already have. So this is the product that you need. Then if you go to help.salesforce.com you'll see that once you log in as a customer, we're now interoperating with you in a really smart and creative way as well when you're talking to these agents. So these are real examples that you can really get your hands on today to understand what is that agent future going to be like and is it 100% perfect? No. Is it everything that. Is it Minority Report? Is it her? Is it, you know. No. Is it pretty good? It's pretty good actually. I use it every day. I think it's great. And it's a big leap forward, I think for our customers. And I think that idea that customers can have a better relationship with your company because you're going to have an agentic Layer in your company is a.
- [30:16]
Marc Benioff
Real idea, but so you're not really afraid of, let's say, the Klarnas that are saying instead of using business software, we're just going to use.
- [30:22]
Michael Kovnat
I read this, they're a big customer of ours, actually, and they use Slack still.
- [30:25]
Marc Benioff
They said they were canceling.
- [30:27]
Michael Kovnat
Well, I didn't get their cancellation notice. All I saw was a lot of provocative statements. At the same time, they were also writing on LinkedIn about how they're loving Slack and rebuilding it. You know, we have many tools at Salesforce, but look, I'm a big company, so you can just tell me. I have 75,000 employees. Let's take that as an example. Those employees I have an employment record on. I hire them, I pay them a salary, they have stock options, they've got benefits, they have 401k plans. I have different information about them based on how they're doing. They're doing well. They're not doing well. Their performance record. Where do you want me to store all that information? That's all I want to know. Just tell me where you want me to store it. If you have some magical new way to store. Because I'm using disk drives right now. So if you have a new way to store data besides disk drives, I'd like to know about it because it's probably an incredible investment opportunity. But for me, right now, I'm using, you know, I'm using disk drives. I have an app on there called Workday, which I use. I have Salesforce, I have Slack. Like this is what I use. So if there's something else other than that, I need to know. But, yo, there's a lot of people making very provocative statements that they understand the future and they saw movies. So therefore this is what it's going to look like. I'm like, great, I saw the same movie, great movie. Just show me exactly what you're doing. Because I didn't get the alien technology, you know, from the, from the ufo, federal, you know, investigator. I. All I got was the disk drives that I have today. So tell me what you're using.
- [31:58]
Marc Benioff
Well, I messaged Sebastian earlier from Klarna. He's been on the show. No response yet. So we'll have to save that for our next conversation, why don't we?
- [32:05]
Michael Kovnat
He's a great executive, actually.
- [32:06]
Marc Benioff
Yes.
- [32:07]
Michael Kovnat
He's going public. It's amazing.
- [32:09]
Marc Benioff
That's right. And we had a fascinating conversation here about how he's automating with AI. So why don't we talk?
- [32:14]
Michael Kovnat
He's A great person, he's done a lot of great things. But I think that idea, you know, hey, if they have a better way to manage thousands of people, look, they're going public, right?
- [32:23]
Marc Benioff
Yes.
- [32:23]
Michael Kovnat
So they're going public. They're going to have to report their financials. Maybe they have a new way to store financial information. Also, they're going to have to be able to report information on their employee, including all of their employment details. Maybe they have a new way to manage employment information and report. And they're also going to need to know all their customer information, including financial information for regulators. So if they have a better way to do all of that, we want to know exactly what they're doing to manage their employee information, their financial information, their customer information, what the technology, specifically. But if you make a provocative statement and say, listen, the future of software is not what you're using now, it's this great new thing, you have to at least tell us what the great new thing is. Otherwise how are we going to figure it out? We're not like some psychics. And he didn't tell you on the show. I was listening.
- [33:13]
Marc Benioff
Okay, well, speaking of provocative statements, we're going to get to what you said about Microsoft in the second half and also some of your suggestions about social media. We'll be back right after this.
- [33:24]
Michael Kovnat
Hey, I'm Michael Kovnat, host of the Next Big Idea Daily. The show is a masterclass in better living from some of the smartest writers around. Every morning, Monday through Friday, we'll serve up a quick 10 minute lesson on how to strengthen your relationships, supercharge your creativity, boost your productivity and more. Follow the Next Big Idea Daily wherever you get your podcasts.
