Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down Marc Benioff’s bold vision for AI-driven digital labor and its impact on business operations.
Highlights
00:13 — My conversation with Marc Benioff focused on things like how do agents tie in with applications? In a world that now has access to unlimited digital labor, how do CEOs think about organizational structure? What’s possible? How do you set a culture that sees AI as an opportunity for growth and capability, rather than just a tool for cutting costs?
02:30 — Benioff mentions that there will be some rebalancing. He talked about how Salesforce now has thousands of paying customers for Agentforce, and he said many were able to deploy and get those agents fully up and running within just two months since its release. He also talked about digital labor and how it will help companies grow by giving them access to new opportunities.
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03:10 — He said Salesforce has reached $38 billion in revenue. “We’ve got multiple billion-dollar TAMs (Total Addressable Markets) across our different products — Slack, Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, Cloud Analytics.“ He argued that digital labor results in a trillion-dollar TAM, and CEOs must now rethink their approach.
03:50 — Benioff emphasized that the biggest winners in this AI-driven transformation will not necessarily be tech companies, but rather the businesses that buy and implement this agentic technology. He argued that the companies closest to the data will be the biggest winners. And he promised that with what Salesforce has in store, “Our customers will be thrilled out of their minds.“
04:20 — Not so long ago, technology sometimes drove customers out of their minds. So it’s great to see this shift, where new technology is being designed to thrill rather than frustrate. Benioff said, “Our job is to make AI as simple as possible for our customers to consume—so that they not only get the results they need but are genuinely excited by it.”
