The Exchanges

Q Do you have to own that agentic layer? Because 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?

A 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 a 135,000 customers. The next version of Agent Force is coming. We're going to announce that December 17th. I hope you could come to San Francisco and we can talk about it then. It's going to be incredible. Um, we have an incredible new Agent Force two about to ship. So on Agent Force One-O, the first thing to know is that we automate every customer at 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, B to B and to all these companies. Number two is customer service and support, our service cloud, our marketing cloud. We're the most skilled enterprise email system in the world. Our commerce cloud, our analytics, Tableau, Slack, Um, Mule software 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. …

AI assessment note: “you have to have as much access to the data and metadata and workflow”

Q takes me to Matthew McConaughey's talk where he talks about kind of the different checks and balances in his life where he has work, he has his marriage, he has being a good father, being a good friend, and you know, his career. Can you take me to a time when your priorities have been out of whack and miss something's gone wrong there and what you've learned from it?

A Well, my priorities are constantly out of whack. So, you know, my priorities are like my spiritual health and well-being, my physical health, my family, my friends, my business, my ability to give back. It's a dance. You know, when you have a dynamic life, I think it's a dance because different things are coming at you. It's the constant battle between the urgent and the important. In 1992, I started to really to take meditation classes and work with people. That also has really kept me, you know, going down the straight and narrow and keep my head in the game, and also to really constantly consider the questions that you're asking me. What, what is important, and what do I really want, and what is the prioritization, and is it in balance, or is it out of balance? That's been an incredible part of my life. I'm so happy to have that as well.

AI assessment note: “Well, my priorities are constantly out of whack.”

Q takes me to Matthew McConaughey's talk where he talks about kind of the different checks and balances in his life where he has work, he has his marriage, he has being a good father, being a good friend, and you know, his career. Can you take me to a time when your priorities have been out of whack and miss something's gone wrong there and what you've learned from it?

A Well, my priorities are constantly out of whack. So, you know, my priorities are like my spiritual health and well-being, my physical health, my family, my friends, my business, my ability to give back. It's a dance. You know, when you have a dynamic life, I think it's a dance because different things are coming at you. It's the constant battle between the urgent and the important. In 1992, I started to really to take meditation classes and work with people. That also has really kept me, you know, going down the straight and narrow and keep my head in the game, and also to really constantly consider the questions that you're asking me. What, what is important, and what do I really want, and what is the prioritization, and is it in balance, or is it out of balance? That's been an incredible part of my life. I'm so happy to have that as well.

AI assessment note: “Well, my priorities are constantly out of whack.”

Q When we do this in 10 years time, Mark, if everything goes to plan with AI and Salesforce, where is Salesforce then in 2033?

A Today we're the number one CRM, you know, the number one in sales, the number one in service, the number one in marketing, and commerce, and platform, and all of these areas, and it's been an amazing thing, you know, working with companies, delivering their customer success. AI is the opportunity to take all that to another level. So, we've done it for our customers with Predictive. We've now turned over the generative platform to them. For a lot of companies, they want to use generative technology But Harry, they don't have the tools to either build the apps or use the technology and make it easy or get the data together. We've packaged it together in Einstein One. I understand the problem very well where they're just given an LLM and said, oh, now make this a success, and they're like, well, I don't know, what is, what do I do? So we've been able to kind of put it together in a low-code, no-code way that makes it easy for them, wrapped in a metadata framework, so when they add a field, It populates through all the apps, and into the data cloud, and into the AI, and everywhere, and then back into the core system, and that lets them build apps, deliver customer success, uh, create innovation using this AI. You know, I put a demo on Twitter, you probably saw it on my feed over the weekend, on the next generation of our platform. I'm pretty excited about what we've done in the la…

AI assessment note: “Today we're the number one CRM, you know, the number one in sales”

Q What made you realize that? What was the penny dropping there?

