13 hours Ago By Yahoo Finance Video
Developments on the AI front are coming in hot and heavy. OpenAI is eyeing a . Microsoft ( ) is full steam ahead with a Copilot for everything.
Tesla ( ) CEO Elon Musk is whipping up And bumbling lawmakers are still trying to figure out how to regulate the technology before the year 2040. And then there is a tech giant like Salesforce ( ), which is going all in on “ ” to help unleash the power of businesses around the world. Salesforce says its agents could bring in big business and usher in a whole new way of closing deals.
Yahoo Finance executive editor sits down with Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff – a champion of these agents – from inside the company’s annual extravaganza in San Francisco known as Dreamforce. How big is “Agentforce” going to be for Salesforce? Sozzi gets to the bottom of it! For full episodes of Opening Bid, on our website or on your favorite podcast platform. Video Transcript All right, welcome to opening bid.
I'm Yahoo. Finance's executive editor, Brian Sozzi. Now let's make some money and get a lot smarter.
I know we're probably both of those things are going to happen right now. We're, we're in Dream Force, San Francisco. I think this is my fifth Dream Force and a very special guest with us here uh today and that is Sales Force, co founder and CEO Mark Benny off Mark.
Always great to, to see you. Wow, 45,000 people in the Mosconi Center, holy cow, everyone's back, more motivated than ever more inspired. Did you ever think that you'd have 45,000 people today and like, not consistently like this and also just focused on changing people's lives.
You know, we're really showing them how their career can go forward and how they can get to another level on the salesforce platform. And just as we've guided them through the cloud and social and mobile and data and A I, we're now introducing them the world of agents, but it's amazing to see everybody so engrossed and focused on business improvement via technology. It's not like something I see at other events something that look like this.
Our total focus is the success of our customers. And that's why not only are we introducing agent force here, which is going to help them to automate all these amazing things in their company, their sales, their service, their marketing with autonomous agents in a way that they never have been able to before. And they're not going to have to diy it, they're not going to have to buy a model and buy a hyper scalar and buy a database and buy an A I engineer and hook it all up.
We're going to do it. Boom right now on the floor. And at our launch pad, we have hundreds of customers already who are live with these agents.
And this is the first time in the history of our industry that agents have been deployed at scale and we're doing it right here at Dream Force. We talked when you reported earnings about two weeks ago and it was the first time I heard anybody talk about agents. I'm like, what is Mark talking about? But since then, there's been this explosion conversation about the A I wonder why that is, I wonder why, but why they, but I think their vision of the future may be slightly different.
What's your vision for the future? Let's start with that. My vision for the future is that this is A I and what it's meant to be easy, low cost and for all of us to be able to change our businesses. And it's not a science project, it's not an engineering project.
It's something that you and I can do and that you're seeing ordinary people get it done. And just like we've shown them how they can build massively scalable systems easily without cost and complexity. We're doing that again with agents and we're taking our existing customers, of course, we already have hundreds of thousands of customers.
And what we did was we brought 4000 of our employees here at Dream Force to sit with them and just show them here, do this, do this, do this and they're gonna go back fully enabled and running is, is it agents versus copilots. Copilot is kind of a failed idea. This idea that there's some kind of a platform that or app that's gonna ride along or bolt on your technology that's gonna make your company better.
And the reality is it just hasn't worked for customers. They're, I mean, you know, that you're one of the top journalists in the world who are the five companies that, you know, who have transformed their businesses with copilots who are raving copilots. I'm still trying to figure out how to use it all.
So I think that the evidence is there that yeah, you know, we went through a first generation of A I predictive, deep learning, this idea that we're gonna have machine intelligence. And yes, we're gonna have next best action and we have been in sales force. It's been great, but then we're gonna move into this copilot world and by bolting something on, we're going to transform our business and it has not worked because what customers need is the integration of the data and the metadata which we have in our platform, the sharing model, which we have in our platform.
Also, they're going to need the business logic, the workflow, oh The apps, we have all the apps in our platform, the sales apps, the service app, the marketing app, the analytics app tableau is in our platform now slack. It's in our platform and then it just works out of the box. I saw what you were during your keynote, you use sacks a good amount of times.
I mean, holy cow, the the ability, I mean, I saw the transformation. Everybody says, oh, this little hype is marking. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not like these things are really working like full stop.
I actually saw it working for my face mark and it's wild. What sacks is doing? Sachs is a massively successful customer of ours. They use our sales cloud and our service cloud and our marketing cloud.
Even our new cash register, you know, we're doing hardware now too. We have everything. I mean, we're running the whole thing and they're not only just A B to B company, they're a B to C company.