- [33:47]
Marc Benioff
And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Marc Benioff, the CEO and co founder of Salesforce. Mark, you are a very, let's say, loud and prominent detractor of Copilot by Microsoft. And I hear what you're saying your argument boils down to Copilot is basically just ChatGPT, but it's in Outlook and people aren't loving it. I'm going to counter by saying they put it in everything. They put it in Outlook, they put it in Excel, they put it in PowerPoint, and there are some cases that are just better defined and work better than necessarily the Copilot and Outlook. So two examples, talking to your data in Excel, that seems interesting. It seems like something that you'd be excited about and then being able to generate PowerPoints. Say what you will about PowerPoints, to be able to prompt a PowerPoint presentation that also seems pretty useful. So are you say, are you going to say here that all of it is useless or just like the one part about the chat within, let's say, Outlook?
- [34:53]
Michael Kovnat
Look, number one, you have to remember Microsoft is our competitor and they're the number one software company in the world. We're number two. So my job is to compare, contrast our product to theirs. And in a recent Business Insider report, as well as we saw it on Computer World and we saw it from Gartner and others, they were testing Copilot and what they found and they also heard it from Microsoft employees that information was going into copilot. And while queries were being made, consumers were seeing information that they were not supposed to be seeing. And in one case, somebody saw a CEO's emails. Now, I know as a CEO, I don't want anybody seeing my emails. I only want to have my email seen by me. That's why I'm writing these emails. And not only was this data kind of getting spilled and like, you know, misshared and the security model was kind of, you know, getting misplaced, but customers reporting they just weren't getting value from copilot. And the reason why is what Microsoft basically did was, you're exactly right what you said. They just repackaged OpenAI's product and didn't really integrate it very well and didn't really think from the ground up what it was going to be in its best situation to offer value to the customers. And I think the comparison is agent force. And all of the stories I just told you that are the, you know, basically hundreds or thousands of companies that are deploying AgentForce now and what they're doing with it. And I hope that those are stories that I don't hear about. It's not that, you know, there aren't. Look, there's no finish line when it comes to security or reliability or availability. You know, in enterprise software we know that. But I think my job is to compare and contrast. And I think that when I do talk to reporters, I do ask them to tell me their best copilot story. And I've yet to meet a reporter or even a customer who has defined a huge valuable proposition for Copilot where it's offered value to their company. Maybe Microsoft will pivot like they usually do and fast follow us into this new agentic world, because I think that's really where all the action is going to be.
- [37:00]
Marc Benioff
I'll tell you one Copilot story, but it's not Copilot, it's Claude from Anthropic, but similar idea.
- [37:05]
Michael Kovnat
Great company. Yeah, I'm an investor in the company.
- [37:08]
Marc Benioff
They're great, which I totally understand. And I'm sure they're listening. We talk about them all the time here. I have a running conversation with one Claude who I've now had to like copy the brain and put it into a new cloud because I ran out of characters. It's a diet coach. We talk all day long about what I'm eating, the calories, whether it adheres to my Whole Foods guidance, and then it gives me a grade. Each day we weigh in and we talk about it the next day. And I don't know, do you want to call it a co pilot, a chat instance? It's pretty useful. Well, maybe it will share my details with you.
