The Exchanges

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

A 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 velocity 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 2000 salespeople in the short term.

AI assessment note: “I think we'll probably be larger.”

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

A 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 velocity 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 2000 salespeople in the short term.

AI assessment note: “I think we'll probably be larger.”

Q You mentioned values. I know it's a fanboy, clearly. Uh, Matthew McConaughey says we've financialized our values in society so much in his I miss you. I know it for word for word after about 4000 runs. But my question to you is, Mark, and I hope it's not too personal. How do you reflect on your relationship to money today? And does money make one happy?

A Well, money's never going to make you happy. And I guess that's one of the reasons that I'm so into philanthropy. I've given away more than a billion dollars to all kinds of organizations, mostly in San Francisco, mostly our university, mostly UCSF. I built two children's hospitals. I built an An ocean program. I've done all kinds of things. Wherever I go or where I live, I make sure that I'm always giving back at scale to the community. Personally, I feel that to who much is given, much is, you know, required. I want to build a great company, but I also want to give back. Now, I want to tell you why that's selfish, because it gets to your point. I'm not going to be happy unless I'm giving.

AI assessment note: “Well, money's never going to make you happy.”

Q Okay. You've got open AI, you've got open AI at one 60 anthropic at 40 or x.com at 50. Which one would you rather invest in?

A 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. 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. 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 going to really Operate for different industries differently is where the models are going to start to really shine.

AI assessment note: “I don't know if I'd really want to invest in any of them right now”

Q 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?

A Well, I think that people don't under his, 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 put one percent of our equity, profit, and time into a five O and C three public charity, a foundation here in the United States. It was easy at the time, Harry, because 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 ten 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 a hundred and fifty million dollars to its local public schools in San Francisco and Oakland. No, 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?

AI assessment note: “why is it that most more people aren't asking me how can they use”

Q other podcasts 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?

A 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. Thich Nhat Hanh was an amazing influence on my life. Um, he is of 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 Thich Nhat Hanh, he 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. And 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 because There's so many difficult things happening all the time. Yesterday, I spent the whole time doing my, the whole day doing my earnings. So by the time it turns out, you know, for this morning, I need to get a few minutes to clear, clear my head.

AI assessment note: “that was an inspiring talk from Jensen, which is why I tweeted it”

Q Okay. You've got open AI, you've got open AI at one 60 anthropic at 40 or x.com at 50. Which one would you rather invest in?

A 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. 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. 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 going to really Operate for different industries differently is where the models are going to start to really shine.

AI assessment note: “I don't know if I'd really want to invest in any of them right now”

Q 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 the Salesforce journey has led to the greatest outcomes in terms of learning?

A I think yesterday's a great example. We had a great quarter, Harry. We delivered, you know, clear guidance to thirty eight 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 nine percent. Um, it was adding another large tech company onto our company. So we ended up in the mid three hundred billion dollars in market cap. And, you know, when I think back, um, I think our stock was about one third this value two years ago, one third. 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 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 resulte…

AI assessment note: “two years ago, we had a really difficult moment. We were like flying an airplane”

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

A Absolutely. And you have to find ways to be able to constantly bring it back around to everybody. Even 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 twenty-four-seven perfect accuracy, but a lot of the conversations that I have with those two organizations is, what is your agent-first future? What is your agentic layer? How are you going to 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 going to transform your customers? That everything needs to be about agent force 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.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. And you have to find ways to be able to constantly bring it back”

Q other podcasts 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?

A 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. Thich Nhat Hanh was an amazing influence on my life. Um, he is of 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 Thich Nhat Hanh, he 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. And 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 because There's so many difficult things happening all the time. Yesterday, I spent the whole time doing my, the whole day doing my earnings. So by the time it turns out, you know, for this morning, I need to get a few minutes to clear, clear my head.

AI assessment note: “that was an inspiring talk from Jensen, which is why I tweeted it”

Q 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 a next generation of AI. Do agents really help Salesforce?

A We're in a really competitive industry, number one. And 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 great example is, you know, your favorite airport there, Heathrow, um, is one of our launch 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 because people have 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 going to be partnered with an agent to make sure you have an absolutely great experience at Heathrow. I think this is going to be pretty awesome.

AI assessment note: “we've delivered the first scaled, secure, trusted enterprise agentic platform, which we call AgentForce.”

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

A Absolutely. And you have to find ways to be able to constantly bring it back around to everybody. Even 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 twenty-four-seven perfect accuracy, but a lot of the conversations that I have with those two organizations is, what is your agent-first future? What is your agentic layer? How are you going to 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 going to transform your customers? That everything needs to be about agent force 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.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. And you have to find ways to be able to constantly bring it back around”

Q at the beginning the art telling the story and the science, the learnings that come from it. I, I do want to discuss two amazing decisions and two tough decisions or plenty of 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?

