Marc Benioff, Salesforce Founder: Why Salesforce Isn't Hiring Software Engineers | E1236

1. 0:00 – 1:43

   Intro

   1. MBMarc Benioff0:00

      (instrumental music) We're doing our business plan for next year, for 2025, right now. We're not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we're using for our engineering teams by more than 30%, to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer, but these current large language models, there's a lot of folks building those today and they're cr-rapidly becoming a commodity, and everything needs to be about Agentforce at Salesforce. This is the only thing that really matters today.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:34

      Ready to go? (instrumental music) Mark, I am so excited for this, our second time. Thank you so much for joining me once again.

   3. MBMarc Benioff0:52

      Great to be with you, Harry, and glad that we have a slightly better video set-up this time.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:56

      Uh, we've got a fantastic video set-up. You look, you look younger and younger, Mark, which is terribly worrying.

   5. MBMarc Benioff1:00

      I have, like, two dogs here underneath the desk, so hopefully I'm petting one, and I hope that they, uh, don't start barking, but I'm just giving you the heads-up on that.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings1:08

      Well, fingers crossed. Uh, listen, I've interviewed many VCs, so it'd make more sense than what they say, so don't worry about it. Uh, (laughs) my question to you to start, actually-

   7. MBMarc Benioff1:16

      You're saying that VCs are like barking dogs?

   8. HSHarry Stebbings1:18

      Uh, well, d- do you know what? (laughs) At least barking dogs stop. Um, but, uh-

   9. MBMarc Benioff1:22

      (laughs)

   10. HSHarry Stebbings1:22

       ... yes, my question to you is, I hear that you've actually got quite an interest in podcasts now, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you think about the-

   11. MBMarc Benioff1:29

       You were my first, Harry, and you'll always be my first, and-

   12. HSHarry Stebbings1:32

       (laughs)

   13. MBMarc Benioff1:32

       ... you know, you never forget your first, Harry.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings1:34

       (laughs) Do you know what, Mark? It's not something I ever thought I'd be really proud to hear- (laughs)

   15. MBMarc Benioff1:40

       Yeah.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings1:40

       ... but it fills me with pride. How do you think about

2. 1:43 – 3:22

   The Importance of a CEO’s Personal Brand

   1. HSHarry Stebbings1:43

      the changing importance of a CEO brand? When you think about that today, how do you think about that when you listen to podcasts?

   2. MBMarc Benioff1:51

      Well, I listen to more podcasts than ever myself, which is what all of a sudden I, it occurred to me, I should be doing more podcasts. And the world w- ... Uh, my chair's just falling over, dogs are pushing me over here. I, um, you know, will just tell you this, which is that, um, I listen to more podcasts myself, I enjoy podcasts, and I realize I need to learn how to be on a podcast. Like, I don't know the snappy things to say, I don't know how to, like, get people's attention right away, that I haven't been on a podcast, so I may say some crazy things or terrible things. So get ready for something crazy to happen-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings2:29

      (laughs)

   4. MBMarc Benioff2:29

      ... because I don't know how to do the podcast very well. A lot of my friends are really good, they're scripted, they're reading, they say these really punchy things. I'm like, "Wow, they really like priming themself." I'm like, "I've got my dogs," you know, or, "I have two golden retrievers under my desk." I'm like, "Crazy things are happening," and, um, no, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to panel a podcast, so help-

   5. HSHarry Stebbings2:52

      So I've done 3,000 and I can give just two bits of advice.

   6. MBMarc Benioff2:55

      Yes.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings2:55

      The best are art and science. The art is telling a story, making someone feel like they're a part of the journey, bringing them into those early moments of Salesforce magic. And then the science is, and I learnt three lessons from that, you need the combination of resonance with the consumer and learning, and the two together makes for magic.

   8. MBMarc Benioff3:16

      Fantastic. Well, that must have been an example right there of, of the Made for Magic podcast.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings3:20

      There, there we go. Perfect.

3. 3:22 – 7:14

   Embracing Pain & Suffering

   1. HSHarry Stebbings3:22

      You, you said that you l- you know, you love other podcasts and, and shows. I saw your tweet last night where you said, "No mud, no lotus," with regards to Jensen and his talk with Patrick Collison, where he said, "Nothing great is achieved without pain and suffering, and so I wish upon you plenty of pain and suffering." You know, wonderfully charming of Jensen. Um, why did you tweet it and how did you feel when you heard that?