- [37:40]
Michael Kovnat
It's a great example. It's a great example. And I think that idea that you're able to kind of get some benefit. I even talk. I've, I've been, you know, use these things a little bit as a therapist, I'll have like some psychological issue I'm kind of dealing with in my mind and I'll ask it a crazy question and I've gotten great answers, you know, from it. Or you know, there's so many things you can do with large language models. But let's get clear what large language models are and what they are not. So, you know, large language models really start with this kind of these next generation algorithms that are quite good based on deep learning and these artificial intelligence techniques, a lot of them that came out of Stanford really in the early kind of 2010s, 2012, 2013, had a lot of breakthroughs. Even prompt engineering was invented at Salesforce, which we're very proud of. And then what happened is we started to expand deep learning, bigger and bigger data sets, bigger and bigger compute. And all of a sudden we had generative AI. And really that's the story. And this idea that we now have generative AI made possible by so many interesting companies like you mentioned, for example, that incredible company Anthropic. But also there's other ones, OpenAI and Cohere and you.com and perplexity. And many of them, they're very, all very similar actually right now. So if you go to the App store and you download five or six of them and put them on your phone, I put them all into a folder and try different ones and they can draw pictures and they can answer questions and some of them can talk to you, I think Google's Gemini is amazing. You can talk to it with almost zero latency. It's really cool. So all of that is happening. All right? And that is the kind of current phenomenon where we really start to have the kind of generative AI cool experience. Like, this is really great, right? And the next step is how do we actually connect it into meaningful data sets? Because, like, for you, the next step is, hey, wouldn't that be cool if that was connected to all your medical information in real time and to kind of continue the conversation. Not only are you connected into your medical information and your labs and your scans and your diet and your family history. Okay? But now your doctor's conversations, too. And now you end up in your doctor's office, and it's all right there in front of you in a big screen. And that will be incredible. And we're close to that happening.
- [40:08]
Marc Benioff
Okay, so we have about five minutes left. Switching topics a bit. I want to ask you a media question and I want to ask you an Elon question. Media question first. Are you going to sell Time?
- [40:21]
Michael Kovnat
Well, I love Time. It's been a lot of fun. I really enjoy it. I work on it every day. I've been working on it today all day. All connected to the Elon question. We just published our fifth cover on Elon. Elon just, you know, tweeted and texted me, oh, I don't want any more covers, you know, but he does love the covers. He wants to be of the year. Yeah, he's a great guy. He's doing incredible things. He's brilliant. He's running like 2,000 companies and the US government all at the same time. So, you know, it's like we've never seen anybody like this in our careers. Right? It's just like this person can't be human. Like, how does. What. How is this even possible? But it is. And whatever he's doing, you know, whatever he's drinking, whatever he's eating, whatever drugs he's taking, I guess I want some of them because I've never seen anything like this.
- [41:09]
Marc Benioff
And so on the Time question.
- [41:12]
Michael Kovnat
Oh, I love time. And time's amazing. And, you know, we. We own time. We bought it five years ago and we're doing great with time and we love it.
- [41:22]
Marc Benioff
There's been a bit of a question about the billionaire owned media company moment that we experience. We had, you know, you bought Time, but of course, Bezos bought the Washington Post. Patrick Soon Ching bought the LA Times. I would say you're probably doing the Best of the three. Do you think this was a mistake in error?
- [41:43]
Michael Kovnat
No, I think that, you know, when it comes to what's going on, I can really explain it if you're interested. I think that in the media business, you know, you're like software. You know, I'm working with engineers. And these engineers are all over the world. And it's very much a global experience. My salespeople too. I think that when it comes to our journalists, our journalists tend to be, you know, very much represent their beliefs and their ideas and their visions and their aspirations for their own lives. And a lot of it does come out of certain geographies where they're based. And because of those geos or certain have certain kinds of characteristics, even political characteristics or cultural characteristics, they can kind of permeate out into the journalism itself. So it can be a little bit difficult for maybe a journalist. I'll give you an example in New York and understand exactly what is going on day to day in pick Bangalore, India. Okay. It's two different worlds. It's two different economies, it's two different even languages. It's two different philosophies of life. Everything is completely different. And then add into, let's say, a place. I just was in Jakarta, Indonesia. So you start to look at, well, these are just different mindsets. And I think when journalists are writing, they're writing from their mindset. I'm actually finishing up an article that I'm going to publish next week in Time about all the things that we're talking about right now of labor. And, you know, I'm writing from my perspective as a CEO of a software company. So journalists are writing from their perspectives. And you have to just understand that it's not always going to match exactly your perspective because it may not be where you live, how you grew up, your religion, your philosophy of life, or your mindset. And so that tends to be, I think, a little bit of the conflict. And that's what I see playing out. And I think that we are fortunate in Time that our journalists and our, especially our editor in chief and our CEO and others understand this and they try to upscale how they're thinking about things and say, hey, let's make sure that we don't go too far left or too far right, that we go down the middle. By the way, it's not the history of Time magazine at all. If you go back to the history of Time magazine, which is 100 years, it goes a little bit this way and a little bit that way. And you can look at it. If you just look at the covers or read, you know, the magazine, you'll. You'll see that there was even a political intention. There was even a time when the owner really, the founder, you know, had a very specific political ideology that it was expressing through that. I don't think that that's appropriate based on the current world. You know, we're trying to create a neutral, you know, agnostic, you know, provide a balanced view on both sides. Do we always do that? No, because these are human beings writing these stories and they're going to write it from their perspective. And that's all that's going on. I don't think anybody should be demonized or criticized for this perspective. I think that we should just have a realistic view. You have a lot of experience in the media industry and, you know, how do you see it? Do you think that that's a fair way to look at what's going on, or do you think that there's some other reality?
