Tony Robbins interviews Marc Benioff

I'm the founder of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff. Mark, how are you doing, brother? Oh, I'm doing great, Tony. Thanks for inviting me today. I'm really thrilled to be with you always. I'm always thrilled to be with you, my friend. And so we've been on quite a journey. I've gotten a chance to be with you since the beginning. I remember you coming to Unleash the Power then and introducing yourself after a couple of them in a row and saying, I'm going to go start this company called Salesforce, and we're going to change business around the world. And you said to me at the time, we'll do $100 million in business. And this year, I think you're going to hit $40 or $42 billion, right? 26 years later? Tony, you remember very well. I mean, my journey with you started on a cassette tape, you know, decades ago, driving up and down the 101 Highway in San Francisco, listening to Personal Power, I'll Never Forget It, How It Transformed My Life. I think I'm still stuck on day 17, you know, Financial Mastery, so we need to follow up on that at the end of this. I think you're doing okay on that one, Mark. Well, listen, I wanted to just give people a sense. I mean, from 1999, in those days, it's hard for most people, some people weren't alive at that time, to remember that software was something that you had a hard drive for, and some days before that, you know, some kind of a disk. And all of a sudden, the cloud comes, and you didn't invent the cloud, but you saw, you had a vision that most people didn't have. And I'm just curious, you know, so many people could have taken advantage of that opportunity, but you're the one that really launched it and became really the largest promoter on earth of it, and obviously became the institution that everybody looks to. What did you see back then that made you believe that the cloud was the answer? And what did you see that I think other people seem to have missed? Well, Tony, technology is constantly getting lower cost and easier to use. And, you know, I was kind of recounting that story when I got those personal power tapes on those cassette tapes. And listen, when I started working in software on a TRS-80 Model 1 computer, I had a cassette player. That's how we stored the software. So I would write the software. My first piece of software was how to juggle, you know, and I'm working on that and writing, getting the whole thing working. And then you'd record it right onto the cassette tape. Now, today, people have no idea what I was talking about. You know, I tease them all the time because they're like, Hey, you know, I sold my first piece of software to SeaLoad magazine. They're like, well, what's SeaLoad? I'm like, cassette load, that's how we used to do it and it's been a wild ride you know over decades to watch this technology continue to grow and evolve and move forward, and it's so exciting to be part of this journey and it just, it's never ending, every every day is something new, what do you, what, what is it you saw then about the technology that made you jump on it because a lot of people I know even myself as an individual as a business owner was thinking man, put my stuff in the cloud where somebody else has access to it all and gets stolen. There was a lot of uncertainty and fear in that era. So what did you see that allowed you to say, I'm going to leave what I'm doing, I'm going to put myself on the line, and I'm going to be the person that brings this to the world? What did you see other people didn't see? Well, that idea that I know that software is going to be changing, I keep an open mind to what's next. And all of a sudden, Tony, here I am, I'm at home. I'm using Amazon and eBay and Google, and I'm on the browser, and this is like 94, 95, 96. And then I go into the office, and it didn't match how the software was in business. You know, all of a sudden, business software wasn't like that at all. And I had one breakthrough, and that breakthrough was this. wow, what would happen if all business software was as easy to use as this amazon.com or this ebay or this google, and then I looked at what is their architecture so different, the UI and the business model and the technology model and what would I want to do, how would I put all that together and that was the moment, you know, in the 90s and then in 99, March 8th of 1999, I started Salesforce And with that idea that we were going to have a new technology model, which was, if you call it the cloud, we called it software as a service or multi-tenancy at that point. And then number two is a new business model. We were going to have people subscribe, not pay a license fee, which is how the software used to be, you know. And number three is a new philanthropic model. Because, you know, I was at Oracle for 13 years at the time, and I just had had a revelation that business could be the greatest platform for change. And that we could take 1% of our equity, 1% of our profit, 1% of all our employees' time right there in that moment of founding and, you know, have this new kind of culture as well. And the thing, Tony, well, I mean, it was very easy because we had no people, we had no equity, nothing. But it was very easy to do. But, Tony, by doing those three things, that was the foundation of the company. And that's still very