Marc Benioff says it’s ‘crazy talk’ that AI will hurt Salesforce

Today on Equity, TechCrunch Editor Julie Bort is sitting down with Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce and one of the tech industry’s biggest hype men, about his latest work with Time Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, and why he thinks AI agents are the next big thing for enterprise software. Listen to the full episode to hear about: The impact of AI on customer experience The application of AI agents in the healthcare space - and what it could mean for data privacy Marc's thoughts on Salesforce competitor Microsoft's Copilot The range of gadgets that have piqued Benioff’s interest lately As always, Equity will be back on Friday with our news round-up! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bellan and this is our Wednesday episode where we home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Today, I'm handing the reins over to TechCrunch editor over on the Venture Desk, Julie Bort. Julie caught up with Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce and one of the tech industry's biggest hype men, about his latest work with Time Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, and why he thinks AI agents are the next big thing for enterprise software. The pair also explored the application of AI agents in the healthcare space and the range of gadgets that have piqued Benioff's interest lately. So stick around to the end for that. Let's listen in.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Welcome to the Equity Podcast, Marc.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Julie, it's great to see you again. It's been a long, long, long time.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  It has been.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  I can't believe how long it's been.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  I am happy that you're here. So these are your people. Like, this is a podcast for those who want the inside story about running startups, raising money, all that kind of stuff.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  And so I kind of want to start there. You are, of course, a founder yourself of Salesforce and you've been running in founder mode, so to speak, since the dot com era.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Founder mode, whatever that means, you know?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Whatever that means. You've done a lot of angel investing. And so are you still angel investing much?

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I still do a lot of angel investing. I have a company called Time Ventures, but really, it's just my own personal investing. I don't know, we're in hundreds of companies. So we've done over the years, maybe over more than 200, all kinds of diversified companies, mostly in software, tech software, and in health. Enterprise software, I can't really do usually because of Salesforce conflicts. So Salesforce Ventures, which is probably the most successful venture capital firm in enterprise software, we've invested over $5 billion and we have like some crazy IRR, like 28%.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Time Ventures, which is, we have different companies. A lot of people know the companies that we've done, health companies like Fitbit or Aura, Upstart. Yeah, we've done so many companies over such a long period of time. Airbnb, I mean, we've had a lot of failures, too.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  So what are the trends you're seeing right now? Like, what's got you excited as you hang out with founders these days?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Well, we're going through a transformational moment in the industry right now. This is a moment where we see this every two or three decades. I've never been more excited about what's going on in the software industry. I think that what's happening right now is why I got in the software industry. I think I'm very fortunate to be here, really at a moment of incredible transformation and change, evolution. The excitement of what's happening and what we're able to do for customers is unprecedented. And this is the moment you want to be in the software industry.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  But I do feel like every year people say that about because, you know, there's always something new that we're inventing. Right now, it's all about AI.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  I'll tell you why. I, I think the big difference is what we're doing with customers is dramatically impacting them. I think up to this point, software for customers makes customers maybe more organized, more productive. Maybe it gives them a little bit more clarity or more alignment, more understanding of their business. It's obviously very important for the largest companies in the world to be using these software packages, banking, healthcare, across the board. But now what we're seeing is that this software is so cool. It can transform a company and give them a radically different approach for how they're connecting with their customers in a whole new way.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  And that is different and we can talk about that if you want, we can talk about whatever you want. This is your time.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Well, can you give me an example? What's an example that someone is doing in 2024 that they couldn't do and say 2020?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I've been working with this customer Wiley, who's this textbook manufacturer for probably more than a decade. And, you know, I love working with them. They're kind of a salt to the earth company. You know, they're not the biggest company in the world, but they're not the smallest. They make textbooks. Our kids use them in schools. Right now, everybody's back to school. So everybody's calling them all the time. What we're doing with them is very simple, which is that we're saying, hey, this is the time of year. We know them very well. You know, they were, they're using all of our products and sales and service and marketing, commerce, all these things. And we're going, you know, this is the time of the year where you hire all these gig workers to really. Ban your sales and service organization because it's your Super Bowl. And instead, you could use this new platform that we have called Agent Force.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  And you can ask one fundamental question that will really change how you think about your whole business. All your business KPIs, the whole business can transform. And the question is, 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 45 years I've been doing in the software business. I've never been able to say to a customer, what if your business had a workforce with no limits? And that is really a thought. It's also like non-profit, so I was just on the phone with this great company called College Possible. And College Possible is like an NGO that does college counseling for high school kids.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  But Julie, how many college counselors per student do you think there are in California?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  One college counselor per 500 kids.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And you know that that's not okay. It's not going to scale. And College Possible has all the kids in the database Salesforce and all of the context and structured and unstructured data in the database Salesforce. And now they have an agent that basically can work with every kid. Fully democratize the ability to communicate and motivate and inspire every kid to go to college. And they're blown away. I'm blown away. I even put a demo on my Twitter feed of them because I'm like, this is incredible how they're thinking about this technology. So that idea that what if your workforce had no limits? You can have college counselors. What if your workforce had no limits? You can scale your sales and service organizations at peak times.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  This is really exciting.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  There are some pundits talking about AI agents. You know, like a contingent that believe that agents are going to kind of lead to the death of enterprise software as we know it, right? So we're all just going to tell our agents to do stuff instead of firing up the app and clicking on the enterprise.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I've heard a lot of crazy talk. Oh, I heard on a podcast called All In that there's some all new incredible new way to like store data. And I said to them, I know them very well. I text them, really, I'm using disk drives. So if you know other than disk drives, I'm really excited because I use disk drives, operating system, I have a database, I have an application. Then I have, yes, I have also this kind of agentic layer as well. And then all of it together works together to deliver like very high levels of accuracy. So they did not want to talk about that and or put me on their show because I guess they're afraid, you know, to debate it because they're wrong. And it's