- [44:50]
Marc Benioff
It's going to be the, I think, look, it's going to be the essential question of journalism forever. It's like how much of your own viewpoint do you insert into what you're doing? Because ultimately your job is to unearth facts. And I think everyone is still trying to figure out, because, you know, there was this view, this sort of front, top, down view, that it should be a certain way and people are still trying to figure out exactly how to do it. Okay, we have like a minute left. I'm just going to ask you quickly, then we can end. I don't want to take too much of your time on, on around the Twitter sale. You texted Elon, happy to talk about, if it's interesting, Twitter as a conversational os, the town square for your digital life. What do you mean by that?
- [45:29]
Michael Kovnat
Well, you can see what Elon has done has been amazing with Twitter, and he's really transformed it and done something that I could have never envisioned. And it wasn't what. When we were talking about buying Twitter, that's not what we were going to do. We were really going to build something that was more of an application development and deployment capability where you really had this kind of same Twitter feeds, but you'd kind of have hypercards in those frames, not just photos. And if you remember hypercards, which came out of the original work in the Macintosh, I worked at Apple in 1984, so I loved HyperCard. You know, that. That idea that you could have apps and an app store and applications and not only have a creator economy and people building incredible, you know, new, you know, videos and dialogues and conversations, but also apps. And that's what I always wanted, apps to be part of the Twitterverse, if you would. And that was a vision that I had, which was a little different. And I talked to Elon about that, but that's not, he's not interested in that. He's really very much on this. Hey, I'm going to open it up to everybody. I'm going to turn everyone on who's turned off before. I'm going to let be absolutely information free for all and no guardrails, and let's just let everyone kind of, you know, work it out. And it's kind of the Hunger Games is what's going on. And I think that that's fine. And everybody knows what it is. And he's doing his thing and, you know, there's section 230 preventing, you know, any kind of, you know, liability for him, so he can just let that roll. And that's not kind of how I looked at it. I had a whole different vision that will never be realized because I did not end up going in that direction, mostly because my investors, I run a public company, did not want me to go into this crazy world that he's, he is doing a very good job actually in. So I, I, I'm not in that world.
- [47:20]
Marc Benioff
Well, Mark, believe it or not, I first asked Salesforce to let me speak with you 12 years ago when I was a reporter for AdAge. We put Larry Ellison on the COVID we wanted to put you on. And I have to say it was worth the wait. It's really great to get a chance to speak with you. And thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [47:36]
Michael Kovnat
Well, I hope it won't be another 12 years. I'm happy to come on your show anytime. Please call or email me anytime or text me.
- [47:42]
Marc Benioff
I'm going to take you up on that.
- [47:44]
Michael Kovnat
Look forward to seeing you soon.
- [47:46]
Marc Benioff
Thank you. All right, everybody. Thank you, Mark, and thanks you all for listening. Thanks to you all for listening. We'll be back on Friday with another show breaking down the news. Until then, we'll see you next time on big technology podcast.