I want to test your patience a little bit, talking about the elephant in the room, which is, of course, President Trump. You have been understandably supportive and optimistic of the new administration. But I wonder how you kind of rate the week one executive order. It's the tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, shutting federal DTI efforts, pardoning the January six protesters, ending subsidies. How are you evaluating things so far? Well, I think that, you know, we can really evaluate that the current administration and what's going to happen by what we saw with Trump, one, which is that a lot of the things at the beginning are not exactly where we're going to be in six months or a year. So, you know, I'm very positive. I'm just looking forward to seeing what's going to happen.
And, you know, it's it's a new day and it's an exciting moment. I mean, I, I can't to somehow get off my phone. It seems like there's another news story. I don't know how you're feeling, but I feel like every minute there's some new thing that I don't even know about. When you just told me, like, 20 things,
I don't even. And that is the Trump. What do you think about this? I don't know. Jesus like, Well, I have my phone back to me.
Well, I'll keep doing that. I don't know. I don't know if it was yesterday or today. Davos kind of messes with your perception of time, but Trump appeared with Sam Altman, Masa, Masayoshi Son and your mentor Larry Ellison, to announce Project Stargate. Tremendous branding there. And the number bandied about, I guess, was 500 billion. It's unclear whether that's real or not to build new data centers and sources of energy to support the next generation of AI and U.S.
competitiveness. How are you reading the I guess, the the practicalities of that, the alliance and the and the project? Well, I think the big news is that, you know, Openai is moving off of Microsoft. So you can see the real you know, Are you being facetious? No. You can see that this is a break with Microsoft. So Microsoft's not involved. This is the first time that Openai is moving into a non Microsoft data center.
This is really the result, I think, of Microsoft hiring Mustafa Suleyman and starting to build their own large language models, which I expect will compete with Openai very aggressively. And I think it's the end of the wow, this is the end of the open, a real break. And the alliance that was first forged almost put open on the map when Microsoft made a big investment really soared here last year even before Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman is an incredible computer scientist, as you know, is the lineage of Google inflection now Microsoft? Sam and Mustafa were not getting along well on panels that they were on here at Davos. You can go back and see that. I remember one specific panel that I was in and it was thought they were going to come to blows, but, you know, it didn't happen.
And so has Larry Ellison, an oracle, you think stepped in as as that as a technology partner or a source of funding for Openai I. I don't I can't speak to those specifics. But what I can tell you is that I think it's a big moment in the history of air that they're not running on a microsoft data center. And how does it impact, I guess, Microsoft's competitive competitiveness on air? Going forward, we'll talk about copilot and the like. But if you feel like, you know, because
of these developments. Satya. Microsoft are in an unfavorable strategic position. Well, I think as you know, Microsoft doesn't have today their own frontier model. So they rely on open air. And now open air is saying that they're going to another data center structure. So it's a big moment. Right.
And to just close the loop on Stargate, you know, part of this is obviously driven by national security concerns and the idea that, you know, that that it is vitally important for the U.S. to maintain this lead. I mean, do you share the concern and the urgency? And do you think China is close to a parity? Well, you have, what, six questions in there and they let you peel it apart one by one. I think that we're just seeing a incredible amount of investment in A.I. overall, which it's because it's really exciting to look at what's happening here at the conference I just showed you, you know, that Salesforce has run the information management for the World Economic Forum for more than a decade. So all of everything that's happening here is running on Salesforce. But and and we've used our Einstein platform here for years, but this is the year that we're using agent force.
So now you have an agent that's right front end of your app, probably define what that is. Okay. Well, what it what it is is you have the ability now to use an agent, a kind of almost like a digital worker to help you to kind of get your job done. So here I am. I have my app, I'm on my phone. I'm normally just bringing up my World Economic Forum app. I'm going through trying to find all my sessions. When is Brad speaking?