much, you know, what we're doing today. And those three things are very important. But maybe that's not as important as 19,000, 20,000 other companies have followed us with our 1-1-1 model. And then they've given away $3 billion or more now. So that's been exciting to inspire others that they can also see business is the greatest platform for change. What gave you your initial hunger to make this happen? And what keeps you hungry today? You know, I mean, number one is you have to have a beginner's mind. You have to, I was in Japan last week, in Tokyo, they have a word for it, Shoshin. And Shoshin means the beginner's mind. It comes out of Zen Buddhism. In the beginner's mind, you have every possibility. But in the expert's mind, you have few or none. And this is very important that, you know, every day I try to start with meditation. And I try to open my mind with mindfulness. and this idea that, okay, I'm willing to accept kind of what's coming and I'm listening to what the future holds. I'm trying to remember the future. And that idea has really guided me. And that idea that's given me that kind of desire and that hunger. And I'll tell you, I'm still as hungry today as I was on that moment. That's what I love about you. I've never been more excited about my company, about the software industry, about the tech industry than i am today i mean and by the way we talked about that moment where i was like oh hey i'm using google i'm using amazon i'm using ebay therefore i'm going to do this i just had that moment again you know a couple years ago where i was using chat gpt and i was using gemini and i'm using anthropic and i'm using all these new large language models and ai and i'm like but i'm not using that in my business so how am i going to bring all that together So that moment is constantly happening. And, you know, Tony, you and I believe one thing very strongly, which is you're always underestimating what you can do in a year. But, you know, I mean, I'm overestimating what you can do in a year, but underestimating what you can do in a decade or two decades. And that idea that we have to remember that, yeah, we're going to set our intention, we're going to go, and then we're going to have to kind of let this play out. And one decade or two decades, it's amazing where Salesforce is. And now when I look at AI, where it's going to be one or two decades from now, it's just incredible with the opportunities. Well, speaking of AI, that's why I wanted to start with your history, because you saw that generational, maybe you'd say, breakthrough that was happening. You took advantage of it and built the largest company in the world at its time. And now AI is here, and everybody knows it. And there's a lot of people that are overwhelmed by it. People are, you know, they have, some people are fearful of it. People are falling behind. Tell us a little about your journey before we jump into AI, because AI allows us to be really a creator like never before. What's your pattern? You told us when you recognized the pattern. How did you get yourself to start utilizing the pattern and start putting together the systems that you now call Salesforce.com, this business? And where are you now creating patterns that were never done before? Well, you just articulated one of the most important patterns. You said something incredibly powerful. you said people are feeling overwhelmed they are fearful they're unable to see what their role is going to be in this future that's rapidly changing that's a pattern when i feel that when i start to feel that anxiety or that stress or that feeling i know oh something big is happening when you see that happening i mean who cannot feel that way in regards to all the technology that's happening yes no one can no one knows exactly how this is all playing out and some of it is being oversold some of it is being undersold and you know we have a futurist here at salesforce and he actually lives in the right next door to me here and he was one of the writers of Minority Report he was one of the writers of War Games you know these are the AI movies that you and I grew up on you know he wrote the movie Deep Impact you know he's on the asteroid commission And when you look back then at all the AI movies that we went through, like Terminator, Her, and all these, of course we're going to feel that. Because it played out in so many ways. Now, one thing that's really important right now in this current moment with AI, because I do think that when we kind of talk in the spiritual context of looking at things in terms of decades, we also have to kind of get back to the present moment. And in the present moment where AI is today, large language models are actually somewhat limited You know, they're just word models where these words are just hyperlinked together and they're trained on something called Reddit, which is a big Q&A answer board, you know, on the Internet that's not trained on huge biological models, you know, or huge, you know. That's why, like, for example, there's like all these people just a few years ago, well, radiologists, you know, we're not going to need them anymore. There's not going to be any more radiologists. and today we have more radiologists than ever and radiologists who only use AI don't deliver accurate diagnoses so we're not at that point and yet