• 7:23Speaker 02

  kind of a crazy thing. But no, you have to understand that this is an incredible moment, but we have to not only stay with the excitement of the moment, but actually understand this is computer science. And we understand how computer science works. And we also understand, you know, how AI works, how the LLM works. But LLM is not a database.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  But you not think that agents are going to replace the interface, the customer interface, the user interface layer, right? And that sort of changes everything. Then Salesforce, which does store a lot of data, is sort of a data. That's what your deal is. You're storing data.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Let's talk about that point. 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. You know what a sharing model is, Julie?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  You're going to tell me, right?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Well, my banker can't see what your account balance is.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  And your banker can't see what my bank account balance is, even though we're in the same bank, because there's a sharing model. So sharing model is a security model and sharing model. And then you have your database of all your information. This, by the way, does not go away at the agentic layer. The agentic layer still has to preserve the sharing model because as you saw, well, you saw that horrible copilot report from Gartner. I heard, I read your story. And you're right, they are spilling data all over that. Well, why are they spilling data? And why are users who shouldn't be seeing data are seeing data? It's because they don't have a sharing model. They don't have a structured way to look at the data. When you apply that now to the AI, Julie, you have to deliver a level of accuracy

• 9:03Speaker 02

  in your capabilities with these customers. And that's what we want to achieve. We want to make sure that the agent is accurate. So how do you do that? It's got to look at the data, the metadata. It's going to use an ensemble RAG technique, the workflow. It's going to have access to the LLM because that's key ingredients of intelligence. It's going to do all of these things. It's even going to use an ensemble RAG technique. And all of those things together, bam, basically give you the ability to have a compelling agent. But it does not negate the need to have a database or an application. Unless you're fully going to get rid of all of your humans and all of your workers are no longer there and don't have to interoperate with this data at all. And I don't know any company on planet Earth that has that position.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Maybe one day it's just one big AI computer that we're all talking to. And how? I don't want to open the doors for you. You know, I get it.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Are you dog fooding this now? What are you using AI agents for? What would you be doing if you weren't using an agent to do this work?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Oh, well, two things. One is you can have much better customer relationships. I mean, I just gave you the story of Wiley. Another great story is Disney. Disney, you know, manages every customer touch point on Salesforce. Sales, service, you know, they sell the real estate, the customer service on Disney plus. If you go to the disneystore.com, that's Salesforce. Every customer touch point is Salesforce. So the customer database is very rich and big and very exciting. And then if you're with the Disney guides, do you take your kids to the parks, Disneyland or Disney World?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  And have you ever gotten a Disney guide so that you can like go in the back of the lines and this kind of stuff?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Oh, that sounds great.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Oh, it's really great. Anyway, if you get hired one of these Disney guides, they have a Salesforce app and they use Slack and they are able to go through the park and they have special access and it's so cool. And they can see parts of your customer record. So they know what you like. And if you've been there before and what rides you've been on and what you haven't. But then like all of a sudden I'm going through the park and it's going saying, oh yeah, you know, Mark, I know you want to go, you know, the Rise of the Resistance and Galaxy Edge, that's Star Wars land, but oh, the riot is down. But I just, hold on. Oh, my agent just said it looked across all of the flow control of all the rides in the park, looked at your ride history of everything, and you haven't been on Toontown. So let's go that way. And the agent said the flow control is ready to go. The agent is able to do

• 11:27Speaker 02

