Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the next big thing for enterprise software, particularly Salesforce, is AI agents – or software bots that will do limited tasks on their own taking those tasks off of human workers.
“What if your workforce had no limits? Now, that is a question we could not ask in the last not only 25 years I’ve been doing Salesforce, but the 45 years I’ve been doing the software business,” Benioff told TechCrunch on the Equity podcast.
He said that “hundreds of customers” are already using its AI agent platform, AgentForce. in their businesses now. “Our goal is to have a billion agents deployed within one year,” he said.
He cited his own experience visiting a Disney park using Disney’s Private Tour Guides, a virtual tour guide that scripts the day and handles the skip the line Lightening Lanes.
“Oh, my agent just said it looked across all of the flow control of all the rides in the park. It looked at your ride history, of every ride you’ve ever been on and you haven’t been on in Toontown. So let’s go that way,” he described of the experience.
He also talked about agents in healthcare doing the kind of daily follow-ups to ensure patients are following instruction, and said Gucci using call center agents, with up-to-the-minute product information, closing sales.
On the flip side, Benioff was quick to pan the agent-making software of his biggest, longtime rival Microsoft. In October, Microsoft introduced ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 – its Salesforce competitor and an agent-maker as part of Copilot Studio.
In the days after that announcement, Benioff publicly bashed Microsoft’s products. He likened Copilot to Clippy, Microsoft’s widely panned 1990s talking paperclip cartoon character. He cited research by Gartner about Copilot’s imperfections, in its view, ranging from admin tasks to controlling agent answers.
“Why are they spilling data, and why are users who shouldn’t be seeing data are seeing data?” he said of Microsoft’s Copilot on Equity. “Copilot has really disappointed so many customers, and not just that, they also have a narrative that they have to write their own LLMs and this and that. And it’s not transforming companies.”
Of course, the people who are prognosticating Salesforce’s risk from AI – and plenty are doing so these days – aren’t arguing that Microsoft’s AI agents will outperform.
They are seeing a much more cataclysmic shift. With the rise of GenAI in the enterprise, enterprise AI startups could give rise to the next multi-billion dollar business that displaces some legacy players. And AI sales rep startups are booming. So are AI customer service rep startups – two of Salesforce’s biggest markets.
More than that, the days of the awful enterprise software interfaces are numbered – hunting for all the right buttons to do the things. GenAI interfaces should mean simply asking for the sales pipeline report, and the software produces it.
In September, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski made news by saying his company was ditching Salesforce and Workday altogether in favor of gen AI apps, some homegrown. This after building a customer service AI assistant called Kiki using OpenAI that was being used by 90% of their workforce.
If OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is to believed, AGI, nearly sentient AI that can infer so well it can handle nuanced commands, will be here sooner not later.
Benioff scoffs that any of this is a threat. “I also watched ‘Minority Report,’ and I also watched ‘Her,’ and I watched ‘Space Odyssey.’ I watched them all, but that’s not where we are today,” he said on Equity.
He’s got a point that Salesforce, of all the enterprise players, is well positioned to take advantage of AI, rather than die from it. That’s because AI needs to eat a lot of data to be useful and Salesforce has that data.
“We manage 230 petabytes of data for our customers. You could say that might be one of the main things that we do for them. And we do it with a security and a sharing model,” he said, which means “my banker can’t see what your account balance is, and your banker can’t see what my account bank account balances, even though we’re in the same bank.”
Right now, a lot of enterprises question what OpenAI does with data they share with it, even through ChatGPT Enterprise has security assurances. Going to another cloud provider, say Microsoft, which also sells the latest OpenAI models, means moving all their data from Salesforce to Microsoft’s cloud. That’s a big painful project, and it swaps one big software player for another.
In the meantime, Benoiff says Salesforce is using its own agents internally to run its own business as well. “We’re using it in our customer service, of course, our call center, we’re about to deploy our sales agent. And if you go to help.salesforce.com and you’re authenticated as a sales force customer, you’re now using our agent to get access all of our help.”
As for the startups that might rise up and threaten? Benioff says they could provide Salesforce with M&A targets. Salesforce Ventures is one of the most active corporate venture firms in the tech industry.
“We’ve done more than 60 acquisitions, and that has been a lot of startups,” he said adding that “even AgentForce” was built with tech from the acquisition of a startup called Airkit.ai, founded by a former Salesforce employee. “We invested in the company. He built the company up. We acquired it, then we re-integrated it into the platform. That’s how we were able to release this so fast and get out so quickly.”