A 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, 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 want to 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 going to do one size. 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 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 going to 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 going to talk a lot about all of Salesforce's products, which are amazing. You know, on the podcast, I'm going to keep coming back to AgentForce because t…

AI assessment note: “when I just rolled out AgentForce... I'm going to keep coming back to AgentForce”

Q not? Something that makes people happy for the millennial generation. Maybe I'm going to get in trouble for this. It's working from home. My team want to work from home. I want them in the office. I won. My point is, how do you feel about the, what if it's work from home that makes you happy? And how do we feel about the reversion back to work in office?

A Well, I think for different kind of workers, it's different. And I think like, start with our engineers. Our engineers only have to come in the office 10 days a quarter. You know, for our engineers, We want them to come together to collaborate and to hang out and to get to know each other, but they're very productive at home. I work mostly at home. I have for my entire life. I just have never been able to work well and be successful in an office. I can't tell you why. Today, I think there's a balance between working at home And working in person. I need to be with my customers all the time. Now that can be digital. Like I was just with a customer before we had this conversation and I'm in my zoom room here and I'm like hanging out today and, uh, it's a digital day. You know, last week I was with thousands of customers and it has to be a balance of being in person and digital today. I think for everybody, it has to be a little bit different. I think that for our sales and marketing people, We tell them that four days a week we want to see them, you know, in person with a customer. For our sales and for our marketing people and our G&A people, we like to see them in person three days a week. Obviously, I'm in an office right now. I'm not really at home. I have my chief of staff and other employees here working on various things. My futurist was just here. We're doing a variety of…

AI assessment note: “I think for different kind of workers, it's different.”

Q thing that everyone feels is finite is, is talent. And Zuck is paying up for talent like no one's seen before. You're seeing your mirrors getting offers at a billion dollars with, bluntly, very little to show for it. No disrespect to her, but other than the team, um, Oh, do you feel the pressure to enter this talent buying frenzy in a way that we're seeing other large incumbents?

A No, and we're not. And I'll say that, you know, we're very focused on really defining what is the next generation of the enterprise and really looking at what is working and what is not working and how do we go forward? And, you know, tactics must dictate strategy over time in enterprise software. I'll just say, like, the first thing that we've been talking about now for only about eight or nine months is that we have help.salesforce.com. And help.salesforce.com is our agentic layer around our support. And this agentic service means that there is an omnichannel supervisor that is paying attention between my human support agents and my digital agents. And to that point, I've been able to reduce the number of human agents I have in support From about 9000 to about 5000. And why that's important is I've been able to take that headcount and then rebalance it into other parts of my company where I need more help and need more support because we're still growing. So I think that this is very, you know, exciting that it's a huge change in how our company is structured, how our technology is built and delivered to our customers and we're customer zero. And Let me give you one other crazy story to that point, and you'll be the first ones to hear this story, which is that, and this is a little bit forgive me part of the story. Over the last 26 years, Salesforce has had more than a hundre…

AI assessment note: “No, and we're not.”

Q 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?

A 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, an 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 lot of different products. I won't go through them all.

AI assessment note: “Yes. And that is a great place to be because you can do it on your phone”

Q 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?

A 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, an 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 lot of different products. I won't go through them all.

AI assessment note: “Yes. And that is a great place to be because you can do it”

Q Mark, are you knackered at the end of Dreamforce or Agentforce? It is an intense period for you. You are on stage. We see you crush it. Are you knackered at the end?

A 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 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 the ideas, concepts, notions, people? Is every, do I have everything necessary to make agent force 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 in 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 grow in it as the singular CEO all the way to today at thirty eight billion in revenue. Whoa. Like you have to be ready to leave it on the field each and every moment, or you're not going to get to where you're, where you want to go. So yeah…

AI assessment note: “Well, I would just say it's exhaustive. I mean, yesterday was also exhaustive.”

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

A 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 the, 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 going to get there, and that we need to be Spending more time looking at what all of the potential of AI is. Look, technology is 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 going to use it for, uh, the betterment of our society?

AI assessment note: “one thing that does, and coming back to the AI theme”

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

A 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 the, 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 going to get there, and that we need to be Spending more time looking at what all of the potential of AI is. Look, technology is 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 going to use it for, uh, the betterment of our society?

AI assessment note: “coming back to the AI theme... there's a lot of parts that could become dark”

Q 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 the Salesforce journey has led to the greatest outcomes in terms of learning?