  things that humans cannot do. It can look across the park. It can put everything together and do it all in a moment's notice. Now we're augmenting our employees. On one side, we can have productivity, like the Wiley example. I'm expanding my service force. Now I'm augmenting my employee because Disney's products are so complicated. Now the agent is able to do that. And they're doing it with 95% accuracy. We have the highest accurate agent ever. And you can see that on the top of our Twitter feed because we're able to access this data and metadata capability. You look at the customers who are using this now, and now it's hundreds of customers who are deploying these agents. Our goal is to have a billion agents deployed within one year. I believe we're already the largest and most

• 12:11Speaker 02

  important supplier of agents in the world today. I can just tell you customer stories all day long.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  What about you, though? What about you in running your company?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Well, at Salesforce, 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 Salesforce customer, you're now using our agent to get access all of our help and trailhead and everything to get the best access you can do.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So now, and who is managing the AI agents? Like, has this been added to the person you would have hired? You know, has it been added to?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  I'm so glad you asked that. Now, Julie, you've been following Salesforce for a long time, isn't that right?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Long time.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  And you know about our Trailblazer community, which is millions of people who are mostly not programmers. They're mostly administrators. They code, but they do clicks, not code. They're usually non-programmatic folks.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  And what we've done, Julie, is we've extended and complemented our Salesforce platform, and we have put Agent Force in 100 and Twenty five thousand Salesforce platforms already. So it's there latent, waiting for the administrator to turn it on. And those are the trailblazers. And those trailblazers were saying to them, hey, it's time for you to become an agent blazer. And here's how you're going to do it.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  So basically, the Salesforce administrators are going to be sort of managing these agents as opposed to a salesperson having agents deployed for him or her.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Well, the administrator turns them on, configures them, sets up the guardrails, puts the personality in, tunes it, nudges it, helps it get a little bit more accurate, figuring out how to go in this direction, that direction. And then turns it over to the salesperson or the customer service person or the marketing person or the commerce person or the employee or maybe the customer directly. And then the agent does its thing where you're now interoperating with the agent. And yet, the agent is tied deeply into our customer apps. So when you're working with the agent, all of that is available through the customer service app as well.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so as a giant enterprise, you are building your own agent technology. You're putting it out there, your customers are using it. But you're also, you have Salesforce Ventures, they just added 500 million to invest in AI technology. And you also invest. Where are the startups fitting in to an ecosystem like Salesforce?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Salesforce now has 75,000 people, will do 38 billion in revenue this year. You know, from our last guidance that we've given. Not only that, Julie, we're now the second largest software company in the world behind Microsoft. So that's a big thought from when we last spoke. It's been a big change. And we automate 15 major customer touchpoints. And we operate in 15 major geographies in the world. That's Salesforce today. We've also done 60, more than 60 acquisitions. That has been a lot of startups, even Agent Force has built a lot and got accelerated through a key acquisition that we did earlier this year called AirKit, which is a former employee who left Salesforce, started a company. We invested in the company. He built the company up.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  We reacquired it, then we reintegrated it into the platform. That's how we were able to release this so fast and get out so quickly. You know, we've done that very consistently, and you know that because you actually covered and written so many stories about all these acquisitions we've done. But it's been a great relationship with us and the startup community. In addition to that, Salesforce has invested in lots and lots of startups. A lot of them have gone public, companies like Snowflake and others. We've even made a billion six on Snowflake alone. We try to work with and listen to the startup and venture and also private equity community very, very closely because we don't believe that all the innovation comes directly from Salesforce. We believe that innovation comes from everywhere