   2. MBMarc Benioff3:47

      Well, that was an inspiring talk from Jensen, which is why I tweeted it, and, "No mud, no lotus," well, that came from one of my teachers and good friends, Thich Nhat Hanh. Uh, Thich Nhat Hanh was an amazing influence on my life. Um, he is someone who really brought mindfulness, uh, to the West, and, uh, I learned really how to meditate from him and what meditation was all about. Um, I learned that, uh, I could cultivate my beginner's mind, or what the Japanese called shoshin. You know, in the beginner's mind you have every possibility, but in the, in the expert's mind you have few or none. And when I think about, uh, Thich Nhat Hanh, he, you know, would always say to me, "No mud, no lotus." And what he meant by that was, yeah, you have to go through difficulty and you have to go through suffering to get to beauty and love. And this is an incredibly important part of my life and how I think about it. And that's why I meditate every day. We talked about that, um, the first time we had a podcast. I spend every day in mindfulness and meditation, and try to come back to my breath and clear my mind, 'cause there's so many difficult things happening all the time. Yesterday, I spent the whole time doing my, all d- the whole day doing my earnings, so by the time it turns out, you know, for this morning, I need to get a, a few minutes to, uh, clear, clear my head.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings5:05

      Can I ask, when we think about pain and suffering that has led to the greatest lessons, what pain and suffering that you've been through, maybe with the Salesforce journey, has led to the greatest outcomes in terms of learning?

   4. MBMarc Benioff5:19

      I think yesterday's a great example. We had a great quarter, Harry. We delivered, you know, clear guidance to 38 billion in revenue this year, 12.9 billion in cash flow, uh, 32.9% margins. This was our guidance. And the numbers were so far ahead, the market advanced our stock today, I think, about 9%. Um, it was adding another large tech company (laughs) onto our company, so we ended up in the mid $300 billion in market cap. And, you know, when I think back, um, our, I think our stock was about one third this value two years ago, one third. W- what does that say to me? Well, two years ago, we had a really difficult moment. We were like, flying an airplane is a good example, and, uh, we found out the two pilots were gone in the front and the one guy with a parachute jumped out the door, um, and we had these k- unusual resignations that happened, um, that kind of blindsided us.We had a lot of unusual things. The financials were not what we wanted, and we had to start making changes. We had to make financial changes and technology changes. We had to rewrite our product. We had to create new products. You probably know we've introduced this incredible new platform, Agentforce, that we can talk about. We also rebuilt our financial model and addressed, uh, financial issues in the company that we had not been willing to address up to that point. And then what that resulted in was, you know, two years of really hard, difficult work, but it resulted in yesterday where, after two years, the stock has tripled, we have delivered a financial transformation, we have delivered probably the most exciting new AI product in the history of enterprise software, and a level of customer success we just have never seen before. So this is, um, a great example of no mud, no lotus because if we hadn't gone through that two years ago, we probably would not be where we are today.

4. 7:14 – 10:53

   Can Salesforce Thrive in the AI Era with Agentforce?

   1. MBMarc Benioff7:14

   2. HSHarry Stebbings7:14

      So this is our second conversation, and so I- I feel like I can be more direct. Um, why when you look at the guidance that you have, when you look at the results, when you look at the amazing product, why is it that people say, "I don't know how Salesforce will fare in the next generation of AI?" Do agents really help Salesforce?

   3. MBMarc Benioff7:34

      We're in a really competitive industry, number one. Uh, number two is when you think about Salesforce and AI, we are the number one enterprise AI supplier in the world today. We'll do more than two trillion enterprise transactions this week. Uh, no one is delivering AI at this scale to more companies globally than we are. And now, we've delivered the first scaled secure, trusted enterprise agentic platform, which we call Agentforce. And this is the way that so many companies right now are deploying agents. One of, great example is, you know, your favorite airport there, uh, Heathrow.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings8:15

      (laughs) I love that.

   5. MBMarc Benioff8:17

      Um, it is one of our large customers. One of the busiest airports in the world where customers really have a lot of complex issues happening all the time where they've evolved, you know, into really starting to focus more on customer success at Heathrow for, 'cause people have had so many challenging situations. And we're building an agentic layer completely around the airport with Heathrow, so that from the beginning of your journey to your end, you're gonna be partnered with an agent to make sure you have an absolutely great experience at Heathrow. I think this is gonna be pretty awesome.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings8:47

      Do you have to own that agentic layer? 'Cause if you don't own that agentic layer, don't agents just pull and summarize data and Salesforce becomes a database? And is that a bad thing?

