Marc Benioff: Salesforce guides to $46.2B revenue with AgentForce hitting $800M and 170% growth

talk to you soon.

Happy birthday.

Have a great rest of your week.

Great to see you.

We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and mediumsiz businesses. Um we have our next guest, Mark Beni off in the Reream waiting room. Let's bring him into TV Ultra. Mark, thank you so much for being first to join us here on earnings day.

We're honored. Great.

Great to see you.

How's it going?

It's going fantastically over.

Did you get that Metallica album I sent you?

We did. We did. Thank you so much.

Did Jordy listen to it?

Did we need a We need a

We need a record.

Jordan again.

But moed again.

Frame.

Jordy again. Again. Jordy,

I have no words. But but fun fact, Jordy can actually play the guitar. And so next time you're on, he's gonna be playing a cover.

I'll play you I'll play you a tune.

Yes.

How about that?

You got to come on the show with us.

Oh, that'd be fantastic.

I think it would be really good.

We'll have to We'll have to make that happen. Well,

but I'm going to call out I'm calling out Jordy on the whole situation.

The reality is Yeah.

Jordy, you're still unforgiven.

There we go. There we go. Uh well anyway, thank you so much for joining us first on earnings day. Uh take us through it because I got a mallet here that's itching to hit a gong.

Well, if you want to hit a gong, I mean no no enterprise software company has ever given guidance for 46.2 billion before.

And these are crazy numbers. So

all right. I love that gong, by the way. I love that gong.

We love gongs.

I really do. But I would say that that's exciting.

Yes.

But also just this company, you know,

it's really become a cash machine as well with, you know, we're projecting over $16 billion in cash flow this year. So when you think about that,

and then the quarter, you know, the quarter we deliver this record RPO. Funny thing, you know, some of my friends are writing these articles. RPO doesn't matter. I mean, they just write a song, nothing matters.

I don't know. Nothing else matters. Yes.

But RPO, which is, you know, kind of our remaining performance obligation. These are contracts that we basically have signed but not yet recognized.

That is $72.4 billion.

So, these are driving these huge numbers. That's

what does that mean? What does that I think people have a good sense. That's that's up 14% year-over-year. It's that all these numbers are accelerating growth. So,

I don't know. I just kind of I I am very proud of my team. I'm very proud of our customers. I I say also I'm very proud of the customers because we've really been pushing the customers hard this year to deploy all this new amazing AI and agent technology and we've hit basically now more than 19 trillion tokens. So you can just see the velocity of AI and agents and the company's just transforming from being not just an apps company and I think you guys are using Slack and other Salesforce apps to run your business

but now they're all extended with these agents like Slack not just Slackbot

but the ability to extend your service and your marketing and your sales and all the agents are out there and they're running wild as well. So you have apps and agents, humans and agents working together. It's very cool moment. Very cool.

Jordy. Uh yeah, what what has it been like in internally with the team uh this year? It's been I has there been a more kind of chaotic period uh in your career? How like how are you guys operating internally clearly delivering results? Uh what's it take?

I mean, well, you know, you know, we all been reading about the SAS apocalypse

and but we've got our Sasquatch is eating our SAS apocalypse. Let's go Sasquatch.

I just think that when you look at things like, you know, Agent Force, which we've talked about on the show now three times, you know, starting at Dreamforce,

that, you know, and D, first of all, Agent Force by itself is now an $800 million business, up 170% year-over-year. Wow.

So, that is amazing all as its own product. But then you look at Agent Force and our data business together. That is now a $2.9 billion business up 200% year-over-year. So there's no question that AI and data is a huge driver of growth.

And it's about these apps and these agents. And you know, we use the apps. We're these humans. We're using the apps. You know, we're using Slack. We're using SalesCloud, ServiceCloud, we're using all of our cool apps. And then each one of those now has an agent platform also. Yeah. And these two things together is the future of enterprise software that apps have been extended by agents. And while we before were in the apps market and that's what we've been doing for 26 years, you know that we've been in business since 1999. Now we're in the apps business and the agent business and I this is why I've never been more excited about my business. I just love it.

