Marc Benioff on Dreamforce, AgentForce, $43B revenue, and why sales is still the greatest career

you. We are working on this. Um, let's make sure that uh he is in the reream waiting room joining. I wish I wish we we got to get ESO back on the show. I see him. I don't hear him yet. I would ESO. Hey, how you doing, Mark? We got audio. Thank you so much. Got audio. You have John Kugan and Jordy Hayes from TVP.

AGI is here, but we still have technical tech, but here we are. It's AGI. It's amazing the AGI. I mean, it's unbelievable how far we've come. I mean, all of the AI is, you know, is it isocond or isocond? I can never remember. I think it's Isoc. Is it miso soup or miso soup? I think it's miso soup. Okay. It's okay.

So, isoc. Yeah. I love by the way and I love poolside. I'm so glad you guys know each other. One thing you need to know. One thing you need to know, I also love Poolside, the music, the Have you heard the Poolside FM? And they do that great Neil Young cover, you know, on Harvest Moon. Yeah. Yeah.

If you haven't heard the Poolside cover on Harvest Moon. Yeah. And Esokan and I were talking about that and I said, "Why why did you call it Poolside? " He's like, "Oh, this and you know, he's building this huge data center now. " Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, "You should split the company, Eso.

you should have a software company building your model which is amaz have you seen his model is amazing. Oh yeah.

And then he's also building a d huge data center and I'm like you have one company which is the model poolside one d one company is the data center curbside so you have poolside curbside that'd be fantastic that'd be fantastic. Uh anyway please give us give us the update how you feel. Congratulations.

Break it down for us. Dream Force feels like something that would never never get old. Super Bowl for sass. Well, you guys aren't here, which I guess you're not Metallica fans, which is sad. And I'm going to have to let Larriage know that you missed it. And then also, you don't like Benson Boon either.

So, you're not pop or heavy metal. What are you? Count us in for the next one. We'll be there. We'll be there. We'll be there next time. Super Bowl of Why? Why? Why? I mean, this is our 23rd Dreamforce. You haven't been to any of them. I want an explanation. I want to know why.

No, you you guys are the number one podcast in the world. I want to know why you're not at Dream Force and I want to know your music ch I want to know your music choice. I do love Metallica. I grew I grew up on Metallica and I believe it. What song do you What's your number one Metallica? Enter Sandman. No, no.

It's okay to like the Everybody knows that one. Let me ask. It's It's It's uh What do What do you got? I'm forgiven. I I do like Master of Puppets. That's a great one.

Uh, but I I was always in a little bit more of the slip knot, a little bit more of the of the corn and the tool, but you know, but I mean, Metallic is great. It's definitely in the heavy rotation. It's on my it's on my metal playlist a bit.

We not only have the greatest heavy metal band of the United States here, Metallica, really the Bay Area, Lars and Rob Trillilo and, you know, Jimmy Hedfield was here and um and Kirk Hammet, probably the greatest guitarist of all time if you like that. But but we also have here Yoshiki. Oh yes.

The head of XJapan who's also one of the greatest drummers of all time and X Japan also. He does classical piano and he's about to go on tour again. Matt back to Madison Square Garden and Royal Fantastic Albert Hall. Amazing.

But anyway, hopefully you guys will come next year and works for and works for X the everything app. That's correct. Right. That's great. Well X X the everything app. This is the different X different. This is extra pan, not related to rel. Okay, got it. Got it.

I I I saw I saw your post about being on X and I wasn't sure if it was a different thing. This is We Are we X? Yes. It It's never been more Japanese. Your Japanese viewers are going to go up if you just say we are X, which is Yoshiki official on Twitter. Yeah. Fantex or whatever it is. We're This This is so fun.

I uh we got to we got to do this more often. Um, we were joking on the show earlier. We were referencing a post, you know, the whole like nothing ever happens investment meme, right? Which is like uh which somebody was highlighting that OpenAI runs on both Salesforce and Slack.