How do I know Brad? Can I contact Brad instead? Now I can just say to the agent, Hey, when is Brad speaking and let you contact him for me and help me make this happen? At Salesforce, we just deployed our agent force technology and helped out Salesforce.com, which is how we how we deliver help to our customers. 36,000 customers a week come to help talk Salesforce.com. If you had come there a month or so ago, about 10,000 of those customers have to move off and get support from human beings, and about 26,000 got resolved by our software. Now, with agent force, only 5000 are going after human beings. So our 9000 support agents have a little bit less to do because the software is able to resolve a lot of this on its own. And that's a very exciting moment that
A.I. and agents can kind of give us this incredible productivity that we couldn't have, whether we're trying to navigate the World Economic Forum in Davos or where Marc Benioff is trying to answer his customers support issues, agents are making a huge difference in our ability to be successful. I want to come back to that, but I just want to make sure we answered the previous question on kind of a parity between China and the U.S.. I don't think there is a parity today.
No. I think that the US has a definitive lead and I think most of the analysis and I think obviously you have a big shootout going on at the very top end of the frontier models between Google Open, AI and Anthropic. Salesforce is obviously an investor in Anthropic. We obviously have relationships with open AI as and also Google. The Google technology I think is amazing. Neil Ferguson just wrote a tremendous analysis of the three models and kind of said it appears that Google is a player. Now.
I think Gemini is more than a player. It's probably ahead. Mm hmm. Okay. And by the way, Dario preceded you on stage earlier this afternoon. He has an outstanding model and is doing a great job in this company. Okay, so back to agent force. You said
less things for your employees to do with agents, agent force, but does it also mean fewer employees? What are the ramifications of this kind of new age of a genetic models going to unsupervised do our tasks for us? No, no question. I mean, of course, in the history look, technology's always going getting lower cost and easier to use. There's not any, you know, horses out on the streets right now going out. And now we have cars now. And in the same way, I think we should just think about the analogy I just gave you, which is that. We have a lot less work for our support agents to do because we've deployed agent force at Salesforce so I can redeploy that resource into other parts of the company. That's very exciting for me.
I have plenty to do. So I can kind of say, okay, these folks can work on this now instead of being over here. Has it changed the arc of your hiring plans going forward? And what is the widespread deployment of this technology made for, you know, a full employment labor market? Well, that is really the the powerful thing. We're in a labor market where it's really hard to hire people. There aren't people to hire. I want to radically expand sales and service marketing and sales force because we are seeing a huge amount of demand in moving and deploying our new technologies. Finding those people incredibly
difficult that I have agents at my disposal is tremendous. So, look, I want an unlimited workforce. I think everybody does agent force agents. That's beginning of an unlimited workforce. I'll give you an example. We have a customer called Wiley. They're a bookseller in the U.S. You probably picked up some of their books when you're in college.
We know them well. You know them well. And, you know, they're they have this moment every year called back to school and they have to normally hire a lot of gig workers to go into sales or into service or whatever it is. This is a year they did not have to do it. There were one of our launch customers on agent force. They have the ability to just scale
their sales and service when they needed it and then bring it back down when that demand spike ended. And we have now, you know, lots of examples of that. So we've now released the code late October. We did about 200 deals in our third quarter, and our fourth quarter will see thousands of agent force deals.
And it's I've never seen anything go as fast at Salesforce as this. I've never been as excited about the technology industry as I am right now. So in the tech industry, we love a good old fashioned field. We used to have a lot of them like Larry and Bill sparring.
You know, Kendrick Lamar and Drake had had nothing on the tech industry. But recently, you know, you've been tweeting or posting on X as you describe agent force and drawing juxtapositions with Microsoft and co-pilot. Not to do more Microsoft bashing here, but I think you compared it to writing Clippy. Yeah, no, but I want you to because I don't know that I really fully got my brain around it. How the the agent force model is different than the copy.
I could make it very. So what is it? Well, first of all, you're right. Microsoft has disappointed, you know, a lot of customers with copilot. And the reason why is I'm not sure everybody agrees, but. Okay. Well, I mean, you can read the Gartner analysis. You can read a lot of the media, but I'm sure you're a big co-pilot user yourself. Is that right?
