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The current tariff situation is expected to be resolved in the “relatively short term” as there is a lot of opportunity for everyone “to operate on the global stage,” said Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce. He also lauded the contribution of Indian-origin nationals to the US and called for “thought through” evaluation of legal immigration, in a virtual interview with ET’s Surabhi Agarwal. Pointing to this being “an Indian era,” Benioff, who is also the publisher of Time magazine, said a lot of his company’s artificial intelligence tools are built in India.
The San Francisco firm with a current market cap of $248 billion, the tech tycoon said, was started while he was on a spiritual trip to India in 1996-97, and that he continues to draw advice from his gurus here. Edited excerpts: What does the current tariff regime mean for the world economy and for technology companies?I do not think this is the first time that we've seen these types of political situations. I expect a lot of this to be resolved in the relatively short term, because there's so much opportunity for us to operate on the global stage and to move forward rapidly.
I expect India to become a huge beneficiary of a lot of the change and transformation in the world. We have really been in the India era, and we can see the huge growth that has happened in India in just a few years. You have spoken about digital labour and agents as the next big thing, what will it mean for India’s engineering talent?We're all trying to understand that in every country.
We have seen the movies — The Minority Report, Her —where there's a lot of AI. It is not there yet, but we are moving into that world. And then the robots, we saw BMW added some robots.
I just spoke to the head of a robot company. Instead of people being on the assembly line or even sorting packages at UPS, they are using some robots. So, should we all be paying attention to that? Absolutely, because this is a critical moment in the history of the world that AI is maturing at a level that we can see that it is having a huge impact on every company and every person.