let's still have this incredible excitement about the future and what we can do right now i think i read this recently i may be wrong with the number but i think compared to a year ago you have like 50% of your customer service now being answered by AI is that accurate and what can you tell us about Salesforce today and how AI is being used right now in this moment? What's real? I have so many exciting stories and that is it. We're at the beginning of a whole new story for Salesforce which is the agentic enterprise. The idea that we're going to have a new kind of company a company built on an agentic enterprise. An agentic enterprise is one that is built on agents or where agents and humans work together. And the reason why agents and humans need to work together is kind of how I just laid it out that these agents are good but not great that is there's a certain level of accuracy you can achieve 92 93 percent but not 100 percent so that is extremely important even like for one of our customers right there close to you Disney and you know we do a lot with Disney so if you go to the Disney store you're working with the Disney guides if you call the Disney call center you go on a Disney cruise you're buying Disney real estate you're probably interfacing with a Salesforce technology along the way and And we're managing all their customer touch points. And then we built this AI for Disney that can do something incredible. Because Disney has done such a great job with all of their products, the thing that's really interesting is that a normal human being like me, I can't put together the whole package. Like the hotel room, the restaurant reservation, the tour, the tour guide, the promotion. Like there's so many variables. But working with an AI, I can deliver a package for a Disney customer that is going to help Disney to maximize their revenue in an incredible new way. And that's really the power of the agent. The agent is going to work with the customer. The agent can work with the employee. And it elevates us. It's bringing us higher. It's moving us higher. It's like being at Date with Destiny. You feel like you're going up and up and up, like you're going to hit the ceiling like Willy Wonka. And then the thing is, is that that is really a great role for AI. I want to feel elevated. I want to become more than I am. I want it to augment me, extend me. I mean, of course, you know, maybe we're moving into brain machine interfaces, too, as I'll be truly extended. I'll be physically extended and then extended digitally. But that's not exactly where we are right now. So that we have to keep in mind. Another example is Williams Sonoma. Williams Sonoma is getting ready for Thanksgiving right now in the holiday season. They're going to sell so many products. It's going to be really incredible. They have nine brands, you know, a place like Pottery Barn and West Elm. And it's this amazing company run by this amazing CEO. Her name is Laura Albert. And she has a new agent on the front end of the Williams Sonoma website. You can go and try it. And it's a sous chef agent. And it helps you put together your Thanksgiving dinner. It's an agentic enterprise. it's they have augmented their human workforce with agents to kind of help you to kind of get to a new level. How about in marketing and sales processes where are agents in that process for you and what you do with your business? Well in our business first of all like number one is you mentioned customer services where we have five six seven eight nine thousand customers for agents and they do millions of conversations every year Well, we added this agentic layer to them so that about half of all of those requests now are actually done by these agents. And so a customer can come into help.salesforce.com. They can ask their question. They can talk to it. They can write it down. And it's giving them the answer. And we've done about 2 million of those conversations in the 10 months that that's been live. And during that same period, about 2 million human conversations. And at any moment, if you hit the maximum capability of the agent, you're like, oh, I'm frustrated now, or I just escalate to a human. Boom. You will right away be connected with a human being, and the software screen goes in front of the human, shows them the whole conversation you've had, where you got frustrated, what is going on, your whole customer history with us, because it is about humans and agents working together. If you're talking to a small or medium-sized business as opposed to a full enterprise, which I know you serve us as well quite a bit, what would you say if they were right now and said, okay, the bus has left the station, the train has left the station, they know AI is moving. And a lot of them, as I said, have gotten overwhelmed when you interview them. They're stressed or they're dabbling with a bunch of things. If you were going to give them advice, what would be three kind of non-negotiable decisions or actions you'd tell them to take immediately to get them moving forward where they really can immerse themselves and understand how to take advantage of this once-in-a-generation movement that's happening right now. Well, this is going to be a golden moment for small and medium business, and I already see that in my own business, that small and medium companies