And I wonder what you think about AI and regulation and what you would advocate for, how you want our politicians, our leaders to be thinking about it.

Yeah, I think I'm going to pivot back to what I said about CEOs need to make the right decisions.

And kind of we just had a good conversation about, all right, CEOs, are you going to put philanthropy and giving back into your culture? Now we have to kind of ask this question, okay, hey, CEOs, are you going to put responsibility into your culture? You know, that you really are trying to build the right kind of company, steer it with the right capability, as I said before, the right values.

I think that that is the question.

I think that when we get to regulatory conversations or regulatory changes, especially as they need to happen on a global basis, We have to look back over the last decade or more of social media.

So in social media, we can ask ourselves the question, how many kids have been hurt? How many countries have been hurt? Why is it taking us so long for there to be some kind of come to terms with aspect of social media? It's been a shock to me, and you're right.

I've been talking about this in nauseam for quite a long time because I believe that if you are a CEO and you're an entrepreneur, you have a responsibility to build a great company, to build great products, and to have a great impact.

Okay.

No, we don't.

We want AI to take care of these things and be held responsible and take care of these actions and be ethical.

And the heart of ethics is responsibility.

You know, Salesforce is a company that's been- Regarded by Ethisphere as one of the most, or the most ethical company in the world for 14 years.

That's very important to us.

But we really look at a light on our brethren here in San Francisco and all over the world and say, "We want you to be ethical in your actions and how you take care of your communities and the world," because this technology is very powerful.

Is it capable? Is it capable? Can it do that?

Jim, we're giving another $18 million today to our local San Francisco and Oakland public schools, $24 million, including Indianapolis and New York, where we have huge communities.

Is it gonna accelerate? Tell us how come you're able to accelerate the way we, uh, had hoped.

Jim, you know this SaaSpocalypse narrative has been such nonsense.

I mean, I've heard you say it yourself many times.

And here you can see, Jim, net new AOV growth is the strongest in four years.

Skeptics said seats would decline, Jim, and Agentforce sales and service and Slack all grew seats year-over-year.

Skeptics said customers are gonna leave, and attrition is near its lowest level ever.

And Jim, skeptics said pricing power would erode, and here we are with our A1E and A4X bundles.

A- and I think they're gonna be surprised that you and Robinhood have teamed up, which I know from the very beginning it could happen, but now it is a reality.

Why do I need Anthropic to help me query Salesforce?

Uh, Jim, this is really the best of both worlds.

This is the number one AI in the world, Anthropic, and the number one CRM, Salesforce, are coming together for the first time in an incredibly powerful way to build a new product called Claude Force.

And you're right, Jim, Claude Force gives you the ability to look at all of your Salesforce data, all of your data systems, all of your applications in what we call our semantic layers, all of our agents as well, and even building incredible new applications on top of this kind of stack.

This idea that you can use Claude Force to not only query your systems, but build applications dynamically, it's really a first in the industry, Jim.

We've never seen anything like it.

It's completely exciting.

Go ahead, Mark, yeah

You're being disrupted by these new AI platforms, and what it's doing is making it harder for you to get longer deals and good price increases." What do you say to that?

Well, Jim, I...

I mean, you can see we just had a record quarter.

It's kind of...

It's, it's really incredible, and when you see the number of million-dollar transactions that happened in the quarter, well, this was a...

This was our record level.

We've never seen this many large transactions happen.

Should I be worried about Tableau, which I think might be, a, a, more in the crosshairs of what we're talking about, or the commerce, uh, silo, which I always kinda liked, and, and I know is very important and near and dear to you?

Yeah.

And then number two is, look, the market is re-rated.

It's not a mystery.

Everybody knows.

You know, you guys have been talking about it for a while.

I've been living it.

So the market, software market's re-rated.

Concur.

open AI

and they're doing the Sora video thing.

And they're also doing ad networks and crazy stuff like that.

Then you had Gemini and they had the nano banana.

And then finally you've got Anthropos and they go, we don't know about those sex bots and we don't know about nano banana, but we're going to do coding agents.

And it turned out Anthropos was right.

And all of a sudden the rocket ship took off and now everybody's like, whoa, where did Anthropos go? Oh, whoa, they're way up there.

Marc Benioff, what are your thoughts on this brave new world?