• 16:01Speaker 02

  and that we have to have organic and inorganic innovation, and that's worked incredibly well for us.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So going back to Microsoft, you're chasing them in some ways and in other ways you're not. But you have definitely been talking a lot about Microsoft's competitor, their autonomous agents that they recently released. So what has you so concerned about Microsoft's products? You talked about reliability differences, but are there other?

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Oh, no. I didn't talk about it. Gartner did.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  All right, Gartner did.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  And you did.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  And I did.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  And also, Computer World also wrote a really good article on it. I'm sure you read.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Lots of people are talking about it.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they have a product called Copilot.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  And 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. There's no transform companies with Copilot and Microsoft strategy. As evidence of my... Julie, I think you're probably one of the main reporters in the entire industry that writes Microsoft stories. I've read them all because I read your work all the time.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'm an editor now, so.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Julie, okay, Julie. So let me ask you a question yourself. What company are you most impressed with how they've transformed themselves with Copilot?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Right now, I'm hearing that everybody on the planet has mostly just trying out all things AI and that we're going to get a shakedown in 2025.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  No, I think that's the answer. Oh, yes, everybody has it. It's great. But the thing is, we want to get significant ROI from AI and agents. And that's why I'm excited. Let me tell you another story. You know, the largest industry in the United States is healthcare. And I know this is, I think, maybe an audio only, but you can see my, can you see I have a boot on my?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Oh, you have a boot on.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Cause I ruptured my Achilles.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry to hear that.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  I was scuba diving in Fakarava and I jumped off the boat and somehow I ruptured my Achilles on the jump. And do you know what the international motto of Fakarava is, Julie?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  I do not. I really don't.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Well, I don't give a Fakarava.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Well, that would make sense.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  I came back here and then I have to like, my doctor's like, something is not exactly right with this. And I don't know what's wrong, but we're going to figure it out. We're going to put you in an MRI and we're going to do some contrast and you're going to have to take these meds. And so I said, fine, put me in the MRI. It's made by one of our customers, Siemens, and I'm in there and it's going fine. And let me ask you a question, Julie. Do you think the next day my doctor called and said, now I told you to drink eight glasses of water today to flesh out the contrast? Did you do that?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  I'm sure your doctor didn't call you. Did you have an agent?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  And the reality is, is that doctors and nurses since the pandemic are so burnt out. You can talk to any hospital and they'll tell you how they all have these huge morale issues. This idea that I need to be cared for. Well, we all know that healthcare in the United States, even though it's our largest industry and we spend more on healthcare than anything else, you're your own advocate. If you're not doing your own healthcare, do you agree with that?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  I do.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  If you are not doing your work and calling the doctor, it isn't going to happen. But I have a prediction for you, Julie.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Okay, predict away.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  And that prediction is that that is about to change. I believe that technology is at a moment where, yes, that agent will call you and say, "Just calling to remind you your MRI is tomorrow. Do you have any questions about it? Just want to ask you about that." "Oh, you do? Oh, yeah. Well, here's this, here's that, here's a link to our site here at this incredible hospital that you have chosen to have the MRI." And then the next day, the agent's going to call you back. "Did you have a good experience yesterday? Oh, you didn't. Do you have a question? Oh, yeah, I can answer that. What's that? You're not sure? Oh, yeah. And did you drink the water? Did you take the meds? Oh, do you want to have your doctor's appointment rescheduled? Do you want to talk to a doctor? Or are you comfortable talking with me? Did I answer your questions? Do you need more assistance?" There's a gap in our healthcare system in the United States.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Anyone knows that. And anyone knows we're on our own, but we don't need to be on our own. We can have a partner with our hospital and our doctors. And why that is a, maybe a theoretical narrative today, we all know it's not true, that we have to basically be on point. And it doesn't work especially, as we know, for our parents that are elderly, and they, they for sure aren't getting that kind of care.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Let me take this one level up. What happens when it's AGI, if such a thing ever does actually materialize? And so if that scenario really does come into play, right now, you're advocating that each hospital's going to have one, each doctor's office is going to have one. But if we're really going to talk about some kind of super intelligent, all-knowing thing, I, as a consumer of healthcare, I don't want to turn that over to my doctors. I want to be in control of that. So what happens when AGI comes into play?