are going to look a lot more like large companies, because they're going to be extended by the technology. They're going to be somewhat indistinguishable. So, all of a sudden, small and medium companies can do a lot, lot more. So, where they could maybe only do so much because they were only limited by the number of employees they've had, Now they can be unlimited. So what would you do if you were completely unlimited? What would you do with your company if you had an infinite number of employees? Where would you go in your whole career if nothing was preventing you from being successful by the traditional human resources? So that idea that we can now have this infinite resource available to us, this can really extend us. Now, as I've mentioned now three or four times, there are limits to what the technology can do. But it is pretty awesome, and you can see it in one area, software engineering, that software engineers are augmented by these new types of tools that are making them more productive. Maybe they had used that to go to an ad agency. Maybe it was difficult to test multiple things. Now, all of those things where you have limits are unlimited, and you have this whole creative capability all in front of you. This is really awesome. So, yes, you're going to be able to augment sales. I kind of gave you the example that we're doing that. You're going to be able to augment service. You're going to be able to augment your marketing emails, your whole creative side as well. Probably in every single one of your business processes, it's going to be able to be transformed or changed or enhanced in some material way over the next several years. and you're going to have lots of great solutions. And there's going to be great possibilities that, you know, are one coming at you right after the next, and you're going to have to get used to feeling overwhelmed. There's no way that anybody is totally comfortable right now. Anybody who's totally comfortable right now, something is really wrong. So this is the moment to go, oh, yeah, everyone is feeling that way. If you're not feeling that way, oh, well, you probably have a much bigger issue, and it's time to get shaken up a little bit because this is your moment. This is your moment. So I'm wondering for you, because you're in the midst of this is your business anyway, in your own life, I look at AI as something that saves time, which is the most valuable thing on earth, and it gives leverage for impact. Where do you personally use AI to save yourself time or leverage yourself or leverage the impact of what you're going after? Well, I'll just tell you a really cool story, which is, you know, I just finished Dreamforce. And you've been to Dreamforce quite a few times. Well, this is our biggest and most exciting Dreamforce ever. It was 55,000 people in town in San Francisco. Totally sold out. Amazing. They hate the incidents. It was really cool. And we're launching the Agentic Enterprise, you know. And so people would show up at Moscone Center and said, welcome to the Agentic Enterprise. Humans and agents are now working together. And we had Laura Alba there from Williams-Sonoma, and Michael Dell was there talking about his agents running his supply chain. And we had this incredible CIO from Pepsi Athena. She's amazing, where she's automating all these small and medium businesses all over the world, using our platforms, millions of small and medium businesses, which is amazing. and we had the team from Pandora including the CEO, you know, the jewelry company with 6,000 jewelry stores on how they're augmenting their commerce and their service. It was really awesome. Anyway, I have to deliver a keynote, as you know. And I have to do my keynote and it's like, you know, it's a couple hours and it's very stressful for me and I'm getting ready to do my keynote so I have to practice my launch line. What am I going to say? How am I going to say it? What's my competitive differentiation? How am I positioning the company? How am I motivating people? So, Tony, this year I did it differently. And what I did was I had one of these large language models on my phone. And as I left my office and drove home every day, I put it on just its speaking mode and put it right next to me. And I would just say to it now, hey, give me the launch line again. I would say, and then it would give you the, I'd say, now is that differentiated against my competitor? what could I do to make it even more exciting how could I make it more motivational where could it go really wrong what's my liability how could I close this up how do I tighten it and I would be working with this thing each and every day and I've never done that before because the latency on the audio models they're just not as good as they are now the latency is so low that you can really talk to it like when you talk to Gemini or you talk to ChatGPT or any of these models, like it's talking right back to you and we've even taken that technology and built it into Salesforce so that you can call your customer service and the agent is talking right back to you like it sounds almost like he's not quite, of course maybe one of the reasons you know, and I always say something like oh, this is amazing, or it's so positive, these things are the most positive, they're way, really positive like they even do a thousand