Surrounded by journalists and industry analysts, Salesforce’s outspoken chief executive, Marc Benioff, revealed a secret about this year’s Dreamforce keynote address: It was only completed the prior night after he scrapped an earlier speech three weeks ago. By the time he took the stage, Benioff hadn’t even rehearsed it before addressing 10,000 in-person attendees and more watching online.
Disclosure: I attended Dreamforce as a Salesforce guest, and the company covered my expenses. Salesforce in no way dictated the content of this post. These are my words.“This has been a transformational moment for me where, over the last few weeks, I realized that this is what customers have—this unbelievable, deep frustration around AI and a huge level of excitement. They hold it both in their hand. They’re very excited because they realize what the potential is…’I made this investment, I bought this, I licensed this, I have this, and I’m not totally getting the result I want,’ and I wasn’t totally in touch with that energy,” Benioff remarked.
‘We’re in a DIY Moment’
Salesforce doubled down on that sentiment throughout its formal introduction of its Agentforce platform. In one of his many analogies, Benioff made reference to Waymo, saying what people expect from AI is like taking that first ride in one of the autonomous vehicles. It’s that “a-ha” moment. That’s what companies want but aren’t receiving from AI vendors.
Another concern he sees is a lack of accessibility to development. Companies wishing to implement AI may often need the assistance of experts to help hook everything up and customize the solution so it operates as intended. “It is crazy that these people are feeling like, ‘I have to go hire somebody to do all this,’” Benioff quipped. Salesforce believes its counter approach with Agentforce is better because it’s a platform that works for “the average personnel.”
However, Benioff acknowledges results may vary, telling reporters that they might write stories about “the customer is going to be crying that it works, and it’s going to be very emotional,” or “they unleash their agent, and it completely screws up, and their whole job is gone.” It was here when Salesforce’s CEO expressed some concern as it relates to how the enterprise tech firm would capitalize on this so-called third wave of AI:
“I’m sure that there’s going to be good stories and bad stories,” he declared. “I’m sure that some of this is going to work, and some of it is going to go horribly wrong. I hope the horribly wrong stories are not as bad as I have them in my mind, as they could be because they could be horrible, but they also could be magical. And I’m not sure what’s going to happen. This is kind of a moment in my career where we are rolling the dice a little bit.”
Through that uncertainty, Benioff hoped at the end of the day, “we’re on the right side of history.”
“We realize we’re dealing with the most avant grade technology, the most exciting stuff that everybody wants to talk about and try out. But how many of us really have the ability to get our hands in the soil?” he said. “Usually, we have to rely on what everybody’s saying. How often do you have an actual customer in hand who said, ‘Yeah, I resolved 80 percent of all my customer service issues, and I increased my revenue by 20 percent? Oh, and employee satisfaction also went up by 30 percent because I’m resolving more issues for them. And I have ten stories because we’ve been in the generative AI world for three years?’”
“I think those stories are not quite as…prolific as they are intended to be, and I think that we’re about to show, and our job is…to remove the veil and say this is the right approach, a completely different approach,” Benioff went on to add.
End the AI Hypnosis
With the launch of Agentforce, Benioff wants to end the “hypnosis” surrounding AI created by AI vendors, including Microsoft. It’s where software buyers are convinced of the hype and marketing about the technology without clearly understanding its capabilities and limitations. He believes vendors have conjured up a sense of mystique and excitement around AI without necessarily delivering the real-world results that solve customer problems.
Instead, Salesforce’s leader challenges all AI vendors to “let the customer at it” to determine which provider has the best AI. According to Benioff: “Let them try it. Let them test the actual numbers, what works and what does not work, and then in front of as many customers as possible.” In other words, company customers should use a more transparent, evidence-based evaluation method instead of relying solely on a provider’s claims and marketing.
It’s hard to fathom vendors acquiescing to Benioff’s call. But the message wasn’t directed towards them anyway. It’s aimed at the software buyer, the developer, the IT manager, or whoever is responsible for AI in an organization. Salesforce is pushing hard to be a larger part of any technology decisions instead of Microsoft winning out simply because a company uses other parts of its technology stack.
Moving beyond DIY means more people can toil with and build AI-powered agents to help validate their fears or show how exciting developing these products can be. That’s been the pitch for Agentforce and an ability that doesn’t appear available or promoted within Microsoft’s Copilot.
Microsoft-OpenAI Who?
Salesforce’s CEO also criticized Microsoft and its Copilot tools, noting that some companies have found the OpenAI-powered bots to be “hit or miss.” During his keynote, Benioff even compared Copilot to the infamous Microsoft Clippy. Believing that Microsoft wasn’t adequately addressing enterprise challenges with AI, Benioff said this motivated Salesforce to push further and define the next step in the AI journey.
“We don’t see how that Copilot world is going to get us to the real vision of artificial intelligence, of augmentation of productivity, of better business results that we’ve been looking for,” he stated. “We just don’t see Copilot as that key step for our future.”
Benioff continued to poke fun at Salesforce’s competitor when asked how he felt about Microsoft, sarcastically saying, “I love them. They’re great, a very impressive company. They have tremendous acuity in their ability to run their business” before subtly referencing the European Union’s case against Microsoft involving Slack and the antitrust probe relating to Netscape.
“This is not the first year that we’ve seen a little jabby jab come out of [Marc Benioff],” Liz Miller, principal analyst with Constellation Research, tells me. “Last year, within a month after [Microsoft announces] Copilot as the big OpenAI implementation, [Benioff] took to the Dreamforce stage and said Salesforce Copilot. So, let’s be very honest: this is not the first time we’ve seen a jab. I think that when you are number two [software provider in the world], you will always look at number one, being like, ‘Okay, how do I do you better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently, more effectively, all of the things. He has long had Microsoft as that target, like, ‘I’m going to keep chasing your back because someday I’m going to get in front of you.’ I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Do I think it’s meant to be personal or malicious? No.”
Now that Salesforce’s agent-building platform is out in the wild, all eyes will be turned to Microsoft to see how the company responds.
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