I try to moderate my. Oh, I see. So, you know, I don't want it. All right. But you got to like most people, you know, you're writing for. All right. Thank you.
Thank you for making my case. But anyway, the point of that is all copilot is is repackage chat CBT. So in a chart I just solve like the 20 most used apps currently on the internet. Like open I was very much at the top co-pilot was not on the list I just retweeted it actually so that when you look at that, why that is is because why is it it's not really offering me any value. So
agent force is really what I was meant to be, the ability to give a company, a user, a customer, really the value of artificial intelligence. That's why I was excited to bring it to the show, excited that Davos is deployed it and we can really show customers here. This is a really great opportunity. And an example, yesterday we were in a session with Royal Bank of Canada who just deployed it for their wealth management. Look, they are ability to scale and compete against the big U.S. banks when their wealth management is
augmented because they're using agent force. That's very exciting for them. They're their CEO. Dave Mackay is here. It was really a great a great moment to
hear, you know, what they're doing with this. So before you mentioned the abundant capital flowing into I you know, anthropic to even today there was news of another $101 billion from Google. Is there any case to be made that A.I. is over invested at this point? No, there's not. I would say that we are really at a point where everything is changing. I think the evidence like we just did a demo with your associate in the back here where I just took out my phone and we are demo in the World Economic Forum app, and if we were here a year ago, we'd be looking at a very similar app kind of going through.
What sessions are we going through? Who's coming to the conference? I need to contact this person, all the typical things. And instead I have this agent that I just can go right to and say, Hey, do all this for me. That level of productivity. That's why in the third quarter of last year, we saw productivity rise in the U.S. without any additional workers. That really hasn't happened in a while. There is a margin there that I think it it that is exactly what is going on. I think A.I. is kind of kicking in right now. I'm writing the business plan for my
next fiscal year, which starts February one. And this will be the third year in a row that I'm working with an AI to write my business plan for the year. So I am I have a colleague. I will write different parts of the plan and then I will talk to the A.I. and I will say, Hey, what do you think of this? How does this compare to this design your own lab? And we have our we have some great technology, and then I'll say, Hey, how does this how does this affect this competitor? How does it affect that competitor? And I have been shocked at how it's impacted me, that it has made me more productive, but also expands my own consciousness on what I should be doing and leading and moving forward. So I is definitely a part of to be a little bit more skeptical. And what I do are I didn't know that. How long do I know you before?
I never knew this for a while, but I'm so happy to know this about you. When I when I hear things like Larry, your former boss, Larry Ellison, saying today that there will be targeted vaccines for cancer using AI within 48 hours, I mean, it just feels like the exuberance is is I don't think he means in the next 48 hours. I think what he's saying is we understand 48 hours within digi. Okay, so what do you say?
Okay. So I've actually talked to him about what he's doing. It is pretty incredible. His vision. You know, his vision is that, you know,
there's these amazing kind of cancer tests that have kind of been developed like Grail and others where you could get a blood test. And it shows you if you have these fragments of cancer in your bloodstream and so forth, and then they go to try to find the cancer in this case. And I'm not going to describe it as beautifully as he did today, but because it's his his vision, his idea is that you're going be able to run that same test and then use a I to have much more affinity on what's really going on and then be able to use our MRI technology to develop a highly personalized vaccine for that cancer and eradicate it from your body. That is pretty extraordinary. Obviously, it hasn't happened yet, but the vision is awesome. And you know what?
I think we should be looking for innovation in the world, and it's exciting to see someone like Larry Ellison having a huge vision for cancer. He has invested lots of of his own money in cancer treatment and has centers in L.A. and in Oxford. And it's been very impressive to see what he's done. I want to hit a couple more topics before we are supplanted by a head of state. I think last year we talked about social
media and you sounded the alarm on misinformation and, you know, the lack of proper oversight. You've used some salty language. And in the last few months, we have seen a retreat on moderation. You know, what do you make of recent moves at Meta and the company formerly known as Twitter? And do you think it's dangerous? Well, I think, you know, my my thoughts on social media is really well known. But I think that, you know, we need to continue to look at some of the fundamental reshaping of, you know, Section 230.
