why aren't all 230 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public
record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 13 checkable
ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't;
assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card:
▮▮▮▮▮ certainty ·
▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Cohen: Nobody will use Concur, Amex GBT, or Salesforce by 2028
“In five years from now, nobody is using, going to use Conquer and Emacs. Nobody, by the way, nobody is going to use Salesforce.”
Disclosure
Curative Canceled $600K Salesforce Contract For An Internally Vibe-Coded CRM
“We just recently canceled our Salesforce contract because we have an internal CRM that was vibe coded, that is working better, that is managing our process better, is more integrated into what we're doing. We run our agents inside of it, and no one was using S…”
Opinion
Salesforce salespeople are terrible hires because they are just order takers
“Salesforce. Terrible. Terrible. Because they have no idea how to sell. They, they're order takers. To your point earlier is they don't, if you go to a place that's just an order taker, they'd have no idea how to do it. They have no idea how to sell.”
Assertion Supported
Benioff: Salesforce cut support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000 via AI 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.”
Prediction Partly held up
Benioff: Salesforce Will Not Hire Software Engineers in 2025 Due to AI
“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 …”
Insight
Lemkin: Autonomous AI agents could reduce Salesforce and HubSpot to dumb databases
“If the agent can run 24 seven autonomously, take all your data and build all the analytics, build all the dashboards, run autonomously out of it then your data can flow between apps and you won't even care where it lives and all the fears about headless become…”
Opinion
Stebbings: Staying at Salesforce for 12+ years signals mediocrity
“If you've been at Salesforce for 12, 1314 years, I automatically think you're not great. I'm like, you got stuck in your ways. You've been there for way too long. Seriously, you were happy just in this kind of melee of Mediocrity for 1213, 14 years.”
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Salesforce risks becoming another IBM if its AI agents fail
“Unless it gets its shit together and makes great agents, it's another IBM.”
Opinion
Zinman: Salesforce and ServiceNow markets are open to AI competitors
“The way I look at this today, service dominated by ServiceNow, CRM dominated by Salesforce is open market today.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2036
Cohen: Form-based software like Salesforce will be obsolete within 10 years
“I think I called out Salesforce back then, as I cannot imagine people using something like this in the next 10 years. I think AI accelerates this.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Dec 2030
Lemkin: Drift Is Completely Dead After Being Banned by Salesforce
“They kicked Drift off five months ago. Drift will never come back. It is dead. It is completely dead.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jason Lemkin: Salesforce Agentforce could render AI startups obsolete within two years
“Salesforce could be the next Google. It could be in 18 to 24 months. We could be like, oh my god, Agent Force crushed it. All these startups, we didn't need them because Agent Force is so good.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shlomo: Building custom CRMs via AI will soon beat buying Salesforce licenses
“And there would be a time, it might be in a few months, might be in a few years, where it will be easier to build your own Salesforce type of CRM than to actually buy a license to something off the shelf.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shlomo: SaaS companies requiring implementers will not survive the decade
“I think every software company that needs implementers, right, there's like a Salesforce implementer or whatever maybe in a decade from now is not going to make it.”
Opinion
Former Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan calls Salesforce a terrible product
“Cause God, what a terrible product that is. It is awful.”
Opinion
Zhang: Competitor Sierra relies on heavy, Salesforce-style configuration
“The approaches are just very different because of their leadership all coming from Salesforce. They've taken a very Salesforce-esque approach where it's, you know, the heavy configuration and sort of this longer lift to get going. And we're more of a, you know…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2030
Varun Mohan: Salesforce won't be dethroned by database-plus-agent competitors
“It's very unlikely to me that what's going to happen is Salesforce will get dethroned by a company that is just a database with an agent operating on top of it. It just, there's too much inertia for the company building out these complex workflows.”
Opinion
Torres: Salesforce is the biggest short in public software markets
“Salesforce.”
Opinion
Salesforce Is No Longer the Best CRM on the Market
“Salesforce isn't the best CRM now.”
Opinion
Sivulka: Salesforce will survive AI disruption due to human switching costs
“I think that ultimately I don't think they are. I think that I think that Salesforce Like, has built, again, like, a very, very, very sticky network effect with people, and people are the shifting function at the end of the day. It's not a technology problem. …”
Opinion
Daniel Dines claims UiPath's technology is much harder to build than Salesforce's
“Look, with all respect to Salesforce, our technology is much harder to build.”
Prediction Held up
Benioff: Salesforce Will Reduce Support Engineer Headcount in 2025
“We will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer”
Disclosure
Benioff: Salesforce Shifted Help.Salesforce.com to 100% AI Agents
“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 base.”
Insight
Benioff: Layoffs Are a Necessary Tool and CEOs Shouldn't Fear Them
“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, inc…”
Assertion Partly supported
Mathrubootham: No enterprise software company has successfully transitioned down to SMB
“Oh, start high and go down never, never works. In the history of software, you can tell me which company has succeeded in starting at enterprise and actually winning in SMB. It's not happened. But if you look at many companies, including Salesforce and Freshwo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cassidy: Never hire 10-year Salesforce veterans for early-stage startups
“Versus like, oh, this guy was a sales force for 10 years. I won't ever hire that person in a startup generally, right? Because there's no, no comparable motion, right?”