   7. MBMarc Benioff8:57

      Well, let's talk about what we're doing and what we can do that others cannot do because of the nature of our platform, which we've now delivered this platform, uh, to 135,000 customers. The next version of Agentforce is coming. We're gonna announce that December 17th. I hope you could come to San Francisco and we can talk about it then. It's gonna be incredible. Um, we have an incredible new Agentforce 2.0 about to ship. So on Agentforce 1.0, the first thing to know is that we automate every customer touchpoint. This is one thing that's really unique about Salesforce. So for Heathrow, of course, we have our sales cloud and they're selling, you know, B2B and to all these companies. Number two is customer service and support, uh, our service cloud, our marketing cloud, we're the most scaled enterprise email system in the world, our commerce cloud, our analytics, Tableau, Slack, um, MuleSoft for integration. All of these key components together is the Salesforce platform. This we've been doing for the last 25 years. And for the last two years or so, we've been focused on building our data cloud, which is the amalgamation of all of our customers' data so they can take all of their Salesforce implementations and all of their data and bring it all together. And then the third layer is the agentic layer on top of that, and those three things are not three products. It's actually one piece of code, one integrated piece of code, and why that's important, Harry, is this. For AI to work really well and to get the level of accuracy and low hallucina- low- low hallucinogenics that you need in enterprise AI today, um, you have to have as much access to the data and metadata and workflow as possible. And we have over 230 petabytes of that data in our platform, and that makes it very unique. And it's not just the data. It has to be the metadata as well. That's how you get the real accuracy.

5. 10:53 – 12:14

   Salesforce’s Biggest Challenge in AI Dominance

   1. MBMarc Benioff10:53

   2. HSHarry Stebbings10:53

      What is the biggest challenge that Salesforce will have to overcome to achieve dominance in the next generation of AI as you outline there?

   3. MBMarc Benioff11:00

      This idea that we are gonna build not just a sales force and a service force or a marketing force but an agent force for our customers, we shipped it October 25th. In the quarter which closed at the end of October, we already sold 200 deals. We'll do thousands of Agentforce deals this quarter, and what we have to do is really show each and every customer what the magic of Agentforce is and how it can provide tremendous value to them, and as an example, is Salesforce. Uh, this week, I think I already told you, we turned on help.salesforce.com. I stripped out my previous support infrastructure. I've plugged in a new support infrastructure, and it's all 100% agent based. And, uh, we're gonna be able to rebalance our headcount based on that we have a digital workforce and a human workforce now. We have digital labor in our company and human labor now, and I need to bring that to every single company. And to explain that is extremely difficult because this is a new horizon for business, this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened for business, because we are gonna start to bring in digital labor into business for the first

6. 12:14 – 13:09

   Will Salesforce Have More or Less Employees in 5 Years?

   1. MBMarc Benioff12:14

      time.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings12:15

      You- you said there about kind of digital labor and human labor. Will Salesforce have more employees or less employees in five years' time?

   3. MBMarc Benioff12:22

      I think we'll probably be larger. You know, we... It's a good, it's a good question. Number one, we're doing our business plan for next year, for 2025 right now, and we're not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we're using for our engineering teams by more than 30%, to the point where our engineering philosophy is incredible. I can't believe what we're achieving in engineering. And then we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We'll have more salespeople next year because we need to really explain to everybody exactly the value that we can achieve with AI, so we will add another probably one to two thousand salespeople in the short

7. 13:09 – 17:18

   How Will Digital Labor Impact SaaS Pricing Models?

   1. MBMarc Benioff13:09

      term.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings13:10

      Mark, you're the master of sales. When you think about this agentic layer and when... what you're serving, digital and human workers, how does pricing in SaaS change when you are pricing digital labor? Do we sell by seat or does that change?

   3. MBMarc Benioff13:25

      Agentforce is consumption pricing, so you're being... charging per conversation. The starting price is about two bucks per conversation, and then it's negotiated based on volumes for customers. It's basically per user for humans and it's per conversation for agents.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings13:41

      Totally get that, and I, um, share your excitement. I was surprised when I heard you say, though, that we're near the upper limits in LLM use. When I heard that, I was like, "Huh, what made him say that?"

   5. MBMarc Benioff13:52

      Well, if we look back (laughs) , we're going, uh, down the road, on a curvy road right now.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings13:56

      Yeah.

   7. MBMarc Benioff13:56

      So I will just say that when we look at what's happening with LLMs, that is very exciting. We've all had these great experiences, um, with LLMs and what's happened, but we've had a lot of great experience with artificial intelligence in the last 60 years. And in the last 60 years, the history of AI is a new model or a new technology will come along and a bunch of folks will kind of get to the point where it becomes a commodity, and then we kind of hold until we wait till the next one, and then it goes on. And we've moved from machine intellerent- machine intelligence and machine learning to deep learning, you know, to the advanced aspects of AI to where we are today, and we're kind of waiting for even some of the new models to emerge after, you know, this generative AI models. But these current large language models, there's a lot of folks building those today, and they're cr- rapidly becoming a commodity, and we're... They're rapidly maturing, they're cresting, and that's not unusual in AI. AI kind of, you get a model and then you start to hit the upper, upper limits of what's possible in that model. We have some of the best people in the industry working on these LLMs, but you can see that the growth rate and the maturation plate, maturation rate of those models has slowed because we're starting to commoditize them.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings15:14

      Can you take me inside the internal discussion that you had at Salesforce of whether you should really invest in buil- building out your own LLMs versus leveraging others and the commoditization of LLMs that we're seeing now?