Wanted to ask you does not does nothing does nothing ever happen? Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. There you go. Um, you're still unforgiven by the way. A super intelligence would use Salesforce and Slack for sure. that that that would be the first thing that they pull off the shelf.

If you are a Slack user, you need to see the Slack bot that we introduced here which is built on Enthropic. It's also amazing. So, we use OpenAI, we use Enthropic, we use Gemini. I just did an interview uh with Sundar, you know, you can see it on YouTube. We XAI love Elon. Yeah, we we love them all.

We love all our children very equally here. Yeah. H how do you think about vertical integration? I mean, it's a fascinating company. You've had the opportunity to build your own cloud.

I I don't believe you've ever built your own operating system, but many companies now are saying we want to build our own ASIC and you've probably I don't know, have you ever thought about putting Salesforce on an ASIC or Slack on an ASIC? Like how do you think about when to verticalize versus when to partner?

It's such a great question and you probably will enjoy my interview with Sundar because I asked him that because you know, you think about it, he's really got it all together. He's got the data center, he's got the chip, right? Tensor, right? Yeah.

He's got he does a lot of the operating system type work including the model you know the Gemini model the applications he does as well and he even gets all the way to the robotic layer right so here he's got these Whimos running around the street what other company is going from robot to chip you know to data center really only I mean and if the future is well what is the future is it billions of fast food restaurants on the planet you know all having their hamburgers made you know by robots And that's the world we're about to enter into.

I mean, I have no idea, but the one thing I know is uh if you look behind me, there's no robots walking around. Well, there might be one, but not making the burgers here. Not yet. Not yet. Uh, how do you think about the different foundation model brands? Do your customers want to know that they can pick Claude?

Is model switching important or is there a world where you wind up wrapping that at an abstraction layer and you're just serving them your product and it's powered by the different foundation models but the the consumer doesn't really care.

This is a great question because number one you may know that Salesforce also has a huge research team. We invented prompt engineering the first prompt right here at Salesforce research commercialized by others of course but also the first prompt Absolutely. Gone. Thank you for your service. Thank you. Thank you.

And listen, yeah, look, some customers want to use our models. Yep. Some customers want to build their own models. Yep. Some customers like a certain brand of model. By the way, some countries like a certain model. You just saw ISO Kant. Was it ISO or ISO? ISO, right? ISO. ISO K. He's in Portugal.

He is going to make a play. He's going to have a data center in Texas, but he's also going to have a data center in Europe. Yeah. There's Mistral in France. There's Middle East models. There's Asian models. You know, Quan from Alibaba. You didn't mention that, right?

There's models all over the world and different customers and different geographies are going to all want different models based on where they are, the kind of customer they are. They may want small models, they may want large models, they want micro models, they want foundation models.

Yeah, there's a lot of different models. So, you have to give people choice. But what we're going to provide is this incredible platform that we call the Aentic Enterprise. And we have Agent Force. And Agent Force is powered by all of those.

And you can plug into whatever model you want wherever you are with the data residency, the governance, the compliance, everything you need. Boom. Right into Agent Force. Because look at here at this conference. you're not here unfortunately and I hope you do come. We've had 23 of them by the way. But I know.

But here's the thing. Listen, Jord's barely 23 years old. One of our one of our team members over there. No, you're doing podcasts all day long. You got your podcast all day long. You're doing this podcast going. But listen, listen. I get it. I know you're too busy for me, but now listen to this. Listen to this.

No, this is this interview is so fun. We're We'll fly. We'll fly to Salesforce Salesforce Tower. No, I know you're busy. I get it. I got it. You're too busy. No, no. I understand you're not Metallica fans. You're too busy for us. Fine. But here's the thing. I want to just say this to you.

Look, there's customers here from hundreds of countries who have flown in from all over the world. Yeah. And they all have different needs, different industries. They're different size. There's small businesses, companies like 0 to 200 employees. There's 200 to 1,000 employees, 1,000 to 2,000 employees.