This is something very new, very different.

Jim, you remember five years ago we bought Slack, and it was an incredible company, um, but it's become an even a better product.

And we've also tripled revenue, uh, during that five-year period.

We're anticipating about $3 billion in revenue this year with Slack.

Pretty incredible.

A- and I'll tell you why it's one of the fastest-growing products at Salesforce, Jim.

It's really this AI revolution.

Two decades

So this, what you're seeing, is a relief rally, and I will tell you that at a market multiple off of next year's numbers, 22 and change, it's still a reasonably priced tech stock in my opinion.

What about below market multiple for Nvidia that's expected to have 65% earnings and sales growth? By the way, GAAP is gonna equal adjusted.

You saw that announcement here today, which I think is interesting.

I think it's gonna put pressure on a lot of high growth, uh, tech stocks.

But you have a 74% gross margin.

I'm just saying, uh, you know, if we wanna compare the two, if we're pl-

[laughs]

In December they reported a good quarter too, and it went from $425 down to 325, $20.

I don't see a drop-off in the number of seats from the older business.

Oh, Jim, not only do we have more seats, we're intro- also introducing incredible new products.

You know that we have our incredible new ITSM product.

That's a seat-based product going after our friends at ServiceNow.

We have five amazing conversions now from ServiceNow to Salesforce, including companies you know, like Sunrun, Cornerstone, CoolSys, MyStone, Thames Valley Police, and others.

So more seats, seats.

But Jim, in every case, it's apps and agents.

Yes

Mm-hmm.

Or now, this week, we have an agent that is gonna qualify fifty thousand leads for our company, you know, which is our sales agent, that it's out there talking to our customers.

We even closed millions of dollars of business this week just through the agents themselves.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm....

I think every company's gonna grow because we have more to sell, and there's more excitement, and action, and energy.

And so this kind of s- s- counter-narrative of, "Oh, no, no, no, they don't understand, we're just..." Call that company who wrote that report-

It's

unfortunate.

because there's so much that you can do right now in AI.

Unfortunately, there's so many false narratives.

So I think because so many companies and pundits have said things that are not true, it kind of freezes certain customers and they don't know who to believe.

So that's why, like we were talking just before we went on, that Ramon is here, the CEO of Pepsi.

You know, it's a new generation.

What should companies be doing about this? Well, I

Earlier today, I sat down with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and asked him what he thinks is happening here in the software space in the market.

Just look at our results from the third quarter.

It was spectacular.

I mean, it's the best quarter we've ever had in our careers.

Every single thing outperformed the revenue growth, profitability, cash flow.

And we're not talking like low numbers.

We're talking we delivered over 34% margins.

We

Mm-hmm

... we're gonna see one emerge next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, called Eva.

And every cust- company has an agent to work with their customers to make them more successful, and when we deploy those agents, we have a tremendous, uh, architecture to create the guardrails to help prevent crazy things happening.

You know, we don't want-- you know, we've [laughing] seen this, where customers try to come along and have kinda cybersex experience, you know, with these agents on these websites.

Yeah.

Our biggest.

But guess what? The value that it's provided now, it's, you know, it's not a sub-billion dollar company like when we bought it, it's a multi-billion dollar company.

I think it's, like, almost three billion dollars or more.

Is there something that can come out that would make it so all of these people and companies we just mentioned would say, I don't need agent force, this one's much better? Or do you have something like their data, for instance, that would make it so it would be foolish for them to move?

Jim, what makes AI powerful for the enterprise? It's a combination of a few things.

It is, of course, a killer app like Slack or a sales product or service product.

You've got to have the killer app.

Then you have to have the data, the relevant customer data.

I showed that to you because I showed you how agent force prepared me for this call.

Amazing.

I thought it was funny.

You're a master.

You're too busy.

You're a master.

No. No.

I understand you are not Metallica fans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Of course.

everything that she's done is about personalization

at a level that no one else can do.

Every single viewer.

Every single person here can go to the Williams-Sonoma website and look at how it has changed.

You're getting ready now for Thanksgiving, and you want to learn how to make your stuffing.

You want to make sure you've got your turkey plate.

You want to make sure you've got the right placemats and the napkins.

That's why I thought today was important because the smartest people do

into becoming an agentic enterprise.