Yeah.

I mean I really love it. How much h how much similarity is there to the original messaging just around like being a company that enables cloud adoption? Like there were probably a lot of companies and and CEOs that came to you early in your career that said like I know this cloud thing is important. How do I do it? And you had an answer. And now there's CEOs that say I know this agentic thing and this AI thing is important. How do I do it? And you probably have a pretty similar answer, right? Is this is this history repeating itself? Oh my god, it's such a good question. You know, Neil Busher, who's now the CEO again of Workday,

my good friend, uh he lives, you know, basically next door to me, came over last night. We both had a cocktail cuz, you know, we're looking at his after hours stock and I said there Neil, there's no way this can be true.

You know, you have to let this go. And in fact, you saw already that his stock corrected today because the numbers are just don't match, you know, what's really going on. He has an unbelievable business. He had a great quarter. he's going to have a great year. We use his HR and financials.

And I said to Neil, this is just something that you have to let go of. This is not my first apocalypse, you know. We I saw this in 2008. I saw this in 2001, 200 2016, you know, and look, this is there's people in the market, they make money when the market goes up and down. So that's just the stock market. But let's talk about the customer success. And when you look at how companies can actually be better, more productive, successful, profitable companies, and we are, you know, we're we're number one. We're customer zero. And that's what I'm so excited about because when you look at how we're running customer service and support right now, we're using it with service agents and service apps. So if you go to help.salforce.com, salesforce.com, you're using the agent and at any point, bam, bam, bam, you can autoes escalate right back to the app and the humans if you like exhaust the agent or now this week we have an agent that is going to qualify 50,000 leads for our company, you know, which is our sales agent that it's out there talking to our customers. We've closed millions of dollars of business this week just through the agents themselves. So that is what is amazing that we have apps and agents. And it's not that we don't have 15,000 salespeople at Salesforce. We do.

And we have millions of apps all out there scurrying around looking for opportunities and then bringing them to those humans going, "Hey, look at this opportunity. Give this person a call. Let's go see this person. Let's go find out what to do."

And that is really the

Yeah. How much extended elevated? We're elevated by AI. We're made better. We know we're made better by AI.

There's no

How much have you been How much have you been kind of uh you know all the the Catrines post, we've talked about it at length on the show. Very very a lot of a lot of doom. Uh but we've been very focused on what's happening in in coding. As these coding models have gotten better, people want to hire. Uh at least the data shows so far. Citadel was showing up up uh job listings for engineers are up 11% year-over-year. You've talked before about hiring more uh sales reps because as your reps get more productive,

probably want more of them. But is that is that a kind of comp that you're looking at uh given that I think everyone is expecting sales agents to to kind of get uh to kind of catch up to to coding agents in terms of capabilities?

Great question. Amazing. And you know, we were I wasn't really on the show at the beginning of the year a year ago with you guys, but if I was, what I would have said was, I'm not hiring more engineers in fiscal year, you know, 26, the year I just passed

because I was using coding agents and I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year. Yeah.

And I didn't hire more service agents in the year. I held it flat and then reduced it slightly because I'm using service agents. But I did hire like almost 20% more salespeople this year. I think we've talked about that because I need more capacity because we have more demand than ever through every market from the small, medium, large customers, you know, guys like yourself who are like these great entrepreneurs building a great business like TBPN really going all the way through it. You need a technical infrastructure around you to grow your business. I know you use Slack. I know use other products

and that's our job is to make you successful and to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do it just with an agent.

You need you need we we there's still some humans around who need to be automated as well.

Yeah.

And that is what is exciting.

Yeah.

And that is what I'm doing every single day.

What advice do you have for a company like Anthropic that's hiring a a Salesforce admin? What makes for a great Salesforce admin? you're you're kind of leading beyond. I mean, you know, it's kind of funny, right? Because these AI companies, they love our products and they can't buy enough of them. They're some of our largest customers now. Anthropic, Open AI, Google, Amazon, you name it. These tech companies Slack is the largest AI ecosystem in the world. You know that.