Very large enterprise, the Pepsis and the Dells. Michael Dell was here. You're not here. Michael Dell was here. Okay. Laura Albert, the CEO of William Sonoma is here. You're not here. That's fine. But here's the thing. Hold on. But here's the thing. Also, it's about governments. It's about software companies.

You know, it's about all of these people are here because it's a highly diversified market software and these models don't just have to reach consumers. They have to go through these businesses and go B to B to C. Yeah.

you know from business to business to consumer and that is actually complicated because you have different governance like I was saying different compliance all kinds of different rules based on country based on so it's it's not like you know we're look we're here we're Americans we're here in America you know that we love our country and we have certain models that are built here great okay we love that but here's one more thing there's many people who are not Americans who are here and they have to comply to their laws in their countries in their languages and their governments and we have to adapt to those organizations and those countries as well.

So you have to think about AI as a global phenomenon. You have to think about AI as a highly diversified phenomenon and you have to think of a AI as the future. Yeah. And we're just in we're in the current moment now. We've been doing AI at Salesforce for 10 years. We did Einstein 10 years ago.

You know, obviously AI has been around I think since the 50s, the ' 40s. So, and you know, like the guy who wrote Minority Report and War Games and even Deep Impact. He's our futurist. He's 78 years old. He worked at JPL on the Apollo mission. He's one of the writers on all of those things.

And he's there, but we're not. He's there. Yes. Everybody's here, but you're not. Everyone is here, but you're not. But here's the thing. Well, this is the largest tech conference in the world. you know that 50,000 people are here. The largest vendor led tech. Hit that gong again. Uh Mark, one question for you.

Uh you Salesforce has been hugely acquisitive. Uh what is your pitch to founders in 2025 that you want to acquire? That's great. Like why why is it such an incredible opportunity? We have bought more than 100 companies. You're 100% right. Over 26 years we've bought more than 100 companies.

We've invested in hundreds of companies. We own 1% of anthropic. You know, we just sold a company to Google, which is Whiz, the security company. We, you know, we grew Snowflake and took it public. We're investor in many companies. Um, so we want to talk to you if you're an entrepreneur.

We want to invest in you, want to help you grow. We want to bring you here, introduce you to all of our customers. We have 50,000 customers here to introduce you to who want to buy your product now. So come here to San Francisco or come to one of our world tours all over the world.

You know, from here we go on the road and we're going to be in every country in the world, every major city and we will come and meet you. We want to meet you. We want to know you. Salesforce Ventures is our arm that acquires but also invests. It's a huge part of our business. It's a $5 billion fund.

It's I think doing a 33% IRR. I don't know exactly the number. It's probably one of the highest performing funds in the world. That's great. Let us partner with you. Yeah. You know, come here. You know, these podcasters don't have time. You do. Come here. Be with us. Customers are here to meet you.

Uh you're good at sales. You kind of got to be in the role.

But what's the current thinking on uh seatbased pricing versus consumption both at Salesforce or what you advise founders that might be Yeah, I think I think people have this obsession with with seatbased pricing right now and and this idea that that AI may may allow people to run.

uh we're not seeing it a lot yet but uh uh companies more efficiently but in my view I think companies are smart enough to to understand they buy so even if they're paying on a seat base they're paying for value at the end of the day and if they're not getting value they'll they'll churn or they'll find another so but how do you think about this conversation around seatbased versus kind of valuebased pricing what a great question look at I just subscribed to chat GPT it's a seatbased model you know that you probably paid 20 or $200 I just absorbed.

Is that what Did you use that by Did you use that by the way to to make that picture with with uh Sam? It kind of that that picture you guys rock. I said because we were wearing like conference necklaces and I said take it off. And Chad GPT goes oh no no no no no copyright infringement.

And then and then Grock said great I'll do that. And do you want me to put in the photo of the podcasters with you? I said I'd like to do that also. But you might have sepas pricing like those are that's a good example, right? You might have all you can eat pricing. So we have the agentic enterprise license agreement.

All you can eat. Don't even think about pricing. We're going to give it all to you. Don't even worry. Three, it might be per transaction or per per action pricing because you're more conservative.

