Salesforce, every mention
49 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Salesforce
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 53Bernadette Kevins 22Toni Cowan-Brown 21
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Salesforce comes up
AI deployment
- ▶ 15:43 Benedict Evans Should you customize, or should you spend a lot of money to customize Salesforce?
- ▶ 24:44 Benedict Evans You unbundle Excel, you unbundle email, you unbundle Google and SAP and the Salesforce and Workday, and then you turn, and very often, and you turn them into a new bundle, and you identify tasks or projects or problems that people didn't…
The spring updates on AI
- ▶ 20:15 Benedict Evans So go and look at all of the Salesforce and all the client Zoom calls and all the internal Zoom calls and all the Workday data and all the customer analytics, and then tell me why we lose customers and what would happen if we change your…
The end of the network effect
- ▶ 7:22 Benedict Evans You don't have the existing feature set that Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and everybody else have where they can add it and Salesforce and, you know, Workday and, you know, Figma and everyone else, some of them, some…
AI and SaaS
- ▶ 7:56 Benedict Evans I'm going to export a CSV and find out the answer because I can't do it in Salesforce or I can't do it in SAP or whatever it is.
- ▶ 10:37 Benedict Evans The on-prem thing is, the cloud thing is kind of interesting because this is something that starts in, you know, you could date it to Salesforce if you like, you could argue about when exactly it starts, but you know, it's been around 20,…
- ▶ 14:17 Benedict Evans Steps, and that will, that will do is that will find you, ask the LLM, and it will find you the thing in Salesforce or SAP or whatever the data system that you're using is.
A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1
- ▶ 37:27 Toni Cowan-Brown Insert, you know, Salesforce, AWS.
Looking for AI strategies
- ▶ 2:13 Benedict Evans To solve some problem inside big companies to unbundle something out of Excel, Salesforce, email, Oracle, um, whatever, um, solve some point solution.
Ai eats the world
- ▶ 21:35 Benedict Evans Do you go with Google or do you go with Salesforce? 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 33:18 Benedict Evans You could maybe say Salesforce or you could say Gmail.
From SAAS software to Formula 1
- ▶ 8:57 Toni Cowan-Brown And you look at the sponsors, it's the likes of Juniper, it's the likes of Salesforce, AWS, Oracle, like every other sponsor is a giant tech sponsor. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:03 Toni Cowan-Brown Salesforce came out with a stat that said one percent of Formula One fans will attend a race in a season, which means, says to me that this is a sport where 99% of the fans are consuming this at home digitally, which means that if you,…
The AI summer
- ▶ 17:48 Benedict Evans So, if we were business software analysts, like you go and listen to Bill Gurley's podcast, and the whole, and he's talking about chef prices, and the venture market, and actual companies, which I'm, I'm, I'm not, not, know less about, and…
Looking for AI use-cases
- ▶ 17:48 Benedict Evans So yes, you do have four or 500 different software applications, and the reason I mention this is that all of those are basically doing stuff you could do with X, some Excel, email, Salesforce, or Oracle, or PowerPoint. 4 times in the scene
What's your AI strategy?
- ▶ 4:32 Benedict Evans Does this just come from Google and Oracle and Salesforce versus
Bundling/Unbundling AI
- ▶ 11:55 Benedict Evans Well, but, um, so yeah, at a certain point, you know, should I be doing this in Excel, or should I be using QuickBooks, or Salesforce, or whatever it is? 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:21 Benedict Evans You haven't really got Salesforce.
The magic customer
- ▶ 40:19 Toni Cowan-Brown And it's interesting because I can see this working incredibly well for a sport, which Salesforce did a research
Working out AI questions
- ▶ 4:20 Benedict Evans Do you just have kind of one text box to talk to Salesforce?
- ▶ 27:31 Benedict Evans And again, if you were doing this in Salesforce, you wouldn't just, I mean, Salesforce already launching stuff. 2 times in the scene
GPT-4 is here, now what?
- ▶ 28:57 Benedict Evans So, you know, you have, um, you have Salesforce and you have Figma, um, as opposed to, you know, adding, sharing to, um,
Generative search
- ▶ 5:14 Benedict Evans And so you have that when you go to cloud, you get Salesforce.