I think if we are going to let these organizations go to every possible extreme, then they should be held accountable and liable for whatever the content is. And I think that when we look at Section 230, it wasn't written for this kind of moment, and especially with the age of AI, this is a time when that we have to go back and do that. And I hope that the Trump administration will evaluate that. They've made a number of comments along with along those lines.
And I think that that is appropriate to to get rid of that regulation so that these organizations can be held accountable. And I think you're a journalist, you're held accountable for it. You write and what you put on your platform.
So should they. You have come to Davos in years past and made some pretty strenuous one. One thing we said was, yes, positive. Well, we thought three and a half minutes and you've made some pretty strenuous laid out some some strenuous climate goals, I think are the words planting a trillion trees by 2020. I mean, how, in fact, today? Right now, actually, we're announcing that we're delivering the largest forest reserve in Earth's history in the Congo.
And president of the Congo is making the announcement part of the trillion tree announcement that we did five years ago. And we're almost at 200 billion trees. So we're not quite at a trillion, but we got to keep going. That will sequester 200 gigatons. I wanted to ask you. Okay. I'm glad you're excited about that.
I am excited. I love trees. We love trees. If I'm not sure you do based on that. But I just spent exactly about 5 seconds on trees. And a lot of Larry Ellison at the time think you like Larry Ellison more than tree is brown. Okay.
My question is, I'm just saying the innovation that's required to run these data centers, if the industry is sort of conveniently waving it away, talking about nuclear, if we've really accounted for the requirements that these companies are going to need as they scale up their operations. Yeah, Well, I think that that whole idea that energy still needs to get rationalized against what's happening with these data center demands. And some of the stuff that's happening, I think is kind of there's some kind of indiscriminant kind of development and people just using them as much as they can and so forth.
I think it's Salesforce. We continue to try to do our best to be a net zero company, including in the work of our I will deliver about 2 trillion transactions this week. You know, we've been doing that for about a decade. You mentioned Einstein, now agent force.
And even in the development of our own models and all of these things, we have not have these same exhaustive energy demands. And part of that is because of how we operate our own systems. But I think for everybody, there's probably an opportunity for another level of efficiency. And what is the solution? Is it is it nuclear? Is it is it fuel cells? Like how does the industry catch up to the energy use that will be required? I think that it's going to how are we going to get more energy in the world? I mean, I'm not really an energy expert. I'm obviously a huge bill on fusion. I think what Commonwealth Energy is doing is incredible. I'm an investor in the company and I hope that it's a huge success.
And then, yes, I also think these kind of smaller nuclear modular nuclear plants, I think there's a new one just going in Texas, for example, right now in other places. I mean, if you think about it, you know, we've run small nuclear for a long time. Everyone knows about nuclear submarines or nuclear aircraft carriers. Right. And that's basically what we're talking about. Why don't we just take one of those and just plug it into our grid? We just don't think that way. But that's all we're really talking
about, being able to just use the energy that we have in the world that's available to us and deliver in the clean way. I think obviously we have to think about the amount of carbon we're putting in the atmosphere. It's very significant not just from our emissions, but as you mentioned, the trees. And I hate to go back there because I know you have a detest for them, but you know, we used to have 6 trillion trees on the planet. Now we have less than 3 trillion. Every trillion trees is 200 gigatons of
carbon. So that's 600 gigatons of carbon that we emitted through deforestation. And connecting that back to industrialization, we've only emitted about 200 gigatons through all industrialization. So you can see deforestation remains a
major issue. Last question, you can give me a yes or no. You're the owner. I know we've probably exited the trees now once we're down trees. Well, no, this is actually I understand you're the owner of no one's going to accuse you of being the Lorax. You're the owner of Time magazine, a
tree based publication at a time where it's very uncomfortable for media owners. There were reports that you're going to sell. Are you are you going to there's no deal on the table four times. So if we do sign something, I will call you right away. Marc Benioff, thank you very much. Thank you.
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