You want to know exactly what you're paying per action per transaction or it might be some other model that some kind of flexible agreement.

right now what we're having to do and this is a great question so thank you for asking me the question we have to write pretty much a custom pricing agreement for every single customer and as you know this year we're going to do about $ 43.

1 billion in revenue and and we just gave guidance yesterday that we expect to be able to do $60 billion by fiscal year 30. So that's, you know, it's still very fast growing, very exciting, fantastic. But when you have, we have 150,000 maybe customers on our core. There's a million customers on Slack.

Hopefully you guys use Slack. We do, of course. When you have that many customers and that many countries and that many size companies, like I mentioned, it's across the board, it's every possible need. And so we have to adapt more than ever.

Before when we started our company 26 years ago, we had one product, one price, $50 a user per month for our sales product. We only had one product, one price, one type of customer. That is not who Salesforce is today.

with Slack, with Tableau, with Mulesoft, with our sales cloud, our service cloud, our marketing cloud, all you know, our agent force 360 platform, all of the things that we offer, dozens of products, we ultimately have to adapt to the customer.

And what I can say to you is Salesforce's core values which are trust, customer success which is right what we're talking about right now, innovation, equality of every human being including pay equality and also sustainability which is our trillion tree initiative and all the work we're doing for the oceans and if you were here you could see what we're doing.

But listen, the number one thing number one you can say those are our core values. At the end of the day it's all about customer success. Are you happy using Slack? Are you happy using our sales cloud? Are you happy using our service cloud? Is Agent Force fully satisfying you?

Are you getting, you know, you guys have a huge business now? You guys are growing your business. Are you go, you know, like, by the way, for example, you probably heard of the beast, Jimmy Donaldson. His team is here. They're bu running on Salesforce. They're a huge media company now. Everybody know Mr.

Beast runs on Salesforce. You know, the beast. The beast. The beast running on Salesforce. uses Slack very aggressively. Of course, Jimmy is amazing. Okay. He runs a great business. It is growing like a weed beast media, all of these things. We have to adapt to him. Yeah.

It's an example I'm giving you cuz I know you can relate to that in your own business that you guys are trying to grow and make money and have fun and look at this look at this great life. You guys are you probably feel blessed every day that this is your career. We do. We do. So, and I feel that myself.

I feel blessed every day that this is my career, that I'm able to do this for a living. Last night, James Hetfield, probably one of the great singers of our time. I'm going to introduce you to his music. Listen, number one thing he said, he's on stage.

He said, "Metallica for over 40 years, gets up on stage and plays that song that you mentioned, Enter Sandman. " And you know what he said? I feel blessed that I can do this every time I get on stage. We feel blessed that we're here at Dreamforce.

We're blessed every time we get to meet with a customer, every time we have an interaction, every time we are able to write a piece of code, sign a deal, see customer success. It's what gets us up in the morning. It's why we do what we do. And it's why we're here at Dreamforce.

And after 26 years, I still have the passion, the energy, and the excitement and the vision for Salesforce that I had 26 years ago because that's what makes me happy. I love making customers successful. I know that's what you like. You love making your your viewers. You're the final boss of Enterprise SAS.

I absolutely love it. What makes uh why why do you believe that sales is still a great career path for young people? I personally believe it is. I believe it is the most valuable skill in the world.

Um, and but I think a lot of people see all these AI agent for sales rep companies getting funded and they they might think I don't want to go down that path because I don't want to go down the sales path because I think that's going to get automated away. Why do you what's your kind of worldview there?

Well, it's a great question. I mean, you know, at one level, there's between 20 and 100 million people, we actually counted them that we have not been able to call back since we started Salesforce 26 years ago. Between 20 and 100 million people, we didn't call them back.

Not because we didn't love them, not because we didn't like them. We didn't have a people. And you know, those are that idea to be able to call everybody back. You know, how do you do it? Like you can't call every listener back who's already contacting you. You know that. Yeah.