   9. MBMarc Benioff15:25

      Well, two out of the top five models in the industry are Salesforce models. Salesforce builds a lot of models, uh, we have a phenomenal AI team, we do great work, um, we've delivered incredible capabilities for our customers and for ourselves with our own models. We also use a lot of other models. We change that on a regular basis, and we've invested in a lot of, um, model companies, including Anthropic and Mistral and Cohere and many, many of them. Even personally, I've invested in many amazing models. I've invested in an incredible new next gen model company from Fei-Fei Li, who ra- um, AI at Stanford, or has been, runs research for me at Salesforce. He's amazing. Um, we have really a, a selection of capabilities today. So really, it's really fit for purpose what the model is that you want for the task that you're trying to accomplish.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings16:21

       Do you think that will continue to be the same future that we look at, which is a world of many models and you simply go to different models for the different use cases that you need?

   11. MBMarc Benioff16:29

       Yes. And that is a great place to be because you can do it on your phone today. Like, another incredible company that I'm personally an investor in is You.com, company that I invested myself. Um, I, I named it myself. Um, the founder is the former head of Salesforce research. And with You.com, it's an incredible model and incredible set of capabilities, uh, that I use every day to research personal, uh, activities. All kinds of amazing, uh, insights into the world, different kinds of modes and levels of accuracy. It's really awesome. But I have probably a dozen AI apps like You.com on my phone. Gemini, ChatGPT, um, I even have, you know, the pro- dif- lot of different products. I won't

8. 17:18 – 18:20

   Which AI Company Offers the Best Investment Opportunity?

   1. MBMarc Benioff17:18

      go through them all.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings17:19

      I'm gonna ask a really unfair question, but as I said, I can just phrase everything as a second interview and then go-

   3. MBMarc Benioff17:23

      No, there's no unfair questions. You, you can go ahead and

   4. HSHarry Stebbings17:24

      Okay. You've got OpenAI, you've got OpenAI at 160, Anthropic at 40, or x.com at 50. Which one would you rather invest in?

   5. MBMarc Benioff17:33

      I don't know if I'd really want to invest in any of them right now, um, because I think in those cases we're seeing all of them to being about the same kind of product. Uh, a lot of them are really becoming the same technology. So I think this is the moment where each of them needs to kind of pick their poison and go out and become their own company. Uh, I don't think being just a generic company is the right move anymore. You need to decide what vertical you're going to be in or what your best specialty is, and, uh, I think we're starting to see that. Like, for example, we saw Perplexity go off and try to be something truly unique in financial services. This idea that different models are gonna really operate for different industries differently is where the models are gonna start to really shine.

9. 18:20 – 21:49

   The Biggest Question About AI & Salesforce’s Future

   1. MBMarc Benioff18:20

   2. HSHarry Stebbings18:20

      What is an unknown question mark that you have about the future of AI and Salesforce in the next 12 to 36 months that you are spending a lot of time thinking about?

   3. MBMarc Benioff18:30

      The number one thing that I think about every single day is how to explain to customers the huge value that they can get from Agentforce. That's why I felt it was so important that I s- you know, I'm eating my own dog food. Sorry to my dogs here.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings18:48

      (laughs)

   5. MBMarc Benioff18:48

      But I (laughs) , you know, that I've moved my whole support infrastructure to the Agentic platform. I will move my whole sales platform to the Agentic platform as well. Um, I'll move my whole company onto Agentforce for no other reason but to show my customers what is possible. I think we are in such a new world right now, in terms of what is possible today versus even just six months ago, that customers do not understand this and what it can mean for them. So, that is really all I am focused on. My number one focus is Agentforce, and my second one is, how do I find as much fuel in my company to drive the first? That is key. And then we mentioned also expanding distribution. But these three things are on my mind continuously.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings19:37

      How do you think it's most likely that you will find the fuel?

   7. MBMarc Benioff19:40

      The way I'm gonna find the fuel is by using Agentforce. I mean, Agentforce is gonna let me rebalance my workforce. So, I have 9,000 people in support today. I will not have as many people in support in the future, because I'll be able to move more of those folks into sales or into other functions in the company where I'm looking to hire people. And that is a big opportunity for me as a CEO.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings20:03

      Respectfully, Mark, do you, do you move them or do you just do the logical thing, which is bluntly remove the cost, and actually have higher margins, which is a perfectly logical thing for any business leader to do? How do you think about that?

   9. MBMarc Benioff20:17

      A lot of them will get moved. We have a lot of opportunity at Salesforce, and we have a lot of growth happening. So for the vast majority of those, we're gonna be able to move them and find new opportunities for them, and we'll be very excited about that. Even in the layoffs that we had, which were very dramatic in the company two years ago, we have hired a lot of those employees back into the company.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings20:38

       How do you reflect on those layoffs?

