Salesforce’s Benioff: Everything Has Changed with AI

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in having considerably impact at Salesforce, as CEO Marc Benioff said the company is accelerating its use in automating workloads.

“AI is doing 30 to 50% of the work at Salesforce now” for engineering, coding and customer service tasks, Benioff said during an interview Bloomberg’s “The Circuit with Emily Chang. “I think that will continue. All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI can do things that before we were doing and we can move on to do higher value work.”

“Everything has changed with AI,” he said. “Everything has changed to the point where you have to understand that customers want the power of AI without the mystique. I want to try to get to that point.”

Deploying Agentforce

Salesforce offers Agentforce and other AI-powered tools. With 5,000 customers deploying them, they are on track to have a billion agents by the end of the year.

“It’s amazing how many agents we see getting spawned,” he said. “I mean, by far it’s the fastest growing, most exciting thing we’ve ever done. This is what AI was meant to be. These are agents who are making you more productive or reducing your cost, making things easier.

AI Advantage for Salesforce

While agreeing that AI is not a hundred percent accurate, Benioff sees continued improvement as the models themselves continue to stack their intelligence.

“We have about 93% accuracy,” he said. “You’ll never see me saying that we’re at 100%, but I think for a lot of the other vendors, maybe they’re at much lower levels because they don’t have as much data and metadata. They’re not able to kind of put as much information into the model to get to a higher level of accuracy.”

Benioff called the rise of AI in the workforce a “digital labor revolution” with between $3 to $12 trillion of digital labor getting deployed.

“That digital labor’s going to be everything from AI agents to robots,” he continued.

Digital Employees

That goes for the role of CEO as well. While Benioff joked that an AI agent could replace him one day, it is helping him to do his job now.

“I just finished writing the business plan for this year, and I always do that with someone else. For the last three years, I’ve also have found a new partner in AI,” he said. “So I have an AI partner, I have a human partner, and it’s the three of us who are writing the plan together.”

With Agent Force, Benioff is looking at it as digital employees “who are out there doing this work. Servicing the customer, selling the customer, marketing to the customer, partnering with me to do the analytics, the marketing, the branding— that’s exciting.”