So, one thing is, yeah, you're going to have a SDR, sales development representative, the ability to call everybody back, okay? The ability to qualify to have a conversation. But listen, face to face sales or facetoface communication like we're doing right here.

Like, by the way, I'm I don't I'm not an AI as far as I know. I'm here. I'm not biological computer running an LLM. At least I hope I'm not. I feel like an AI would grab a water bottle and hit it like that. Very suspicious. What I want to say, I want to just say this to you.

I also just hired somewhere between three and 5,000 more salespeople. Wow. Okay. I'm growing my sales force. It'll be more than almost. It's I think I'm going to try to get to 20,000 account executives this year. That doesn't include systems engineers, managers, the infrastructurees.

We have we have 80,000 employees at Salesforce. 80,000. And about a quarter of them, okay, are just people who are trained in our product, who are designed to help you. We want to make sure that they can help you be your success.

That is why at the end of the day, I think sales, listening, asking good questions, empathizing with the customer, connecting deeply with the customer, having fun, which is super important for us and for you. I know. I watch everything that you guys do. You love enjoying and having a good time. We want to do that, too.

Isn't that what sales is really all about? And tonight, you know, look at the conference is happening, but across the street is the St. Reges Hotel. And last night, I was there and I'm coming down. It's a long day. It's a long two days. I haven't slept in two weeks. Coming down the escalator looking the bar is filled.

Yeah. And the bar is filled. And what is happening in the bar, do you think? And it's not our people who are in the bar.

I looked it was all the customers talking to each other and connecting going more deeply ha you know having that human touch you know because look AI we love AI okay but AI it's not the same it's not AI doesn't have a soul it's not that human connectivity it's not you know at our depth AI is not born it's you know AI is made so you know we there's humanity that still needs to be nurtured and people want to buy from people and grown.

People want to buy from people. Thank you. I mean that is what it's all about and that's why I think sales actually is and you can see right here my job right now is to sell you to come to Dreamforce but also to look at our products to core sell you our core values. That's my job right now. Right. That is my job. Yeah.

And um how quickly how quickly can you clock if somebody's going to be great at sales? Does it take you like 20 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute? We've all seen We just had a great conversation about Mr. Beast. Yeah.

Would you say on a scale of 1 to 10, the 10 one of the best communicators, most aggressive sales people in the world, where would you put him? One or 10? 10. 10. 10. Yeah. And boom. That is important. And I think that that is and you see like all of a sudden you're watching this thing. One of the games is happening.

He's buried somebody underground for two years or something. They're digging the person up. Are you still alive? Whatever. And then just as they break, they go, "And one more thing. I've got a chocolate bar to sell you. And this is the best chocolate bar you have ever tasted.

Let me have the guys coming out of the ground now. Hey, will you try this chocolate? What do you think? Look, I've been underground for 2 years. This is the best chocolate I have ever had. I mean, he has to be one of the great communicators, but also one of the greatest salesmen I have ever seen.

Is that valuable in the age of AI? 100%. Absolutely. 100%. Absolutely. Where do you get Last question. Where do you Where do you get your energy? It's off the charts. It's incredible. I'm getting it right now from you guys are obviously totally off charts and I'm just vibing. I am so tired, so trashed.

Last week I've been on the road non-stop. I haven't slept for an hour. I don't know where I am. I don't know what conference this is. I don't know if that was ESO or myo. You're doing great. I just want to thank you. I wish we I wish we didn't have to fade to black. We'll talk to you soon.

You see what I You see what I did there? Right there. You googled it. You Googled. You're still unforgiving. I still I think I have I think I have a clip of me playing a Metallica song. I don't remember. We'll send it to you. I'll send it to you. We'll work on Thank you so much, Mark. We'll talk soon. Have a good day.

Super fun. Bye. Uh, fire me up. Yeah, the mogging counter. Uh, relentless. We got We got to add that. That's the chat. What a having a lot of fun at our expense and I wouldn't have it any other way. Everyone had a great time. Thank you so much to Mark Beno for hopping on the show. Uh, I