The Exchanges

Q Do you anticipate that consumers are going to have their own bots and they're going to interact with AI bots and it's just going to be AI dialogue time forever?

A I think that you already can start to see that now on your phone where I have like about a dozen of these AIs on my phone from all these companies. They're kind of commodities at this point. You know, Google has Gemini, there's ChatGPT, there's u.com, there's Perplexity, there's Copilot, there's all these, these things, you know, they're just on your phone, you're just talking to the, basically the same data set through a very similar algorithm, and it's a commodity product. At some point, you're gonna be able to set up preferences and do things with those, you know, tools which you can't do today, where you're gonna be able to, like, ask them to run Projects for you. Hey, I'm going away for Christmas. I need a hotel. I'm looking at different options. Maybe I could go take my kids on some kind of incredible tour. Give me 20 ideas. And you come back the next day and it says, here, I researched this. I looked at it. I laid this out. Here's the ideas for your Christmas vacation. That's one idea. But now, let's say I'm one of those vendors. I'm Disney. I'm Hilton. I'm Marriott. I'm Ford, I'm General Motors, you know, I'm United Airlines, I'm American Airlines, I'm whoever it is. You're going to interoperate with us and our company as well, and you might do that through an agent. Right now, you might just be talking directly to us because that's the most trusted path, and we're in a…

AI assessment note: “eventually they're going to interconnect and, uh, collaborate and share”

Q are, if I'm right, two dollars per conversation. Uh, the copilots are like 30 a month. So, explain to me how the math is gonna work for companies that are spending two, I mean, they have lots of conversations with customers. You were talking earlier just about how many times you're interacting with customers. That seems like it's going to get pretty expensive pretty quickly. How's this going to work?

A You know, our customers who are buying from us, they've traditionally paid like a per user fee, like, you know, a thousand dollars a year to use our sales cloud or our service cloud. And then of course, when we moved into new products like, um, our commerce cloud, or if we call our sandboxes where you can kind of, you know, build your products or, you know, even our data cloud, we started to do what we call consumption pricing. You pay as you go or pay as you use or pay, you know, Pay how you're interacting, and so for our customers who are now using our agent platform, they're paying between, call it, 50 cents per conversation to two dollars per conversation, depending on the volume of conversations that they're doing, and this is, I think, very attractive to them because the comparison might be a customer interaction today that's costing them seven dollars or 10 dollars or 20 dollars, or in some case, I talk to a customer that The customer interaction was costing them 700 dollars. So this is a very different level of interactivity, and we're, our job is to provide value as well as the trust, safety, and security, privacy, um, associated with our technology. And, uh, that's kind of the next generation of the pricing model as well. So it's definitely a new technology model. It's a new business model. And we couple it with our new philanthropic model, you know, 25 years ago, we …

AI assessment note: “the comparison might be a customer interaction today that's costing them seven dollars”

Q the future of business software may end up looking very different from a Salesforce where you have all your data somewhere, but you have a proactive agent itself that's Sharing it with you and connecting with you and connecting with your customers. So do you think that we're going to see that fundamental shift in business software? And is this part of it? Is part of this reaction to that?

A Well, we could, but let's talk about where we are right now and what could happen. You know, we manage our data on something called disk drives, and we have these disk drives and that's where we store our data. And then there's an operating system. And then on the operating system, there's a database because all the data has to be kind of logically stored in the database and secure. And there also has to be a sharing model. So we know who can see what data and who, what data cannot be seen. We have another vendor, you know, who's delivered some of this technology, Microsoft, and I just Saw a story today, just put on my Twitter feed where the wrong data got in the wrong hands. And the reason why is, is because there was no sharing model and the data was not locked up correctly. And that's something that you don't want to have happen, especially like in a regulated industry, like we talked about healthcare, financial services, like for example, my banker can't see your balance and your banker can't see my balance. And that's how financial services is set up. And that's a security Security and sharing model. So again, we have the disk drives, the operating systems, the databases, the security and sharing model, and we have the apps. And then we have the agentic layer on top of all that. You put a big bow around it and that's how it should work. Now, how it's going to look and how …

AI assessment note: “And then we have the agentic layer on top of all that.”

Q comes from me, the individual, as opposed to something that effectively interacts on a company's behalf to better handle my needs. And so I'm curious, do you, do you agree that your vision of agents is maybe smaller than the broader vision of agents? And if so, why did you decide to go that route outside of maybe it was just convenient to do it as the company you are?

A Well, Salesforce, you know, helps companies connect with their customers in new ways. Uh, that's our fundamental mission, and we do that, first of all, through automating every customer touchpoint. So that could be managing sales, like you mentioned, or customer service and call centers, or marketing and emails. It could be their commerce on their website. Uh, it could be their analytics. Uh, it could be Slack, a Tableau. These are all connection points between companies and their customers, and we're managing and sharing that information using a sharing model and a security model to help our customers do that, whether they're in, like, we talked about healthcare, financial services, or technology, or consumer product goods, etc. So that first layer is, are we automating all those touch points? Because for years, we've been automating their sales forces, and service forces, and marketing forces, and You know, their commerce forces. And now you're right. We're about to automate their agent forces. So first step is automate all the customer touch points. So great example is Disney. I love talking about Disney, that Disney, you know, we run the Disney store. So if you go to store.disney.com, you know, that's Salesforce. And if you go to the call center at Disney Plus, that's Salesforce. So the folks that are managing the sales for the real estate and the cruise ships and the, All …

AI assessment note: “Salesforce, you know, helps companies connect with their customers in new ways.”