   11. MBMarc Benioff20:39

       Well, I think that when you think about, and kind of no mud, no lotus, we went through this, you know, two years ago, it was a moment where I don't wanna do layoffs. I hated it. And everybody then looks at you as you're doing this terrible thing. Nobody likes the word. It's a horrible thing. But the company had to be restructured. I had no choice. I, I was up against the wall. I had a clear vision of what the future was, but the current reality did not match the potential for the company for where it could be, as evidenced by today's financials and what's possible today. So, layoff is an important tool for CEOs to be able to use to be able to prepare for a company for the future, and nobody wants to hit the button. Nobody wants to take the action. No employee wants to hear the words. It sends chills down everybody's spine, including my own. But sometimes it's very important for us to do that. I mean, you can see that, um, organizations that need to get rebuilt, this is a, this is a good tool for them to use, and CEOs should not be afraid. And I think that that example that Salesforce went through for the last 24 months is a, is a, is a good one.

10. 21:49 – 24:54

    Salesforce’s Top Strategic Decisions & Lessons

    1. MBMarc Benioff21:49

    2. HSHarry Stebbings21:49

       We mentioned at the beginning the art of telling the story and the science, the learnings that come from it. I, I do wanna discuss two amazing decisions and two tough decisions, or bluntly, mistakes. If I were to ask you, what are the two most strategic decisions you made with Salesforce that worked out, and what did you learn from them, what would be the first that come to mind?

    3. MBMarc Benioff22:09

       Well, I think something I just did is very important. I had a great relationship with Steve Jobs. I worked for him in 1984 in the Macintosh division when I was writing assembly language code, and, and later, uh, when I started Salesforce, he was very generous and would say, "Hey, come down and see me." And we would have, you know, talks about different moments or challenges that I was going through. And one time, I got a call and said, "Hey, just come down. I wanna show you something." And I went down, and he was working on the iPad. And he's like, "Here's two iPads." And I'm like, "Wow, I love both these sizes." He goes, "No, we're only gonna do one size." (laughs) And then, um, I'm like, "Well, this is really awesome that you can work on the iPhone and the iPad, and you got your Mac, and you have all these products you're working on. Your day is probably really full." "No, Mark, that's not how I do things at Apple." "What, what do you do, Steve?" "I only do one thing at one time. I have the A team at Apple. We only focus on one thing. So I'm just gonna focus on the iPad." And that was a very impactful meeting for me, because up to that point, I think I was doing too many different things. And so when I just rolled out Agentforce, you'll notice that we're not gonna talk a lot about all of Salesforce's products, which are amazing. You know, on the podcast, I'm gonna keep coming back to Agentforce because that's all I'm focused on right now. And that's his advice to me. "Focus on that. Put your best people on that. Make that happen."

    4. HSHarry Stebbings23:36

       Is that difficult as a leader, to not make other divisions feel less important if you're just pumping one?

    5. MBMarc Benioff23:44

       Absolutely, and you have to find ways to be able to constantly bring it back around to everybody. Even at... Like, we reviewed our marketing cloud and our commerce cloud yesterday, both amazing products that we have. We just went through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We delivered more emails and more transactions and more GMV than I've ever seen in my career to our customers. We did it with 24/7 perfect accuracy. But a lot of the conversations that I have with those two organizations is, "What is your Agentfirst future? What is your Agentic layer? How are you gonna make your products even better through the power of AI and agents now?" When we look at, and we have, you know, we have our examples and we're showing customers today.... the future of an agent-first marketing cloud or an agent-first commerce cloud, how will that transform you? How is that gonna transform your customers? That everything needs to be about AgentForce at Salesforce. This is the only thing that really matters today. All of our 75,000 employees, our tens of thousands of salespeople, and our 135,000 customers, we need to really boot them into the present moment of what is possible with this incredible breakthrough.

11. 24:54 – 30:27

    Salesforce’s Biggest Mistake

    1. MBMarc Benioff24:54

    2. HSHarry Stebbings24:54

       I love that story of, of Steve and the lessons there. On the flip side of, like, bluntly the worst decision or the worst mistake, when I ask that, what's the time that comes to mind and what did you learn from that?