A Cause that, well, I mean, I think that when you look at large language models, which is kind of the state of the art of AI today, prompt engineering, which by the way was came out of our Salesforce AI research team, you know, large language models are two things. They are a finite set of algorithms. Which have gotten a lot better for sure, you know, but incrementally better over the last, you know, five years and to a relatively finite set of data that has come off the internet. And those two things together really have provide kind of the state of the art of language, large language models today. And when you work with these LLMs, it's very cool because you're like going, oh my gosh, it feels like very intelligent. Well, it kind of felt that way when I was using Eliza, when I was like, 16 years old on my TRS-AT model one also. You know, it was like,

AI assessment note: “it kind of felt that way when I was using Eliza”

Q Jensen Huang said if he'd known how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't have done it. You look at thirty eight billion in revenue, Mark. I mean, thirty eight billion. Like, if I asked you the same, would you have done it?

A 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 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 going to keep doing it. And instead, he became the chairman of his kid's school, and he invested in his community, and he's an incredible person. I have a huge amount of respect for David Kirk. And Jemsen, who I also have a huge amount of respect for, then had that technology. It was going into these game machines, and incredible things were happening. And 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 …

AI assessment note: “my neighbor here is David Kirk, who led the creation of the GPU for Jensen”

Q If you could call yourself up the night before you had your first child and say, Mark, you should know this, and give yourself some advice, what would that advice be?

A I think the number one thing that everyone needs to do is enjoy every moment. And I'll say to people the same thing, and maybe it'll help you. Tell me, what are 10 things that make you very happy? Now let's make a list of 10 things that make you not so happy. Now let's look at these two lists. How about doing a little bit more of what makes you happy and a little bit less of what makes you unhappy? Everybody knows what makes them happy and what makes them unhappy, but I think they have to have the permission to do less unhappiness and more happiness. And I think then you will be obviously happier if you're doing things that are making you happy.

AI assessment note: “I think the number one thing that everyone needs to do is enjoy every moment.”

Q 23 to 35, A la poubelle, in European terms, to the trash. You know, you, you don't have a future. Uh, you, uh, have said before in this conversation, oh, human and agent, and very much suggested a pairing between the two. Jason has presented an idea that in the next 12 to 24 months actually we'll see this mass exodus of the SDR class. Do you think Jason's wrong?

A Well, like I said, I think that, and I'll tell you what I'm doing, which is that, you know, we, we have all these leads that we just, just systemically have not called back. And now we are, that gives me the ability now to rebalance my headcount and to really say, Hey, I want to take all these folks and make them sales folks. And I think that in all of the segments of the business that we do business in, not just government, that was one segment, not just the enterprise, the high end enterprise, the 5000 plus world. You know, but the mid market and the small business, we're, we're a company that's going after all of those segments, right? We don't.

AI assessment note: “I'll tell you what I'm doing, which is that”

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

A Well, I think that what I've really learned over 25 years of leading Salesforce is I think that when you look at agent force, 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 got to 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 got to 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 to 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 Caring, and we even met with Francois, the CEO of Caring, 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 n…

AI assessment note: “what I've really learned over 25 years of leading Salesforce is”

Q When you sit in the Salesforce boardroom, what are the reasons that Salesforce wouldn't win the next five to 10 years for AI? What are the hurdles you have to overcome?

A Well, we are in a remarkably good position. Number one, because we're in San Francisco, which is the number one AI city in the world. That's where all the talent is and all the great startups and companies and It gives us a leg up on the ability to invest in these companies, but also to tap into the universities like Berkeley and Stanford, which have had such huge impacts on the AI World. So I think the other great thing about Salesforce is the nature of our product is that we command a lot of data. So we don't look at our customers' data, but we built our AI. In fact, we were really the first AI that was built where it was able to operate on the data without us, uh, seeing the data. And that's really the magic of Einstein is that Einstein operates with a complete trust layer.

AI assessment note: “Well, we are in a remarkably good position.”

Q What's the hardest part of giving effectively? I was chatting to David Velez at Newbank the other day about this on the show. What's the hardest part about actually giving effectively?

A I think the number one thing that people must do is just start giving. And find what works for them effectively. I know people who do very effective global philanthropy. That's not me. I've tried to do global programs. It's very difficult. I have a program called OneT.org, the Trillion Tree Program, trying to sequester 200 gigatons of carbon with a trillion trees. There's a lot of fulfillment and a lot of fun, and while building the AI version of Salesforce is amazing, and all the things that are going on, Never forget that you're going to ultimately get the most happiness and the most fulfillment is not, not just setting your intention for a great company with great products, but something that's going to give back and impact the world in a positive way.