And that's reality, you know, which is that no one has a company that's running entirely on a large language model because it's not real. That's not we need software and we need large language models. We need the determinism and the programmability and the security and the sharing and but this large language model is an amazing new component of our infrastructure so we can do things that we could never have done before. That is what is so awesome and so we can extend our industry. I think the software industry is going to be bigger and broader and do more this year than ever before. not just Salesforce which is going to grow incredibly this year. I think every company's going to grow because we have more to sell and there's more excitement and action and energy and so this kind of counternarrative of oh no no no they don't understand we're just call that company who wrote that report

and you ask them what is their software infrastructure their magic infrastructure I do this all the time tell me exactly how you're doing what you're saying that you're doing oh well you're right we're so sorry we made a mistake No, you you know and look the futurist I think we talked about this Peter Schwarz you know our chief futurist

he wrote Minority Report. Have you seen that movie like 20 years old? Great.

I haven't seen it but I've seen it.

Oh yeah, you got to watch this. And also he wrote War Games and Deep Impact,

you know, part of a team writing team. These are future movies.

Yeah,

but we all know where the future is kind of going. This highly automated amazing world. But we're living in this world in this is this is this year. This is 2026.

You know, we're running our business today. So, how are we doing our financials, our HR, our customer information? You know, how are we doing all of these aspects of our business? How are we running them? And then we write a we write a report that sounds like Minority Report.

And then I'm like, yeah, Minority Report. I read the I watched the movie. Great guys. Fantastic. But I'm in the present moment reality right now. Yeah. You know.

Yeah. Yeah. It's true.

And come let's come back to world. And by the way, like you can do things that you couldn't do before. This quarter I released our new ITSM product.

So our customers can do this incredible thing, you know, IT service management. They used to have to go to Service Now for that. Now we converted five Service Now customers, you know, just in the quarter right over to Salesforce because we have that new capability. So companies like Sunun and Cornerstone and Cools and others, you know, they can now use Salesforce ITSM instead of Service Now. That's so exciting. And then we have our new life sciences cloud that we've built all with an agentic interface. So our customers do not have to use Viva

and those customers are instead, you know, those are big companies like the Fisers and the Teas and the Novartis and the AbbeyV. So they're running with this next generation platform of apps and agents. Apps and agents and humans and agents working together.

Yeah. So I mean the the business model currently is clearly working. The results show that. Uh as you look into the future, do you think the business model will evolve? Do you think that we're going towards more consumptionbased? Is there is seatbase going to be with us forever? Like how are you thinking? Obviously, you don't need to turn the cruise ship today, but how do you think this evolves over time?

It's such a great question, right? Because that's like one of these interesting narratives. But hey, I don't know which which enthropic product you're using, but the one I'm using is seatbased.

Mhm. So, if you don't have if you have a different one or I have a I don't know which Open AI product you're using, but mine is seat based.

Yeah, I have a seat.

I don't know which one you're using.

It's a good It's a good take. Of course, you can use

No, it's true though, right? Yeah. There's an API also. There's an API also.

Yeah,

but they're happy to be selling seats right now. You're right.

Yeah.

No, we I This is about humans and agents. So, let's use that analogy. Sure.

Humans are seats. And so, they're still like us three. We're like the last three humans. It's very sad, but we're still here.

And then

we have the agents, too. And they're using the APIs and talking to each other and they're on Maltbook and they're like having a conversation, creating their own currency.

They're talking about us. Great.

Smack.

They're saying, "Oh, can you believe those humans are still there? We're going to get them." And it's like, "No, we're it's still humans and agents working together."

And that is what is exciting about the future of enterprise software. So, yes, I have a salesforce, but it's extended with sales agents. And I have a service organization extended with service agents, and I'm sending a trillion marketing messages this year, but they're all extended with marketing agents. And I have commerce agents, and I've got Yeah. And you guys use Slack every day, right?

And you're using Slackbot now, hopefully, you know, since the last time. And I would say it's like amazing that I can use agents in Slack. So I have employee agents and we might have some other new exciting agents coming in the next few weeks for you. I'm very excited.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm very inspired by Maltbot. I'm now got you know our team working on some new things. So

that is like how I see it unfolding and I think it's about a world where there are apps and agents and where this large language model it's extending our capability. It makes us better. It makes us stronger. It gives us the ability to do more. Yeah.