The idea that software is becoming apps and agents working together to make customers more successful is something that we're seeing in every business, but it's really started in our own business.

And we've been talking about that for about nine months now with you that You can see that on help.salesforce.com has now completed about 1.5 million conversations between our agents and our customers.

And at the same time, our customer support agents, we have thousands of them.

Well, they also completed about one and a half million customer service conversations.

And yet the CSAT scores were about the same.

So now we can really see, especially through this kind of orchestration, that it's humans and agents working together to solving these customers' needs.

Well,

Do you feel the pressure to enter this talent buying frenzy in a way that we're seeing other large incumbents?

No, and we're not.

And I'll say that, you know, we're very focused on really defining what is the next generation of the enterprise.

Tactics must dictate strategy over time in enterprise software.

I'll just say, like, the first thing that we've been talking about now for only about eight or nine months is that we have help.salesforce.com. And help.salesforce.com is our agentic layer around our support.

And this agentic service means that there is an omnichannel supervisor that is paying attention between my human support agents and my digital agents.

And to that point, I've been able to reduce the number of human agents I have in support from about 9,000 to about 5,000.

Do you think that's fair? And how do you think that changes over the next year?

What sparked the entrepreneur in you?

I don't know what sparked the entrepreneur because certainly my family was entrepreneurial in the Benioff department stores.

On the other side of my family, my grandfather was a supervisor and worked right there in City Hall.

And he also was an attorney at 690 Market Street right there.

And we used to walk right back and forth there and he was doing civic leadership and my father was a retailer selling clothing.

So it was two different worlds.

And then what happened was, I was just 15 years old, I was cleaning jewelry cases not so far away from here in a jewelry store, doing a lot of very hard work, like cleaning the floors, I remember it fairly well, polishing the cases, and I walked across the street to a Radio Shack store, which doesn't really exist anymore, and I found a computer.

Is it half that in the future?

What gives you the confidence to do that?

Brian, everything went well for us this quarter.

We had bookings go well, revenue went well, and currency went well, and we're raising our guidance by $400 million.

Brian, listen to this.

41.3 billion is our guidance for Salesforce for the year.

So it's pretty incredible what's happening here.

What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes.

And this is just a great transaction for our company.

Am I right?

Oh, Jim, you really understand what's going on with Salesforce.

We have so many exciting things happening, especially with AgentForce.

As you know, every company can now transform themselves with AI.

I mean, this is really what AI was meant to be.

And you look at a huge deal in the quarter was with Pepsi.

Now, Jim, you know Pepsi very well and their CEO, Ramon.

Where are we as a country, as you see, because you have a better barometer than everybody.

Uh, I'm curious, is it a new d- dawn in San Francisco, or how do you, how do you rate the mayor? How, how different do you think it is? What, what's gonna be-

I've known the mayor for a long time, and, uh, I'm excited.

Look, we need a change.

Everybody knows that.

Look, I'm always an optimistic person.

San Francisco has so many great things about it.

I could go through it in detail.

So, this is a shift.

You wouldn't expect it, right? Any things you've seen that are unexpected,

I think some of the things that I've seen that are unexpected are also expected.

And I think like with, and I like talking about some of these customer stories.

Yeah.

The Singapore Airlines story, the Salesforce story, this idea that we're doing, already done a half a million conversations.

As we kind of head to Dreamforce, I'm sure that we'll get into the millions.

Yep.

I'm

How does this vision of agentic AI and agent force specifically fit into this? And in particular, what's the framework of these AI agents? Are they assistive? Are they autonomous? How do you think about all of that?

Well, there's really about three things that are going on here for us.

One is, look, we're just a lot more productive and efficient as a company.

So while we have 9,000 support agents, when we finish this fiscal year, we'll probably have less than that because we need less because our agents are able to do so much more.

So one thing, it's about productivity and efficiency.

And then two, those human agents are way more augmented.

So when those customers who are kind of hitting the upper bounds of AI have to get pivoted over to to a human, you know, our service cloud screen comes up and it's a seamless integration between the two and they can see all of the conversations that you've had.

You actually said that probably means that you will need a lot less human agents in the future, right? So what happens to all these people who are no longer needed in these jobs? Like how is Salesforce thinking about this?