Opinion
Lanng: Salesforce is just a database and LLMs bypass software UI layers
“I'm so sorry, but Salesforce is just a database. And LLMs are really good at talking with databases and querying data. You don't need 15 layers between you and that database to do it.”
Opinion
Lanng: Salesforce turns software users into robotic button-clickers
“Salesforce don't have a human in the center. Salesforce makes you into a robot that has to click buttons in a certain order.”
Disclosure
Benioff: Salesforce threatened to pull Dreamforce until San Francisco leaders delivered
“I mean, I had to kind of lay down the gauntlet. You probably saw that. I had to threaten the city and all the leaders and say, if you guys don't get your act together, we're not coming back, and They delivered.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2033
Salesforce Will Lose Its Top CRM Market Position Within 10 Years
“So I would say I am bearish on Salesforce ability to stay number one over the next decade.”
Opinion
Ariel Cohen: SAP and Salesforce haven't innovated since the 90s and 2000s
“I think the last time that SAP innovated something was in the nineties, and the last time that, that Salesforce innovated was in the beginning of 2000.”
Opinion
Cohen: SAP and Salesforce have not innovated in decades
“Salesforce and SAP, which are not innovating. I think the last time that SAP innovated something was in the nineties, and the last time that the, that Salesforce innovated was in the beginning of 2000.”
Opinion
Braze will win marketing automation over legacy giants Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle
“Braze. It's an incredible team and product in the marketing automation space. They are helping company large brands figure out how to engage with their customers and giving them a single view of their business across channel. And that's something that Salesfor…”
Opinion
Lerman: Billing and Contract SaaS Companies Should Just Be Salesforce Features
“A lot of the SaaS companies out there should just be features of Salesforce. In fact, it's annoying that they're not features of Salesforce. Things like billing, things like order management, things like contract management, but Yext is a platform in itself.”
Opinion
Stebbings: Bret Taylor is building Sierra to recreate the next Salesforce
“I think Brett Taylor's actually trying to recreate the next generation of Salesforce. He is absolutely not playing the customer support game. He's moving into pre-sales.”
Assertion Supported
Salesforce Agreed to Shift Its LLM Spending to Anthropic
“Dario is showing up because Mark agreed to move Salesforce agreed to move
Their LLM spend to Anthropic.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Next-generation startups may never adopt Salesforce due to AI agents
“The next generation of folks may not graduate to Salesforce. Because they never started there. They started agentically. They may never graduate there.”
Insight
Abrahami: Salesforce's Moat Against AI Is Institutional Data Trust
“Salesforce, what is the biggest value Salesforce provide? It's not the CRM. It's the fact that you trust a SaaS providers with your data, right? You have huge banks, huge companies that actually allow Salesforce to hold all of the customer data because they tr…”
Disclosure
Lemkin: Salesforce bill jumped to $22,000 while seats dropped to three
“Our Salesforce bill went up from 12,000 to 22,000 dollars a year, and our seats went down from 10 to two plus one.”
Assertion Partly supported
O'Driscoll: Cursor loses money despite generating $4M per employee
“Cursor does four million per employee. Salesforce does 700 per 700,000 per employee. Oh, Cursor must be more efficient. Well, it turns out Salesforce has 30% operating margins and Cursor's losing a lot of money. Why? Because they spend a whole ton on tokens, r…”
Insight
Rajaram: Systems of record must commoditize complementary AI products
“And I think that's the way that a net suite or a sales for the system record needs to operate. They have to commoditize a compliment. They can't just wait around for other people to build on top of them.”
Assertion Contradicted
Lemkin: Salesforce has more Agentforce AI demand than it can service
“I'm long on Salesforce. The simple reason, and I know this being super deep on agent force and everything, is unlike a lot of folks on this list, they have more demand than they can service.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2029
Lemkin: Monday.com Will Churn Faster Than HubSpot and Salesforce
“The Mondays will churn faster than HubSpot, right? And HubSpot will churn faster than Salesforce. It's just delayed churn, right? That, that's the thing is, you know, ServiceNow takes you 10 years to get off that platform.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Salesforce employees call current AI era most stressful in company history
“And I don't see how even Salesforce is one of the few that can do it with its resources. And even there, it's stressful. If you talk to folks at Salesforce today, they'll tell you this is the most stressful time they've ever worked at Salesforce in history of …”
Opinion
O'Driscoll: AI vibe coding will not replace enterprise systems of record
“I think deals like this put to rest the, anyone who thinks that they're going to vibe code their way to a product that can replace a five hundred million dollar army orders.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Salesforce will be the biggest public tech stock beneficiary in 2026
“I think Salesforce might be the biggest beneficiary next year, and I'll tell you why, because it has, it is, like, you have to also, we go through the ones that declined the most this year, and you have to be honest, are they at least tapping into AI tailwinds…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shlomo: AI will eliminate moatless CRM companies, but Salesforce can adapt
“Smaller CRM companies, every software that's basically front end on top of a database with some team features and some integrations and does not have a moat. And I think Salesforce is so big and so massive that this is like, this is one of their moats. Like th…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
O'Driscoll: Salesforce must automate 20-30% of customers within two years
“In the next two years, they got to get 20% of their customer base plus maybe 30% onto being as pointy edge as Jason in terms of automation. Otherwise, these guys are going to go somewhere else to get their automation.”