‘I’ve never been more excited about anything’: Why Marc Benioff is all in on AI

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says that Microsoft has done the AI industry a “tremendous disservice” by overhyping the capabilities of products like Copilot. Benioff argues that Agentforce, Salesforce’s new fleet of AI tools, is “what AI was meant to be.” Benioff has never been more excited in his career, confident that Agentforce will deliver a transformation on par with the cloud, mobile, social revolutions of the past.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

You’re coming off another Dreamforce, which, for those who aren’t familiar, is Salesforce’s annual gathering. I always think of it as somewhere between a business conference, an urban festival, and like a revival meeting. Are there any evocative moments for you personally from this year’s event?

Well, it was amazing. It was probably not only our best Dreamforce ever, but also our most important. Forty-five thousand people came to San Francisco. It was three amazing days. Incredible show with 1,500 sessions. About 20 million or 50 million people joined us online as well.

We’re doing a dozen or two dozen world tours over the next month or two because the message is so important. It wasn’t just our largest and best Dreamforce, but by far it was our most important Dreamforce.

A lot of the focus was on Agentforce, a new Salesforce tool to build and customize AI agents. I hope I’m describing that the right way. Clearly, you’re very excited about it.

I would just say I’ve never been more excited about anything at Salesforce, maybe in my career.

And not only would I say that’s true for me, but what we did at Dreamforce was let customers get their hands on and build their first agent. It’s extremely important because customers have been told things about enterprise AI, maybe AI overall, that are not true. They need to understand what is true, how it works, and what it can do for them.

Salesforce is probably the largest enterprise AI supplier in the world. We’ll do a couple trillion AI transactions this week alone with Einstein, but what we have built with Agentforce is very different, very unusual, and very exciting.

This is what AI was meant to be. Just yesterday, I was reading feedback from a customer who had just turned it on and they were like, “This must be witchcraft. This is crazy what’s happening with my customers now.” And I am really excited about this. I think this is going to change companies forever. I think it’s going to change software forever. And I think it’ll change Salesforce forever.

At the risk of poking the bear, how is Agentforce different from Microsoft’s Copilot?

Oh, God. Bob, you know you’re going there. Well, first of all, Bob, I think, unfortunately, I’ll just have to tell you, I think Microsoft has done a tremendous disservice to not only our whole industry but all of the AI research that has been done.

Because when you look at how Copilot has been sold to our customers, it’s disappointing. It doesn’t work, it spews data all over the floor, it doesn’t deliver value to customers. I haven’t found a customer who has had transformational work with Copilot.

And customers are so confused based on this Microsoft narrative that we have to let them get what we’ve been keep saying: get their hands in the soil because they need to see for themselves exactly what is possible, what is real, and how easy it is to get huge value from AI, how to make it low hallucinogenic, how to help them connect with their customers in new ways, raise revenues, augment employees.

But, yeah, it’s not Microsoft Copilot. Copilot is really the new Microsoft Clippy. I don’t know if you remember that, Bob, but it was not a huge success. I don’t think Copilot will be around. I don’t think customers will use it, and I think that we will see the transformation of enterprises with agents and Agentforce will be the number one supplier.

I think we’ll have more than a billion agents running from Salesforce within the next 12 months. Even at Dreamforce, I got 10,000 customers hands-on with Agentforce. This was very important to me. And, Bob, you’ve been in the industry a long time. You know you can have a vision for technology in a demo, and you can have customers, but you’ve got to put two and two together to get four.

I just wanted to train them and really get them in it. I’ve never really done it at a level of scale like that before. And, Bob, it worked out far better than I could have imagined. And I think that this agent revolution is real and as exciting as the cloud revolution was, the social revolution, the mobile revolution. It will provide a level of transformation that we’ve never seen.

You had an idea for what Agentforce could be. Was there a moment where you realized like, oh, this actually works? Like this does what we thought it would do.

I have a friend of mine, he’s the CTO of a very large medical company. And they’re one of the largest healthcare providers in the world.

And he called me, and he goes, “We’re using Agentforce, but we just shifted to Agentforce version two,” which we call Atlas. It has this new next-generation Atlas reasoning engine in it. “And something is happening, Marc. Agentforce is resolving more than 90 percent of all of our patient inquiries and scheduling needs. And now the vision is very clear.” Agentforce is going to, like, you’re going to say, “Hey, Agentforce, my leg is hurting, I need to schedule an MRI, I need to see my orthopedic surgeon, I need to get labs drawn,” and Agentforce is going to do all of these things. And then as you get the MRI or see the doctor or whatever, all these things, Agentforce is going to call you back and say, “Hey, how’d it go? Is everything okay? Are you taking your meds?’”

That is a level of capability that technology can now provide. And I think then as you move into other industries like media, financial services, travel, and entertainment, I mean, across the board. The ability to put these agents into place rapidly and get very high outcomes is going to be a huge shock to customers, and that’s why, as I said, I’m getting their hands in the soil. They need to get their hands on it, and it’s going to get turned on live October 25th for all of our customers. So those hundreds of thousands of customers who will begin to get access to this technology, I expect to see tremendous velocity in the number of companies that are going to deploy these agents.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that I should have?

Look, I think that this is an incredible moment. This is a moment where the world is going to change. We may have heard from these AI priest and priestesses of these LLM model companies and Microsoft and others about AI is now curing cancer, and AI is curing climate change, and we all have to plug into these nuclear power plants to get these data centers. None of this is true.

It’s all fantasy land. What is true is that the current version of AI is going to help us run our businesses and be more productive, augment our employees, improve our margins, increase our revenues, and improve our customer relationships and our business KPIs.

That’s what’s exciting about AI today. We need to move the Fantasyland folks to the side and say, “Let me actually show you that we are in a moment that is truly incredible.”