Marc Benioff has claimed that up to half of Salesforce’s “work” is being done by AI, leaving the CRM firm’s reduced pool of humans to do “higher value” work.
Benioff made the claim in an interview with Bloomberg's Emily Chang, in which he also claimed the firm’s chatbots are operating with around 93 percent accuracy.
The interview came the same week as the firm announced Agentforce 3, describing it as “a major upgrade to its digital labour platform.” That upgrade added MCP support and increased visibility.
Saas pioneer Benioff described agents as digital labourers, saying that at Salesforce they were involved in marketing, branding, analytics, selling and servicing customers, and “That’s exciting.”
AI is doing 30 to 50% of the work at Salesforce now, he claimed, across key functions like engineering, coding, support and service. He predicted that growth rate would continue. People needed to get their heads round the idea that AI can do this, and “we can move on to do higher value work.”
Benioff also described his own use of AI, describing it as a “partner” in writing the firm’s annual business plan along with himself and another senior executive.
He said, “It’s a little bit less lonely at the top with AI.”
Benioff also claimed wide adoption amongst customers, with about 5,000 already deploying the technology. “We’re remarkably on track….by far it’s the fastest growing most exciting thing we’ve ever done.”
Though it could have been faster. Forrester VP Kate Leggett told Stack last month that, "Adoption of Agentforce has not met expectations due to missing features, inconsistent results, and inability to understand ROI."
Time for some values?
That didn't hold back the ever-bullish Benioff though. He predicted $3 trillion to $12 trillion of digital labour being deployed across the economy, and warned that CEOs needed to ensure “their values are in the right place about this.”
He accepted that AI was not yet 100 percent accurate, but was hopeful that it would get a lot more accurate with models stacking their intelligence, and “honing what the truth is.”
Salesforce had an advantage because of its data and meta data, he claimed. Though not so much of an advantage that it didn't feel the need to chase Informatica to boost its end to end data capabilities. The data management firm accepted an $8bn bid from Salesforce last month.
Which also throws up interesting perspectives when it comes to startups’ ability to break in.
Pressed by Chang, Benioff suggested that big tech was too big, and probably should be broken up – particularly with the concentration of power around AI. Capitalism needed guardrails, he said.
Benioff also showed off his imitation of a dolphin during the interview, recounting the story of how he came up with the idea of Salesforce while swimming with dolphins off Hawaii. And when Chang described himself as a rockstar, he said he was the Taylor Swift of tech. He appeared to be joking.
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