They're an amazing company. Ok? But then they got here last night and we're briefing them and we're saying we're gonna do Agent Force and this and that and they're like, show us and their team worked for a couple of hours last night and this morning it went live for sacks at scale on sa.com Agent Force.
That is what Dream Force and that is what sales force is all about that. We want to change customers, make them more efficient, make them more productive, augment their employees. OK? Give them more margins, higher revenues.
This is what it's all about. And we're doing that right now. If copilots are failed, do they eventually go away? Is there one winner? I just think that this idea that you're gonna be working with autonomous agents is a more powerful, thoughtful concept inside a platform.
You know, it's not just about your customers working with these agents and the example of Disney, it's their employees that they're delivering a magical guest, your favorite place. Well, it's my favorite place and it's a magical experience, you know, for their cast members or their employees. And you know, I am the number one Disney fan.
Boy I am and I go to Disneyland all the time and everybody should maybe four times a year. How do you find time for this stuff? Brian missing out on life? I really am. And then I get a Disney guide because I don't like to stand in the lions and the Disney guides now use through a little bit of Mica Jolie and NAE sales force to keep track of all the customer information and slack to collaborate with each other in the park because that's a very important part of Disney guides because what happens is it's a theme park.
Everything is not running all the time. Of course, that's normal. That's very because safety is number one for Disney as it should be.
And now my vision and my dream and what I'm trying to have happen, what I hope will happen is that sales force will appear on his phone and go. Uh Hey, I need to tell you something. I know you're on tour with.
Mark. Mark has already seen all these rides and done all this. He's been here four times this year.
You're on your way to rise of resistance, are you? Yes, but it's down right now. You need a new choice. And the guide, the guide, the cast member says, what should I do? And the agent says, Tune Town a plus and it knows that because it looked across all the parks, California Adventure Epcot Center everywhere.
And then said based on flow control, based on current size and safety requirements and getting Mark around and how fast he can walk. We recommend this ride for Mark and plug him in and there's no way that the ride me, the cast member is gonna be able to look across all rides and all flow and all, all consumers and make that choice. But the working where a human and an agent can work together.
And that's my dream for Disney Bob. I hope you're watching here. This is like really amazing opportunity for Disney and I love them.
Like I will spend as much of my time working with them as I can. I have for more than, you know, 10 years mark. I think I would be the guy if I saw you in Disney, I would stop and ask you about and force and profit margins.
I mean, that's how my, that's what my life has become at this stage. I just can't shake this stuff. I can't get out of my head.
What surprised me or what surprised me just taking this all in is like the speed at which all of this is developing. Does it feel like things are moving too fast? No, I don't think things are moving too fast, but I do think a lot of customers are wasting their money trying to diy it too many customers that I've met with personally are trying to diy this next generation of A I. They're trying to take the model, the database, build, the sharing model, build insecurity, hire a hyper scalar and build all the framework and try to make it all work.
And it reminds me a lot of the beginning of the industry when we started with the cloud where I saw customers trying to do that with the cloud. And my message in the keynote you heard to all the people in the room and online is you don't have to diy this and I'm gonna prove it to you here. And I'm also gonna take this show on the road and I'm gonna do an agent force World Tour and I'm gonna show this to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.
You're going to everyone, everyone and every single one like you should. And this is a great moment to like show people you can get much better business performance, you can get better business results if you're using this. And it's gonna be true for sa it's gonna be true for Disney and it's gonna be true for Opentable and Wiley and Fossil and all the customers who have this already.
And we, we, and, and, and you know, like I was just doing a conference and I said, guys don't believe what we say, go to the launch pad and meet with the hundreds or thousands of customers, one by one and like listen to them and watch them, hook it up and get their response. Is this better because the benchmarks say and the bake off say that our A I approach is two X better in terms of performance and lower hallucinations. So the level of accuracy that we're able to deliver for customers is better and it's not about a new model or a new hyper scale or, or any of this.
It's about that the approach is different. The demonstrations I saw had humans working with agents. I put a prompt in.
I'm like, I wanna ensure Yahoo finance charts are always working. Absolutely amazingly. Now, I should say this.
Uh They always work amazing, but it helped me set guard rails in real time in slack to ensure that they're always working amazingly. And it was interesting. It was fast, it was quick and responsive, but I was setting the prompts.
I was working with it. I didn't get the sense my job was going to be taken away. You know, I I would like to think I'm needed in some capacity on camera maybe and from human form, but maybe I'm not, you look at the sacks example uh in the keynote, I mean, someone named Sophie Sophie looked human to me, talk to him and got a job done.
I mean, maybe I'm not needed. I don't know. I mean, but this has to impact the workforce, right? At some point.
