Marc Benioff AI Is Going to Be Incredibly Powerful Research Board

Hello, I'm Jim Roche from Gartner Research Board, and I have the great pleasure of being joined by Mark Benioff, the co-founder, chairman, and co-CEO of Salesforce. Do you feel any particular technologies will be as transformative in the next 20 years as cloud computing and software as a service has been in the last 20? Artificial intelligence is going to take that role. So I think what we see with artificial intelligence today is that it will be as transformational in society, in the world, over the next 20 years as cloud computing was for our industry in the last 20 years. And there's no question in my mind, if you've used, even as a consumer, some of these most recently released software products, like from OpenAI, like DALI, where you just can, you know, using, you know, simple English phrases, describing something and then seeing the computer being able to generate it. It's quite amazing. I mean, we're still obviously a long way away from, you know, what we've seen in the movies, but we're a lot farther along than we were even five or 10 years ago. I think another really good example is when you look at AI in healthcare. Today, artificial intelligence can really provide and augment capabilities that doctors, you know, might have had to have by their own direct learning or going to a seminar, all of a sudden the AI is augmenting the doctor's capability. And that I think is going to be an example of how artificial intelligence is going to impact a lot of us. What should we collectively be doing today to ensure these promising technologies? You know, this is, there's a next level of this automation capabilities or kind of what we just talked about it at Dreamforce, which is that the three big areas that we, you know, really see going forward from Salesforce's perspective is that AI is going to be incredibly powerful for the world, certainly for businesses. And that's why we've built artificial intelligence so deeply in the Salesforce with Einstein and have pioneered the idea of making these technologies available to the average business user at scale and done so in a dramatic way that really impacted the success of our customers. Even e-commerce companies are getting just dramatically better results by using, you know, the AI that we've been able to deliver into our commerce platform, for example. But AI is going to be extremely important. The other area is just broad use of automation. That is technology, you know, we've thought about it, you know, in the past as workflow, you know, the idea that the computer is able to take the next step without us. This is going to be a big motion coupled with AI. It's very powerful. And the third piece is that it's all happening in real time. That's why we just introduced our new Genie platform. And these ideas that AI and automation in real time will start to dominate enterprise software. Well, this is a big thought going forward. So you've been a firm believer from day one, the founding of the company that doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive in business. So you placed sort of philanthropy and social responsibility as core pillars of the company. Could you just briefly explain the rationale for and the power of your one by one model? Well, business is the greatest platform for change. You and I have had many conversations about that over the years, Jim. And, you know, we so strongly believe at Salesforce that that is has to be who we were from the beginning. When we started our company, like you mentioned, we created our one one one model. Oh, more than 20,000 companies have followed us on that path, you know, taking one percent of their equity profit in time and putting it into a 501C3 foundation so that as we've scaled, you know, we've done now seven million hours of volunteerism. We run 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free on our service. That's about a billion dollars of software a year. And we've given away and grants more than a half a billion dollars since we started in 1999. And that idea that we're able to use our businesses to improve the communities that we're in, you know, we've delivered more than one hundred and twenty million dollars in cash grants to our San Francisco and Oakland public schools. That's the largest independent grant, financial grant of a company to public education ever.