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Okay, well, Julie, I also watched Minority Report, and I also watched War Games, and I watched Space Odyssey, and I watched them all. But that's not where we are today.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  So we should be talking about, right now, present moment, tick, nod, hon, breathe, like, this is where we are. We should talk about what's happening now. And what's happening now is, over the last two years, we've had a remarkable advancement in AI with large language models that can then do these things. But if they are grounded in your data and they are grounded with the right level of RAG and the right level of metadata, you can produce tremendous accuracy. And that means for your business, you can do incredible things. When I look at these customers and what they're doing, some of these stories are pretty darn incredible. And I am just trying to like motivate people to understand what they can do today.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Not scare them what's going to happen a decade or two decades or three decades, or maybe never.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  All right, even without a superhuman AI, maybe never. I am still concerned about the privacy implications of this sort of a thing. Healthcare specifically, well, mostly because I am not in control of it, like.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  You already have all your data, I hope. Don't you already have all your electronic medical records in your doctor's office?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Uh, my doctor has my data.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  The X-ray place has my data.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  The hospital has my data. So those are the people that would have to implement the agents.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  That's not how I do it. I work with UCSF in San Francisco, the University of.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Francisco.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  That's true. You have, you have a relationship with the hospital.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  And they have all my data that when I go in there, in fact, I'm going in there tomorrow. And when I go in there, they have all my MRIs and all my CT scans and all my lab resorts. And they use a comprehensive medical record system. And then it's surrounded with Salesforce, which is a patient relationship management system. And all the data is professionally managed by my healthcare and organization. And when my doctor wants to see what's happening with me, they get a comprehensive look at all the data. And that's the way modern healthcare works. That is the correct way for it to look. That is, you're working with a doctor who is able to look at all of your data holistically. And then say, Julie, I recommend you do this, this, and this, because the doctor needs to look at not only your scans, your current MRIs and CT scans.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Not only your labs, your current labs, but your labs maybe over the last several years, so we can see trends and changes. But also any other. Your metadata associated with you and your health, all your visits, you know, his note, they can look at the comprehensive piece. All of this data, all of these basic things can be addressed by software now. And that is an incredible thing that we can give more productivity to an organization like a UCSF or like so many healthcare organizations in the world with an agentic layer. Because yes, the agentic layer can interface with you and take a load off that doctor. By the way, you're already doing it now when you Google search things. So you're like, oh, I don't feel well this, I don't feel well that I'm Googling this. Completely the wrong thing to do.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  The agentic layer is actually going to be a look at your real data, which is safe and secure, managed by your healthcare organization, and actually give you real advice based on science. And that is the future. And then working with your doctor as well in hand in hand.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  So let's talk about gadgets. So going from this giant viewpoint of US healthcare to once, there was a time once where you sent me a photo of your arm where you were wearing two fitness trackers at once. So I know you're a gadget guy.