I think of the example we just did the Gucci call center in Florence and we put our best A I in there and you know, wondering is there gonna be human productivity challenges? What's happening? And those experts, you know, who are customer service experts also became product experts and sales experts and were augmented and their revenue went up 30% in the call center with the technology. I think there's a lot of different ways this can go through. You could have more efficiency, you could have higher sales or maybe if you're a medical institution and you're kind of doing case deflection for your doctors, you're going to fight, you know, doctor and nurse burnout.
This is something that we're working very closely with, for the world's largest medical institutions. This is super important to me. What impact do you think A I will have on health care? And I got a taste of this.
So I went to the time A I 100 dinner. Uh last, it was great. I spent some time with uh M DC O Dr Lisa su.
Oh, isn't she amazing? Just, just one co of the year from Chief executive Richard Soaker, a former Head of Sales Force Research. He's the one that got in prompt engineering here at Sales Force. And really, wow, he got me thinking on the health care impact and how it will shape drug development.
I mean, take us through, I mean, you do a lot of work, a lot of charity work, a lot of work in the nation's healthcare system. I mean, what, what do you see? What's the impact? Well, it's massive and I'm an investor in an amazing company called Arterra. And you know, look here in San Francisco, we have an awesome health care institution are called U CS F University of California, San Francisco.
And in U CS F, we have an awesome urology department and we have a leader there, Peter Carroll, who's probably one of the foremost authorities in the world on prostate cancer and he's also a neurological surgeon as well. Now, let's say you or someone, you know, you know, has to be evaluated for prostate cancer. Are you coming to San Francisco? That's your best case you're getting with Peter? That's your absolute best case.
OK? But now maybe you're in another country, maybe you're somewhere else. It turns out what our terror has done is taken that whole data set from U CS A and put it and packaged it in a way that it starts to provide that kind of experience for a urologist. OK? To use this platform by being an input to scan the MRI the the labs, you know the data asking for all different data, maybe data you don't need that.
You need to know to have a correct diagnosis and all these different pieces go into Arterra and then Arterra says, yes, this person needs surgery. Yes. This person actually might need support from radiology, you know, and reads a radiology, oncologist or no, this person needs to go on active surveillance.
And let's look at all this data again in six months, active surveillance is an idea invented at U CS F. So what is it? And based on the data sets and the history and the trends, the A I Arterra, which just got FDA certified by the way, is able to augment those urologists. That's amazing.
And that is another example of what can A I can do. I mean, this is what A I is meant to be is your biggest, we think we talked about this last year here at Dream Forest is your biggest fear with A I still like terminators and robots. Is that given how fast things have been moving? I mean, well, I saw some very scary movies.
If that's what you're asking by some of our employees, I mean, one of our employees wrote war games and also wrote minority report. They're scary movies about the future. Well, there was a slide you had on the keynote, the next wave robots.
Now you had wave four robots, wave five, what augmented A G I, what was it? I think that was it. Well, there are robots coming and there is, you know, incredible new companies that are building robot operating systems that just invested in one of them through time ventures. There's all kinds of things happening in the future.
The future doesn't equal the present. We know that so things are gonna happen but look at technology is not good or bad. It's what you do with it.
And it's our job to guide the technology and set the values and create the trust like, hey, I think we're the first company to ever say you need a trust layer and we built a trust layer into our core A I first company I ever heard talk about it and we built that last year. That's important for the future of our customers. We know that and that'll be true also with robots and everybody else.
So yes. And by the way, our platform will drive those robots. That will be a very key part of it.
You made also a very key point. You make this point uh frequently that you're not selling customer data. Well, there's still social media platforms out there that are using data and now they have this new, these new large language models and they're going to better be able to target us to sell products.
What do you think about that? Listen, we are in the new world and the technology is just awesome and all we're doing at sales force is making that successful for our customers. You know, here at the show, you've got tens of thousands of customers and a lot more watching online and it's the largest banks and insurance companies and media companies and health care across the world. And we want to help all of them become more successful using this technology.
And I think that that's all I focus on every day. Customer success. It's very binary.
Is the customer successful or are they not successful? Look when you fill a room up randomly like we did today with 10,000 people and you're sitting there, we're not tethering you. As a reporter, you can go and talk to whoever you want, you can go down and sit down at the launch pad and see is are these agent deployments successful or unsuccessful? This is a critical part of being a leader in the technology industry to be able to have independent interrogators. Look at what is possible, what is really happening, what is really going on here and then say, yeah, this is a hypnosis.