data with this it's like you don't just do this idea well you are so smart that is so incredible yes yes so great but i'm just talking to it and you know it's funny tony because you know i would say for the last three years you know and you know we use our V2MOM process to run our company that is at the beginning of every year I'm about to start this process right now you know I really write down the five core elements of my business plan of sales what do I really want what is really important to me in priority. How am I going to get those things? What are my to-do lists in priority and my budget for each one of those things? What is preventing me from having what I really want? And finally, how will I know that it's successful? How will I know that I really have it? These are these five elements of V2MOM. Vision, values, methods, obstacles, measures. And for the last three years, the way I've done it is I've written it down and then I feed it to a large language model and I say, hey, is this competitive? Is this differentiated? Is this compelling? And I've been shocked that it always finds one thing that I completely missed. It knows a lot about our competitors in the software industry because the competitors have put all their business plans into these things for some reason. So all of a sudden I'm like, well, how does it know so much about this competitor? I won't tell you which one specifically it knows everything about and I'm like how could it possibly know all of these things and I'm like well I'm just benefiting from that knowledge that it has and then I can shape it but then I always know I have to get my hand in to really to close it up and tighten it up give us a little a picture of how you see the world and then with that tell me what's a core belief that you have that guides you when you're thinking about the future that allows you to stay optimistic because so many people turn into a negative view of the future because change is people aren't usually prepared for. Certainly not the tempo of change that's happening today. As you said, everybody's uncomfortable if they know what's going on. And that discomfort hopefully drives us to grow, drives us to learn, drives us to go after it. So I'd love to know, what's your vision for where do you see being in the next, say, three to five years? Where is technology leading us? Where do you see the world? How does it change? How does it look different? And then finally, what kind of conviction does somebody need? What kind of belief did he have? I'll give you a metaphorical example. I remember decades ago in the 80s, you may remember there was this guy named Mel Fisher that he believed was going to find this Spanish gold that was lost in the 1600s. He did find it. It was full of gold. He had no clue. He just had this idea, but he sold people on it because he had so much conviction. He raised money, and the first year he found nothing. Second year he found nothing. After two years, he went back and raised more money. He did this for 16 years. For 16 years. And then he found a half a billion dollars worth of gold, which is pretty amazing. But the question I asked him at the time was like, what did you have to believe to do this? And his first belief was the treasure is out there. If you don't start with that, you have no chance of finding it. And I think AI is similar. And the second belief he had was, not only that it's out there, but I will find it. And it was his conviction inside himself that had no basis other than just his pure commitment. And then his third one is, it's worth it. Because if he hadn't known it was worth it, he would have given it up in one year, two years, five years, ten years. He kept on going. So I'm looking for a similar metaphor to help guide people through a future that feels uncertain for many people. Some people thrive on uncertainties, you well know. Other people, not so much. But we all have to. The world's changing so quickly. So give us your vision of how does the world look in the next three to five years in terms of change with robotics, nanotechnology, AI, agentic organizations. and then what core convictions do you have that make you feel more than optimistic but feel great about the future because I know you do. Based on what the tools that we do have and what we can achieve right now, what do we really want? What do we really want right now and then how do we create it? For Salesforce, I want to create the agentic enterprise. I want all of our customers to be agentic enterprises and I want to rebuild our entire products to be data first and to be Slack first and, yeah, to be AI first and to put it all together in a way that our customers are going to benefit and be able to build these new kinds of businesses that will be more profitable and high growth and require rebalanced workforces. So that's what's exciting for me, and that's what I'm doing every single day. And I think for each person, they have to decide what's exciting for them. So let's just balance those two worlds, the present moment and the future moment. and I think that's kind of how I'm handling it right now I think that's solid and wise and obviously you're doing it for yourself as well so it's great, listen thanks for having a fun evening with me buddy God bless, love you you're the best you're the best Tony, love you