AI assessment note: “I've tried to do global programs. It's very difficult. I have a program called”

Q Jensen Huang said if he'd known how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't have done it. You look at thirty eight billion in revenue, Mark. I mean, thirty eight billion. Like, if I asked you the same, would you have done it?

A 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 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 going to keep doing it. And instead, he became the chairman of his kid's school, and he invested in his community, and he's an incredible person. I have a huge amount of respect for David Kirk. And Jemsen, who I also have a huge amount of respect for, then had that technology. It was going into these game machines, and incredible things were happening. And 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 …

AI assessment note: “while I added it into Salesforce, I didn't pivot Salesforce entirely around deep learning.”

Q 23 to 35, A la poubelle, in European terms, to the trash. You know, you, you don't have a future. Uh, you, uh, have said before in this conversation, oh, human and agent, and very much suggested a pairing between the two. Jason has presented an idea that in the next 12 to 24 months actually we'll see this mass exodus of the SDR class. Do you think Jason's wrong?

A Well, like I said, I think that, and I'll tell you what I'm doing, which is that, you know, we, we have all these leads that we just, just systemically have not called back. And now we are, that gives me the ability now to rebalance my headcount and to really say, Hey, I want to take all these folks and make them sales folks. And I think that in all of the segments of the business that we do business in, not just government, that was one segment, not just the enterprise, the high end enterprise, the 5000 plus world. You know, but the mid market and the small business, we're, we're a company that's going after all of those segments, right? We don't.

AI assessment note: “I'll tell you what I'm doing, which is that, you know, we”

Q many things, but he says, life is not easy. Most things are more rewarding when you have to break a sweat to get them. And I was listening to this, and I was like, I wonder what Mark would say to that when I ask him, when you reflect on the immense success of Salesforce, What comes to your mind when you think about breaking a sweat to get it?

A Well, he's one of my closest friends, and we spent a huge amount of time together, and I'll just tell you that, you know, what he says is, don't half-ass it. And that really comes from his dad, you know, and his mom I know very well. This family is a family of people who know who, they, they get it done. You know, that's why I think he'd be a very good, a mayor, or a governor, or even a president, because He's a get it done person. When he was working on his book, you're like, I'm going to write a top book. I said, Matthew, you're going to write the number one book. And then he became the number one book. He, like, completely goes for it, and it's incredible how he lives his life. He's an amazing person. He's a father. He's a son. Um, he is a CEO. He is a philanthropist. He is an actor. He is a writer. He is a song and dance band. When it gets right down to it, he's an incredible person in all these things because he believes that he can do all these things. He will do all these things, that he must do all these things, and he does, and it's a Incredible thing to watch. I've never really met anybody like him in my life.

AI assessment note: “Well, he's one of my closest friends, and we spent a huge amount of time”

Q I have to ask, when you were young, did you always have an inevitability of success about you? Did you know that you would be successful?

A I don't look at it as success, so maybe that's part of it. You know, when I was young, and I worked very closely with my partner from my high school software company as one of our primary engineering leaders and architects, Steve Fisher, and when we started our software company in high school, we were both about 14, 15 years old, And we were writing software on Atari 800, and Commodore 64, and Apple II, and it was an amazing time because nobody knew what we were doing. We were building these entertainment software products, and different titles, and cartridges, and some of it you can find now on YouTube. People have recorded all the software. It's amazing. The thing that's cool about all that is that, you know, when we were doing all that, we were just entering the software industry. We're just doing it because we love software. That's what I love. I love talking about seeing software evolve, go forward, we talked about AI, and also the other thing that I love, philanthropy, and giving back, and giving back to San Francisco, you know, we're the, Salesforce is the largest philanthropist in San Francisco, we've given more than a hundred million dollars to the public schools, more than a hundred million dollars to the public hospitals, that's a lot about giving back, not, not to mention all, a lot of other NGOs and non-profits in the city, And all of the incredible mentoring and t…

AI assessment note: “I don't look at it as success, so maybe that's part of it.”

Q I have to ask, when you were young, did you always have an inevitability of success about you? Did you know that you would be successful?