- ▶ 9:46 Benedict Evans Um, and step two then becomes, okay, we are going to do natural language processing on text, going in and out of Salesforce to work out which sales pipelines are going wrong. 3 times in the scene
No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A
- ▶ 13:32 Benedict Evans And it's like, like Salesforce isn't Microsoft. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:16 Toni Cowan-Brown Um, as we were talking also, and just because we mentioned, um, I brought up Slack and Salesforce, and I hadn't realized this, that Stuart Butterfield, who joined obviously the company as the CEO of Slack and obviously joined Salesforce, I… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:19 Toni Cowan-Brown But I think more than anything, like whether it was Microsoft, Activision, Meta, within, you name it, whether it's Slack, Salesforce, I think what's more interesting here is the border conversation about acquisitions in tech and how to…
How many metaverses?
- ▶ 12:09 Benedict Evans And most, you know, Salesforce is actually better with a keyboard than with a pencil. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:08 Benedict Evans It's not just Google, Apple, Facebook, it's Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, um, Salesforce, um, Shopify, Okta, Spotify, um, pick 20 or 30 other companies. 2 times in the scene
Figma, unbundling and $20bn of antitrust
- ▶ 2:20 Benedict Evans But another whole piece of future work is how much do you unbundle Excel, Salesforce, email, um, Oracle, SAP?
- ▶ 15:58 Benedict Evans They don't have Nvidia or Salesforce in mind when they say the big techs.
The FTC's antitrust thesis
- ▶ 10:40 Benedict Evans So there was this whole sort of generalized, like, on one side, yes, saying, well, anything other than, I don't know, um, Microsoft, you could say the old school antitrust theory would say Microsoft can't buy Salesforce.
- ▶ 25:32 Benedict Evans You're going to ban Google, Facebook, Amazon, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, all these companies.
Are you a seal?
- ▶ 0:39 Benedict Evans If you're actually like working at Salesforce, you don't really think of it like that, but set that aside.
- ▶ 17:41 Benedict Evans Um, and so if you were to say, so Salesforce doesn't exist then and, um, Okta and, um,
- ▶ 29:11 Benedict Evans I mean, Google hasn't even built Salesforce.
'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan
- ▶ 9:22 Benedict Evans You've got perfect search in Google and Evernote and Salesforce and 15 other systems.
- ▶ 14:46 Benedict Evans Whereas with something like frame.io or Salesforce or Bloomberg or all of these kinds of integrated systems, um,
Tech in china, from inside and outside
- ▶ 0:13 Toni Cowan-Brown You moved back to China last year, which we will talk about in a minute, and you did so after working at Salesforce Ventures and Eight Roads Ventures in London.
Slack, Salesforce and the future of work
- ▶ 0:03 Toni Cowan-Brown And today we're talking future of work, Slack, and Salesforce. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:28 Bernadette Kevins And today you say, well, I know I wrote a note, but I don't remember if it's in Salesforce or Evernote or Google Docs or Gmail or WhatsApp or wherever the hell it is. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:13 Bernadette Kevins And so you sort of slightly commoditize Salesforce. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:52 Bernadette Kevins Salesforce or whatever it is, you're going to move to some kind of actual dedicated specific tool, as opposed to these kind of general purpose tools. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:34 Bernadette Kevins So this is a Salesforce point, which is Salesforce, um, Salesforce, I mean, it's an interesting company.
- ▶ 12:40 Bernadette Kevins Salesforce back in the bubble had the idea before almost, before almost anyone else that software, business software could work on the web, and that it could be subscription instead of you buying this enormous thing, and it would run on… 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:08 Toni Cowan-Brown So it's going to be interesting what happens here with Slack and Salesforce, because they kind of feel like attention, but.
- ▶ 17:22 Bernadette Kevins The first is, I mean, I mentioned, um, Salesforce being created in the bubble. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:35 Bernadette Kevins There's always this bundle, unbundle, and how that intersects with the Salesforce.
- ▶ 26:32 Toni Cowan-Brown Uh, maybe one last word on what does this say about Salesforce acquiring Slack on, on their stake or, or how they view the future of work? 8 times in the scene