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  I am, you're right. I have my new series four Aura ring right here now. So you're a hundred percent right.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Your Aura ring. What's your latest gadget obsessions? What are you seeing on consumer tech that you just love?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Well, I love my car. I think my cars that really advance. And I'll tell you a story about a company called General Motors. And General Motors is an amazing company. They are reflects a lot of the major auto companies in the world, all of whom I work with. They've done a great job in a lot of areas, not just electrification, but even connecting with their customers. And we've been fortunate to build for General Motors OnStar. So when you're in your General Motors car and there's a problem or a question, there's a button and you go to the OnStar button and you press it and they say, OnStar, how can I help you?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Behind that is all the Salesforce software and they bring it up. Julie, do you like your new Hummer EV? Yes, I love it. Oh, Julie, you have a question about it? I'll answer the question. But I live in a rural area and where I live, I'm usually out of time. Zone with GM. And when I call, sometimes I'll get a message like, oh, I know you want to subscribe for that, but you have to call back during these hours. And I keep saying to myself, you know, I have to talk to GM because now they've got it all set up. They have the data. They have the customer touchpoints. They've got the metadata. They have a comprehensive data cloud. By adding the agentic layer, now they're never going to miss a phone call.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  And if that customer then wants to talk to somebody, they can immediately say, oh, yeah, I'll have somebody call you when we're back in the office. But I can answer all these various questions for you. That's a big change and it's not where we have been.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And which car is it that you love?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I love all my children, but I I love trucks right now. So I've got a lot of trucks. And I've got the GM trucks. I've got the new Silverado EV, the Hummer EV. I've got Ford. I've got two Ford Lightnings. They're amazing. I also have a Volkswagen bus coming. I'm excited about the new electric bus.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. That one is.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Well, that one is fun. Yeah, we run Volkswagen too. And ADs and all these other ones and Toyota. But I'll tell you that for all those car companies, if you've been on a car dealer website recently, and I have, or if you are trying to communicate with the factory, you already know that once you buy the car, you feel somewhat disintermediated still from the manufacturer. But the reality is they have a lot of the data. They can even provide a lot of value added services and generate more revenue. If they were to monetize more, but they don't have in a lot of cases, the people to do it, kind of like healthcare, the healthcare thing, we kind of ended the story without kind of making the key point, even though it's the largest industry in the US, there aren't enough people to do all of that work.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  There are not.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  That's also true in the auto industry as well. You know, that the people are kind of put in these kind of mission critical components, your doctor, your nurse, your MRI technician, your car salesperson. But all the other things in the middle and all the loose cracks, that's where there aren't people. And I think the agentic layers will fill that in and the agents will fill that in pretty fast.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think we'll have to see how well agents do. Again, as someone from the outside who doesn't control a software company controlling all of the data, the privacy implications of some of this stuff scares me and I would like to know better what's going to happen once I actually turn over not just my data, but decision-making abilities to an agent out there. We'll have to see.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Well, I do recommend Julie that your doctor has access to all your data. So I will have to give you some personal counseling there and then