    3. MBMarc Benioff25:06

       Well, I think that what I've really learned over 25 years of leading Salesforce is I think that when you look at AgentForce, when you look at everything that we've just gone through, I think that for CEOs the most important thing, and this is what I try to remind myself constantly, is you've gotta cultivate your beginner's mind. You have to be ready in today's day where everything is changing by the minute, whether it's technology or political or economic, um, you've gotta be ready to cultivate your beginner's mind where you have every possibility, and in the expert's mind there is few. The Japanese word is shoshin. Shoshin, beginner's mind. That idea, how do I get back to clearing my mind so I can really see what the possibility is? Let me tell you a story. I was getting ready for Dreamforce and, you know, we just had 50,000 people in San Francisco in September, and this is our big user conference of the year, and what I do for two months beforehand is I go on the road and I do all these focus groups. And I'm missing and meeting with all these customers, and the big demo that we were doing was not for Louis Vuitton, it was for Gucci. And we run a lot of work for Kering, and we even met with Francois, the CEO of Kering, and it was an awesome meeting, and I... The whole demo for Dreamforce, everything was Gucci. And we were so excited about Gucci and what we had done with our new point of sale system, Harry, which is amazing, um, all the changes we've made at the customer touchpoint layer, the data cloud was incredible. And things were going along. I was ver- (sighs) very satiated with how the Gucci demo looked. I felt it was very visionary. Gucci loved it. They even came to our headquarters and saw it. And then, about a week or two before Dreamforce, I got the first customer feedback on AgentForce. We had delivered it to the first five customers which included companies like Wiley, the book seller; OpenTable, the restaurant company; ADP; Disney; et cetera. And when I was reading through the feedback from the customers, I'm like, "Wow, this product is a lot farther along than I realized, and I don't think anymore s- anything is more significant for Salesforce than AgentForce." And I hit my Steve Jobs button, and I pivoted the entire company over a period of two weeks, brought everybody in and said, "Everything and all the messaging for Dreamforce is now officially going to change. And we are going 100% on AgentForce." And the question at that point was: What is AgentForce? (laughs) And a lot of employees had not been brought into what we had been building. So, we had an incredible effort underway to deliver this agentic layer; it just happened a lot faster than we expected? And then we delivered at production October 24th. So we pivoted the company, we launched it at Dreamforce, we delivered it on October 24th, and in the f- that, first, last five days of the quarter, we closed about 200 AgentForce deals, we'll do thousands more this quarter. I mean, that was the moment where I was like, "Yes, you have to cultivate your beginner's mind, and then you have to do one more thing: you have to trust yourself." You have to trust yourself to know you have to hit that Steve Jobs button and go, and say, "No, this is now I'm only gonna focus on the one thing, and this is my one thing." So all of a sudden, Astro, you can see him behind me here, went from being regular old Astro to Agent Astro. And here we are today talking about this.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings28:46

       Marc, are you knackered at the end of Dreamforce or AgentForce? Uh, it is an intense period for you. You are on stage. We see you crush it. Are you knackered at the end?

    5. MBMarc Benioff28:57

       Well, I would just say it's exhaustive. I mean, yesterday was also exhaustive. Earnings is exhaustive, Dreamforce is exhaustive. When you're the CEO of a large company, you'd better be ready to have a lot of exhaustive moments. And this, you gotta put it, you gotta leave it all in the field. You know, you've gotta be ready to do everything to make it totally successful. I'm constantly asking myself this question: Am I doing everything? Do I have all of the ideas, concepts, notions, people? Is every, do I have everything necessary to make AgentForce totally successful right now? I ask myself that question every single day. Is everything happening correctly? Am I doing everything? It has to be exhaustive. And there are moments like Dreamforce or earnings or product launches or, you know, international travel is one, you know, where you do, you have to leave it all on the field. And that's an important part of success. After 25 years of being the CEO of Salesforce, from growing it from an idea like you see with a lot of the venture capitalists and, and, uh, that you do, or entrepreneurship that you do, you know, I was right there at ground zero, to growing it as the singular CEO all the way to today at 38 billion in revenue, whoa. Like, y- you have to be ready to leave it on the field each and every moment, or you're not gonna get to where you're, where you wanna go. So yeah, you gotta put it behind you and really go.

12. 30:27 – 33:22

    Looking Back, Would Marc Does It Again?

    1. MBMarc Benioff30:27

    2. HSHarry Stebbings30:27

       Jensen Huang said if he'd known how hard it was gonna be, he wouldn't have done it. You look at 38 billion in revenue mark (laughs) I mean, 38 billion. Like-If I ask you the same, would you have done it?

    3. MBMarc Benioff30:40

       You know, it's funny. My neighbor here is David Kirk, who led the creation of the GPU for Jensen, probably the most important piece of technology that he has at NVIDIA. As the chief scientist, he led the root group and the team, and at the end of the effort, he had built the best chip that they had ever seen. It became the heart of the game machines that became the heart of AI. And then he retired and said, "I did it." And he said, "But I'm not gonna keep doing it." And instead he became the chairman of his kids' school, and he invested in his community, and he's a l- incredible person. I have a huge amount of respect for David Kirk. And Jensen, who I also have a huge amount of respect for, then had that technology was going into these game machines and incredible things were happening. A few years later, he was at Stanford, and he saw this incredible innovation with deep learning, and he was the only large company CEO in tech who said, "You know what? Deep learning is such a big idea, and this technology is pretty darn close, the GPU, to what you need. I'm gonna pivot my whole company, and I'm just gonna be about deep learning." And he did that in 2013, right when it came. He saw the vision models. He saw all these incredible models. I saw all those models too, and while I added it into Salesforce, I didn't pivot Salesforce entirely around deep learning. And he was the only one in our industry to do that. He deserves a lot of credit for having the vision and the insight but also hitting his own Steve Jobs button to pivot his company, 'cause he did a hard pivot at that point, and he said, "No, I'm just about AI." That's why a couple years later when OpenAI started, he was ready to bring them those boards and say, "Hey, build OpenAI using this, not the CPU. The GPU." And that, again, was a bow to David Kirk, but also a bow to his focus on artificial intelligence. This idea that you have to be ready to pivot, to put it all behind you, to go, to leave it all in the field, but ultimately, it only works if you have a beginner's mind. In all of those cases, those pivots are only working if you're ready to really go. And you might not be, you might not know that you're at that moment if you're not in that flow, and I think sometimes CEOs are so in that cycle, they're going like this, they're going like this, that they don't have the opportunity to slow, stop, break, s- split, and just get back into the present moment right now. Breathe, realize what it is that you need to achieve right now to achieve your greatest, most amazing success. What are those values that will guide you? So this is something we all need to kind of take