And yeah, seats still exist and also consumption exists like we have,

you know, lots of consumption products, data, you know, data products. And

was there products?

Was there ever a SAS apocalypse that was driven by fear that opensource software would defeat your products, defeat Salesforce?

Oh, no. There was a bigger SAS apocalypse than that.

Okay.

Do you remember the SAS apocalypse of 2020? the SAS apocalypse of 2020. John, let me tell you the story.

We were all minding our own business and then CNN came on and said we were all going to die.

Not just the software companies, everyone because it was the pandemic. Yes.

And we all went home and we hid and it was a very sad time. And in fact, right at that moment, the stock market crashed because we were all going to die. And that was a huge SAS apocalypse. And you can see it in everyone's stock chart. It goes like this. And

Yep. And then all of a sudden people go, I guess we're not dying. And then it came back up. Yep.

And that was a SAS apocalypse of 2020. It's a sad tale, but we lived through it

and we got through it. And you know what? We're stronger for it.

Yeah.

And that was just one of the SAS apocalypses.

Yeah. Talk about the reception of the Super Bowl ad.

Well, listen, I don't want to be competitive with you guys because your ad was very good. I want you just to know

you did a great job. You should feel great.

I appreciate that.

You know, you had a great great ad. Everybody loved it.

Very high RO.

Now, we were the number one ad in the Super Bowl, which is

Okay. Mog meter going up. Let's go.

Admoged.

I I'm sorry, but it has to be said because, you know, we have Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast.

Yeah, he's the best.

And Mr. Beast did a great job and that was just a killer ad. And um we still haven't revealed the final uh thing. And we have a great person here, John Zismos, who did a fantastic job with Jimmy, and it was an unbelievable partnership. But Jimmy's just he's a force of nature.

Yeah.

I mean, I've never seen anything like this. He's such a young, great, amazing entrepreneur. The first time I ever talked to him, which was years ago,

he said to me, I want to be the future Steve Jobs, you know, I want to be the future great entrepreneur of the world. I had to pause and say, really? She's like, "Yeah, that's what really I want in my life. I want to be a great business leader, a great and I think he's doing it." And he's so young, you know, we've already had him on the cover of Time magazine once,

you know, and I see,

you know, him as a huge leader in the whole world, not just as some kind of YouTube personality. This is a great entrepreneur, business person, not just making chocolate bars, not just running a bank. I see him doing a lot of amazing things and he's got a lot of energy. Incredible. And uh he's I have a lot of respect for him. And yes, number one Super Bowl ad. How about that?

There's a lot of entrepreneurs listening, a lot of entrepreneurs that are searching for their next great business idea. If they want to go swimming with dolphins and get inspired, what's the most underrated time to visit Hawaii?

You're right. Well, number one, this week we have been having an awesome show from Killway, a volcano. Oh, yeah.

We had I think 12, 13, 1400 foot tower, which is I'm in Salesforce tower San Francisco right now. Gorgeous. You guys should come.

Yeah.

And the the fountain from the volcano was taller than this tower this week. So that is amazing. And you're right, all the little dolphins were so happy

just cruising around. But also, it's whale season on the North Coast. So they're going

they were so happy. Also, everyone gets happy when you see the volcano. It's like it's like the wh it's like when you see a whale. Same. It you you it reminds you who you really are. It reminds you this is what life is really all about.

You come back to your breath. You come back.

I don't know. When I see whales out, I think of agents.

I think agent ports personally. Hey, you got to run. Sorry, we're keep I have a challenge for you. Before we talk again, you got to frame mog one of the AI lab leaders.

Oh, this is this is big alpha right here.

We'll talk with you. as possible. We'll coordinate. We'll coordinate. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations on all the promise. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

You better listen to Metallica because I swear to you on here and you're not ready. You're just lucky I didn't bring him on today.

On repeat. On repeat. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Have a good one. Cheers.

Goodbye. Well, if you're tracking