• 28:14Speaker 02

  in regards to manufacturers of, if you buy a car from a car company, they know what car you've bought and who you are and when the lease is up and when you're going to renew. And also like even like, I'll tell you another great story. You know, this great retailer in the U. S. That I've bought from for like forty or fifty years, Saks Fifth Avenue. We have them in San Francisco. They're all over the country. They use every single one of our customer touchpoints. They came to our Dreamforce Conference, something that you might want to do again. You know, you haven't been recently, which was a lot of fun.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  I have not. That's true.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  We had forty-five thousand people there. We had ten million online and at the conference, they came, they're like, ah, agents, you know, we really are struggling. We want to automate our return system more aggressively and our customer service piece. And here's our whole platform. We've laid it all out. Within two hours, we were able to take their existing Salesforce implementation and turn on a return agent and a customer service agent in the existing Saks Fifth Avenue implementation because it comes from within Salesforce's platform. That was very exciting for them that they have the ability to augment and extend with very high-grade, high-quality, low-hallucinogenic AI, these kind of capabilities. So like now I've told you like these kind of crazy stories, Wiley, Disney,

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Saks, the healthcare companies, the healthcare companies don't like me to tell you exactly their names because, you know, they're very sensitive to that. But I'll just say that in all those cases, and I can give you one with a bank in a second, then in all those cases, you have the ability to have a better experience with them as a customer than before.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And are there implications for hiring? Are they going to add jobs, take away jobs, no difference in jobs in your opinion, in your prognostication?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know yet. You know, we ran a test with Gucci, also one of our customers, part of the caring group in their Florence call center. And the test has been going on for about a year. And in the Gucci call center was customer service and we're like, we're going to make this customer service organization much more efficient. So who knows what's going to happen? And all of a sudden, what happened was their sales from the call center went up thirty five percent because those customer service agents suddenly had product information and sales information and were closing deals on the phone that they could not do before. So they were extended as humans through the agent technology, which we would say that that was amazing that they were able to do that. And so they didn't cut any heads. They only

• 30:40Speaker 02

  had more revenue with their existing heads. They had more efficiency. I don't think the hospital in the example I gave you is going to cut any doctors. I think what they're going to end up doing is be able to provide, have much more mental health and less doctor burnout and better customer relations. Not saying that job loss could not occur. I'm sure in some areas it probably could or would, but in a lot of areas, I don't think it will.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  I want to kind of, you know, address the last thing that you said head on. You're very worried about your privacy, your privacy, your security.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  I am.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  But I think that you know, you followed Salesforce for a long time, twenty five years of trust that we've had with our customers and that security and privacy and trust is our highest value and it's built into our platform. It's built into our AI. There's a trust layer. None of your data ever goes into these data hungry L L Ms. And you also know we're a company that's built on core values. You know, you've written about our one one one model before, which was we put one percent equity profit in time when we started. And that is now over a billion dollars that we've given away nine hour, million hours of volunteerism. We run sixty thousand nonprofits for free on our service. Actually, fifteen thousand or eighteen thousand companies have actually followed our one one one model.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  The other thing that's been really cool about Salesforce is that AI, this is not our first venture to AI, as you know.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  No, Einstein.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  We are also the largest AI provider in the world. We'll do two trillion enterprise AI transactions this week and we already do predictive and generative AI and now we do agents as well. This is a huge Moment for our customers to kind of take the focus that they've had on the platform, Salesforce platform, and you've seen us guide them through sales, but also the cloud, mobile, social, AI, data, and now into agents, but they haven't had to change the platform. It's the platform continues to evolve and these trailblazers get more and more capable in what they can do for their customers. And that's why I'm so excited.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Well, we're gonna have to see. 2025 is where all of these temporary CIO budgets are going to become permanent, and agents seem to be where the money is landing. There's a lot of money landing there. So yeah, we'll have to just see what the world is going to be like in 2025. Hey, I want to thank you for being on the podcast, but also

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Oh, it's been so much fun with seeing you again, Julie. I think it's been like five years or six years.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  It's been a while. I will, I will try to make it out to an event or something.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, happy to see that again. You do travel. You're on stage being the big, the big boss on a regular basis.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  I am. I'm the big boss all over the world. Yeah. I love traveling.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Is there something come up where people can see you?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Yes. If you go to Salesforce and look at our events, you'll see we have our agent force tour underway. We just did the UK. We did Australia. We just did Tokyo and we have a lot of major events coming up. We have Seattle, New York, Chicago, all coming up, every major city in the US in the next 60 days. You can come and see this technology, get hands on, try it out, and it's an amazing time in the industry. It's a time where everybody should understand we have hit a threshold in what computer science can do.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  All right. It's gonna be cool to watch. Thank you so much, and I hope your foot heals quickly.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Thanks, Julie. It's great to see you. All the best. Aloha.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.