13. 33:22 – 37:07

    Opinion on Big Tech Was Coerced into Censorship

    1. MBMarc Benioff33:22

       a thought about.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings33:23

       Final one before we do a quickfire. You tweeted that you loved the Marc Andreessen conversation with Joe Rogan.

    3. MBMarc Benioff33:28

       I really did.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings33:29

       Yeah, and there was one element in there that I- I was really intrigued to hear your thoughts on, where he said tech companies didn't just cave to censorship, they were coerced, especially big tech. Did you agree with that statement?

    5. MBMarc Benioff33:43

       Well, I was shocked by a lot of the revelations that have come that the government has been so involved in some of these social media companies and their operations, and he revealed a lot of that in that podcast. I think a lot of people should listen to it, and a lot of things I had never heard before, whether it was involving banking or social media, I thought that's one reason I should actually retweet it. I was surprised how viral that went.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings34:07

       Absolutely. Do- do you think that's true, though, in terms of big tech being censored and coerced in the way that it was?

    7. MBMarc Benioff34:14

       I haven't seen it in my own company. That's why I've been so surprised, uh, that... But I don't run a social media company, so I don't really know what the government does with these big consumer platforms. We almost bought one. You probably remember we almost bought Twitter. I guess there's been a lot of moments now where I've thought to myself, "You know-"

    8. HSHarry Stebbings34:29

       Do you think about what would have happened if you had have bought Twitter?

    9. MBMarc Benioff34:32

       (laughs) I think about that a lot, and I guess in a lot of ways I'm happy I didn't, 'cause I don't think I c- I would have enjoyed that part of it at all.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings34:41

        Why?

    11. MBMarc Benioff34:42

        Because that's not kind of exactly the reason that I was buying it. I was buying it because I thought Twitter... And this is kind of a funny thing, 'cause, you know, I thought Twitter was, like, one of the greatest vehicles for distributing not just content but also applications. So I, as you know, Harry, we've talked about this several times, I worked at Apple, uh, in 1984, and when we had the Macintosh, we had this great app dev system called HyperCard. And HyperCard is an incredible technology model. When I look at those little frames or those little photos inside those Twitter feeds, they look like this. Sometimes they're filled with a video, sometimes they're filled with a photo, but for me, what I saw in my mind's eye was an app. And I thought it was a card, actually, and a card and an app were the same thing in HyperCard. And I thought we could build a- kind of a WYSIWYG tool to build apps and run them in those card frames, and that you could have photos, you could have videos, but you could have apps. And I was gonna build an app store, an app dev tool, and I was gonna deliver apps in frame, and that's why I liked it. You know, I'm just an app dev person at heart, and I've always loved application development and deployment from my very earliest days in software. You know, when I was 15 years old, my first product that I wrote was for How to Juggle, then I wrote ten software adventure games, you know, for different companies, automated simulations epics and, and, uh, Romwalks and others. I ended up writing arcade games, um, but in my heart I just love this idea that, you know, you could build these things with tools, and when I went to work with Oracle in '86, that's what I really enjoyed doing, was building application development deployment tools, and that's what Salesforce has become for so many customers, the ability to easily build these amazing next-generation applications. Today we call them agents.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings36:37

        Uh, uh, another tweet, why are you so excited for Elon and Doge? What would you like to see happen?

    13. MBMarc Benioff36:42

        Well, I think that a g- we kind of... It's funny, we hit this point, I think, quite a few times in the podcast, how important it is to have fiscal responsibility in your company.I think it's important to have fiscal responsibility in your country also, and I think we've gotten away from that in the United States, and I hope it gets back. I hope we get back to a balanced budget. I think that should be a bipartisan issue. I think that's probably true in every country, that we need to have more fiscal responsibility. And that, that would be a great thing

14. 37:07 – 41:49

    Quick-Fire Round

    1. MBMarc Benioff37:07

       for us.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings37:07

       We're gonna do a quick fire, and then I'm gonna let you go. So I'm gonna ask you five quick questions. What is your favorite consumer brand today and why?