You're never going to get this working or you're seeing a, a slide show that you're trying to deploy inside your company or no, we're gonna get this to work for. You are regulators able to, I mean, how far behind are they? I mean, this is election season and we're not going to go down that route. But I mean, I'm getting images and photos on my social media accounts that I don't know if they're the candidates.
I don't even know who they are where they're being created from. It just feels like a I in that case is being used for bad. The European regulators have been super impressive.
I've been very impressed with the EU regulators and the competition market authority that was really leading the world in this area. I even went to the UK Safety conference. That was the most impressive one.
I went to, we have a great leader in this country who's coming here for the interview with me tomorrow, Senator Mallorca. So I hope you'll come to the interview because he has led the pioneering way on looking at A I safety in the United States as our chief, by the way, our chief cop, right, he runs all of our most important security agencies and it's impressive that he is also leading the A I safety program. Do they feel, do they feel behind are the guardrails being put in place? I think that we are doing a lot of the right things, but we don't know necessarily what the wrong things are because the future is still somewhat undetermined.
Mark. You're coming up uh on a big birthday and I had to, I had to, I had to get out there. What are you, you look at, you're a, you're amazing mark.
You look amazing. Uh We both do but you know, what's your, what's your next 10 years like? Do you, do you have time to reflect on that way? Whether you're, if you're a Disney, have you thought about that about your life, your career? I think that, you know, the most meaningful point of the keynote for me was the Phil philanthropy that I've done personally and also what sales force has done. You know, we've done 10 million hours of volunteerism.
We run 100,000 nonprofits and NGO S for free on our service. Sales force itself has done more than a billion dollars in grants. I've done more than a billion dollars of philanthropy I've got four hospitals under development.
That's very important to me. A lot of the medical technology and research that I'm interested in is happening and I feel very fulfilled by that. And I also have a number of environmental programs that are very important to me, including our Ocean Health Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
And our one trillion tree initiative is very important to me. It's been an incredible journey. It's been a lot of fun.
There's been some stressful moments, mostly enjoyable and um I love it. I love the company. I love the customers.
I love the investors. I love all the stakeholders. And uh it's an incredible, like, I'll tell you, there's so many subtle parts of the company that are really important to me.
I'll tell you one that's not very well reported. This is amazing. So quite a few years ago, I had a couple of executives come to me, female executives and sat down with me at lunch and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna have a very nice, easy lunch and they go listen, you need to listen to me right now.
OK? You're paying men and women differently for different work, you know, in this company, what do you mean men and different men and women differently for different work? No, no. That's all we're saying, men and women who are doing exactly the same job, they're getting paid differently. I'm like, it's not possible.
Men and women are getting paid differently for the same work. Is that what you mean? Yeah, that's what you're doing. I said, prove it.
They bring out this huge spreadsheet. And I said, here's our data, look at that. And I was like, wow, uh well, we're gonna make that change.
We made the change and then a year later it was wrong again, all of the data had changed. And I'm like, how can this be? I put all the policy in place. It turned out I bought companies where they had the same issue in their company.
So then I'm like, no, we're committed to equality in our company. It's a core value, men and women will get paid equally for the same work. So then I'm like, we're about equal opportunity and equal advancement that equality is important in our company.
Then I did a review of our human resources at Sales force and I'm like, is this true or hr team is more than 50% women. Our marketing team is more than 50% women. Our finance team is more than 50% women.
Our communications team is more than 50% women. And I'm like, wow, this is really powerful and, but we're still, you know, between 35 and 40% women. So we're not a 5050 company.
So at some level, I'm like, it's great, you know, we're not the tech company as much as we were when we started, we were all tech pros, we're more balanced, we have more gender equality and general diversity. It wasn't very hard to do. It's just opening our eyes and being aware that this is an important part of our future and look, it's aligned with our value of equality.
We believe in the equality of every human being and we believe in having men and women in our company and treating them the same. That is another exciting part of sales force. That's very meaningful work to me.
Well, we appreciate you on sharing us, uh sharing that story with us and then always having our finance to dream for us. I mean, this is a real, thank you. I personally learned a ton.
Uh I always enjoy getting some time with you. So Mark Benioff, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it.
It's great. I hope you're gonna stay for. I will be around, I'm going to be around.
Imagine dragons Lumineers just played spontaneously outside. There's more spontaneous acts coming. I'm going to be omnipresent and if it's not me, maybe it'll be in an agent form.
I don't know. It's really cool. All markoff.
Thank you so much. And that's it. For the latest episode of opening bid on the Hunt for the hottest market commentary.
Then join me Yahoo Finance executive editor, Brian saw an opening bid the show with unrivaled insights from top money managers and analysts. New episodes of opening bid every Monday, Wednesday and Friday starting at 8 a.m.
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