Salesforce is on fire today, a well deserved rally from the non-sense that was SaaSpocalypse. Below are our favorite quotes from marc Benioff about Salesforce and AI. The first is our favorite.
SaaSpocalypse is over. “Skeptics said seats would decline — Agentforce sales, service, and Slack all grew year-over-year. Skeptics said customers would leave — attrition is near its lowest level ever. Skeptics said pricing power would erode — A1E and A4X bookings more than doubled quarter-over-quarter. Skeptics said contract length would shrink — terms improved across all segments. Skeptics said agents accessing our system would kill apps — usage surged sixfold. Skeptics said frontier models would eliminate the need for CRM — instead, they depend on it. Nine of the top 10 AI companies use Salesforce and Slack. Their spend is up 435% year-over-year.”
AI is so much more valuable in conjunction with software. “This is really the best of both worlds. This is the number one AI in the world, Anthropic, and the number one CRM, Salesforce, coming together for the first time in an incredibly powerful way to build a new product called Claudeforce. It’s really a first in the industry. We’ve never seen anything like it. I think that this is the way all enterprise systems are going to run in the future.”
AI unlocks value in incumbent software. “Customers have put hundreds of billions of dollars into Salesforce. There is a huge amount of value that can be unleashed through this combination. When you take Cowork and put it right on top of Salesforce, it brings the data, the applications, the semantics, the agents themselves, and builds complete applications — a total user interface — to let you get all the value out of Salesforce that has been trapped.”
Enterprise class customers cannot depend on AI guesses. “Models are probabilistic systems. They are non-deterministic systems. But our system — those four layers of data, apps and semantics, agents, and interfaces — those are deterministic systems. When you put those two things together, that is a level of value we have never seen before.”
Customers get actual ROI with software and AI together. “The Secretary of the Army took me aside and said he finished recruiting four months early because he was able to use not only the power of all of his human agents, but AI agents as well. That was the Army being all they could be.”….. “Uber for Business. They’ve got 30 onboarding specialists and a mountain of inbound leads nobody was ever going to reach. Now, 6 weeks to launch, within 2 weeks, 60% more leads and converting. This is that power.”
Software and AI together drive far more value. “This combination is a way to gain something that’s one plus one equals three, something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. My chief commercial officer asked, ‘What are the biggest accounts that Anthropic is trying to close now? What are the risks of each one?’ All the data comes from Salesforce. The conversation comes through Claude. You can see how these two things can be more than the sum of their parts.”