A I don't look at it as success, so maybe that's part of it. You know, when I was young, and I worked very closely with my partner from my high school software company as one of our primary engineering leaders and architects, Steve Fisher, and when we started our software company in high school, we were both about 14, 15 years old, And we were writing software on Atari 800, and Commodore 64, and Apple II, and it was an amazing time because nobody knew what we were doing. We were building these entertainment software products, and different titles, and cartridges, and some of it you can find now on YouTube. People have recorded all the software. It's amazing. The thing that's cool about all that is that, you know, when we were doing all that, we were just entering the software industry. We're just doing it because we love software. That's what I love. I love talking about seeing software evolve, go forward, we talked about AI, and also the other thing that I love, philanthropy, and giving back, and giving back to San Francisco, you know, we're the, Salesforce is the largest philanthropist in San Francisco, we've given more than a hundred million dollars to the public schools, more than a hundred million dollars to the public hospitals, that's a lot about giving back, not, not to mention all, a lot of other NGOs and non-profits in the city, And all of the incredible mentoring and t…

AI assessment note: “and also the other thing that I love, philanthropy, and giving back”

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

A Well, I think that what I've really learned over 25 years of leading Salesforce is I think that when you look at agent force, 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 got to 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 got to 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 to 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 Caring, and we even met with Francois, the CEO of Caring, 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 n…

AI assessment note: “what I've really learned over 25 years of leading Salesforce is”

Q many things, but he says, life is not easy. Most things are more rewarding when you have to break a sweat to get them. And I was listening to this, and I was like, I wonder what Mark would say to that when I ask him, when you reflect on the immense success of Salesforce, What comes to your mind when you think about breaking a sweat to get it?

A Well, he's one of my closest friends, and we spent a huge amount of time together, and I'll just tell you that, you know, what he says is, don't half-ass it. And that really comes from his dad, you know, and his mom I know very well. This family is a family of people who know who, they, they get it done. You know, that's why I think he'd be a very good, a mayor, or a governor, or even a president, because He's a get it done person. When he was working on his book, you're like, I'm going to write a top book. I said, Matthew, you're going to write the number one book. And then he became the number one book. He, like, completely goes for it, and it's incredible how he lives his life. He's an amazing person. He's a father. He's a son. Um, he is a CEO. He is a philanthropist. He is an actor. He is a writer. He is a song and dance band. When it gets right down to it, he's an incredible person in all these things because he believes that he can do all these things. He will do all these things, that he must do all these things, and he does, and it's a Incredible thing to watch. I've never really met anybody like him in my life.

AI assessment note: “Well, he's one of my closest friends, and we spent a huge amount of time”

Q they have is how do you bring up children With the same tenacity, hunger, work ethic, when brought up in very different financial environments. The university across the board, I actually analyzed it before this, 48 out of 50 said that was their biggest challenge. How would you say you do it? How do you bring children up to have that same hunger and tenacity in very different financial environments?

A Matthew McConaughey probably has said it best in his books, which is, you know, you have to pay attention to, are you spending time as a parent? Are you spending time I'll say as a son, my mother also is still alive. So, you know, in many ways, I'm also still very much her child, and I saw her last week. She was in San Francisco. People come to Dreamforce, see her. She's in all of my programs. It's probably a better question for her. You know, she's obviously still working on me. Fortunately, this, some of these questions about happiness aren't things that I have to wrestle with because I was able to cross those bridges so many decades ago.

AI assessment note: “It's probably a better question for her.”

Q they have is how do you bring up children With the same tenacity, hunger, work ethic, when brought up in very different financial environments. The university across the board, I actually analyzed it before this, 48 out of 50 said that was their biggest challenge. How would you say you do it? How do you bring children up to have that same hunger and tenacity in very different financial environments?

A Matthew McConaughey probably has said it best in his books, which is, you know, you have to pay attention to, are you spending time as a parent? Are you spending time I'll say as a son, my mother also is still alive. So, you know, in many ways, I'm also still very much her child, and I saw her last week. She was in San Francisco. People come to Dreamforce, see her. She's in all of my programs. It's probably a better question for her. You know, she's obviously still working on me. Fortunately, this, some of these questions about happiness aren't things that I have to wrestle with because I was able to cross those bridges so many decades ago.

AI assessment note: “It's probably a better question for her. You know, she's obviously still working”