A I think yesterday's a great example. We had a great quarter, Harry. We delivered, you know, clear guidance to thirty eight 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 nine percent. Um, it was adding another large tech company onto our company. So we ended up in the mid three hundred billion dollars in market cap. And, you know, when I think back, um, I think our stock was about one third this value two years ago, one third. 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 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 resulte…

AI assessment note: “two years ago, we had a really difficult moment. We were like flying an airplane”

Q So what would you do if you were in charge, as it remains, like?

A I have a ten-point plan I could walk you through. Or I'll send it to you, Harry. It'll be much easier, and it goes through in detail exactly what I would do, and it's something that I evangelize with all these folks. We must enforce our laws. I don't think it's a lot to ask. We have to fund our police force. We have a great police force in San Francisco, but from the time that Gavin Newsom was mayor to today, we've gone from a little over 2000 cops on the streets in San Francisco now to about 1400. That's completely unacceptable, and we need to Now expand our police force. It's the most beautiful city in the world, and the safest, and the cleanest, and we have the statistics to prove it, but sometimes it doesn't deliver the goods every single day, and it's kind of a funny thing about San Francisco, but it's also one reason I love it so much.

AI assessment note: “We must enforce our laws... We have to fund our police force.”

Q thing that everyone feels is finite is, is talent. And Zuck is paying up for talent like no one's seen before. You're seeing your mirrors getting offers at a billion dollars with, bluntly, very little to show for it. No disrespect to her, but other than the team, um, Oh, do you feel the pressure to enter this talent buying frenzy in a way that we're seeing other large incumbents?

A No, and we're not. And I'll say that, you know, we're very focused on really defining what is the next generation of the enterprise and really looking at what is working and what is not working and how do we go forward? And, you know, tactics must dictate strategy over time in enterprise software. I'll just say, like, the first thing that we've been talking about now for only about eight or nine months is that we have help.salesforce.com. And help.salesforce.com is our agentic layer around our support. And this agentic service means that there is an omnichannel supervisor that is paying attention between my human support agents and my digital agents. And to that point, I've been able to reduce the number of human agents I have in support From about 9000 to about 5000. And why that's important is I've been able to take that headcount and then rebalance it into other parts of my company where I need more help and need more support because we're still growing. So I think that this is very, you know, exciting that it's a huge change in how our company is structured, how our technology is built and delivered to our customers and we're customer zero. And Let me give you one other crazy story to that point, and you'll be the first ones to hear this story, which is that, and this is a little bit forgive me part of the story. Over the last 26 years, Salesforce has had more than a hundre…

AI assessment note: “No, and we're not. And I'll say that, you know, we're very focused”

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 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?

A 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, you know, I'm eating my own dog food. Sorry to my dogs here. 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 agent force for no other reason what 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 agent force. 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. These three things are on my mind continuously.

AI assessment note: “how to explain to customers the huge value that they can get from AgentForce.”

Q 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 a next generation of AI. Do agents really help Salesforce?

A We're in a really competitive industry, number one. And 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 great example is, you know, your favorite airport there, Heathrow, um, is one of our launch 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 because people have 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 going to be partnered with an agent to make sure you have an absolutely great experience at Heathrow. I think this is going to be pretty awesome.

AI assessment note: “when you think about Salesforce and AI, we are the number one enterprise AI supplier”

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: “those three things are not three products. It's actually one piece of code”

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

A Well, two out of the top five models in the industry are Salesforce models, Salesforce builds a lot of models. 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 ran AI at Stanford. Her husband 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 tasks that you're trying to accomplish.

AI assessment note: “really, it's really fit for purpose what the model is that you want”

Q 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?

A 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, you know, I'm eating my own dog food. Sorry to my dogs here. 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 agent force for no other reason what 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 agent force. 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. These three things are on my mind continuously.

AI assessment note: “how to explain to customers the huge value that they can get from AgentForce”

Q So what would you do if you were in charge, as it remains, like?

A I have a ten-point plan I could walk you through. Or I'll send it to you, Harry. It'll be much easier, and it goes through in detail exactly what I would do, and it's something that I evangelize with all these folks. We must enforce our laws. I don't think it's a lot to ask. We have to fund our police force. We have a great police force in San Francisco, but from the time that Gavin Newsom was mayor to today, we've gone from a little over 2000 cops on the streets in San Francisco now to about 1400. That's completely unacceptable, and we need to Now expand our police force. It's the most beautiful city in the world, and the safest, and the cleanest, and we have the statistics to prove it, but sometimes it doesn't deliver the goods every single day, and it's kind of a funny thing about San Francisco, but it's also one reason I love it so much.

AI assessment note: “We must enforce our laws. I don't think it's a lot to ask. We have to fund our police force.”