    3. MBMarc Benioff37:15

       Oh, you mentioned Louis Vuitton. I love Louis Vuitton. I just got a windbreaker yesterday. (laughs)

    4. HSHarry Stebbings37:21

       A windbreaker?

    5. MBMarc Benioff37:21

       They make my size, size 60. I love Louis Vuitton. I love the experience online. I love in the store. I love the luxurious. I also love they're a Salesforce customer, so I'm constantly testing to make sure my product is working correctly. But I do love Louis Vuitton.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings37:35

       What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

    7. MBMarc Benioff37:38

       What I've changed my mind on in the last 12 months is how impactful AI could be for customers. When I saw the breakthrough with Agentforce, I didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it was. I didn't realize the power was in our, at our fingertips. And I did the hard pivot at Dreamforce to make Agentforce something real for all of our customers, and now it has been delivered into all 135,000 customers and it's ready for them to turn it on now.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings38:05

       What do agents not do today that they need to do in the future?

    9. MBMarc Benioff38:09

       Agents need today to be multimodal. They aren't. They're mostly text-based because that's kind of the generation of capability, and they need to rapidly become a, um, uh, multimodal experience, and that will be extremely important.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings38:25

        Penultimate one. What concerns you most in the world today, Mark?

    11. MBMarc Benioff38:29

        I think one thing that does, and coming back to the AI theme, is that there's a lot of good parts of AI and there's a lot of parts that could become dark, and I think we all need to get educated about AI, all the good parts and all the bad parts. We've seen this, we've seen the movies, you know. We saw Minority Report and we saw War Games and Her and Terminator. But we need to realize AI is not there yet, but it's gonna get there, and that we need to be spending more time looking at what all of the potential of AI is. Look, technology's not good or bad. It's what we do with it, with technology, that matters. And, um, you know, we should look at that very closely, that AI is probably the most powerful technology we've ever seen, and how are we gonna use it for, uh, the betterment of our society?

    12. HSHarry Stebbings39:17

        Do you believe Sam Altman that we'll hit AGI in 2025?

    13. MBMarc Benioff39:20

        I don't think we are in AGA- AGI in 2025, so I think that's an optimistic thought. I think the- we're gonna hit the maturation of the LLM in 2025, so I'll say that. I believe that LMs are becoming commodities and that we're cresting the LMs, that they're getting incrementally more, uh, successful, but not exponentially more successful. So we'll see the full maturation and commoditization of the LM capability in 2025.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings39:47

        Final one for you. You are asked so many questions by everyone. What question has no one asked you that you lie in bed and go, "God, why does no one ask me this?"

    15. MBMarc Benioff39:56

        Well, I think that people don't under... uh, uh, don't, you know... I would say people don't really reflect on a very simple thought about Salesforce. When Salesforce started 25 years ago, we put1% of our equity, profit, and time into a 501 (c) (3) public charity, a foundation here in the United States. It was easy at the time, Harry, 'cause we had no equity, we had no profit, we had no people, we had no venture capital. So we just carved out a piece of our company. Now, 25 years later, we've given away about a billion dollars. We run 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free on our service. We've done over 10 million hours of volunteerism. I mean, this is where business is really the greatest platform for change, to see the impact that Salesforce has had. Now more than 20,000 companies have also copied us in doing that. We even have a foundation called PledgeOnePercent.org to advocate companies, and it's created billions of dollars of philanthropic aid to local communities. Even Salesforce has been able to give more than $150 million to its local public schools in San Francisco and Oakland. You know, there's no question, Harry, this simple fact: business can be used for good. Why is it that most, more people aren't asking me how can they use their businesses to improve the state of the world?

    16. HSHarry Stebbings41:18

        That's your pithy statement, Mark. You said-

    17. MBMarc Benioff41:20

        (laughs)

    18. HSHarry Stebbings41:20

        ... at the beginning, you need a statement. That's the statement.

    19. MBMarc Benioff41:22

        I guess I'll need one, Harry. Thank you for that. I hope it, I hope it's- it influences you and your own companies and your investments.

    20. HSHarry Stebbings41:28

        Honestly, Mark, it's such a joy. Thank you so much for doing this again, and I so appreciate it.

    21. MBMarc Benioff41:31

        It's great to be with you always. I hope we'll do a third and fourth and fifth podcast as well.

    22. HSHarry Stebbings41:35

        I will see you soon, my friend.

    23. MBMarc Benioff41:36

        All the best.

    24. HSHarry Stebbings41:37

        Have fun.

    25. MBMarc Benioff41:38

        Aloha. Bye-bye now.

    26. HSHarry Stebbings41:38

        Bye.

Episode duration: 41:49