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 examine Marc Benioff’s argument that AI isn’t killing enterprise applications, it’s reinventing them.
Highlights
00:18 — Marc Benioff, over the years, on every earnings call, he’s fired up. He says that this is the most excited I’ve ever been. I’ve never been more optimistic. But I think this time he really, really means it. And one of the reasons behind my belief in that is that Benioff said that there are lots and lots of customers who’ve spent lots of money with Salesforce over time.
01:02 — So the theme that Benioff kept hitting on in his discussion about CloudForce and this partnership with Anthropic was there is incredibly high-value data and semantics and other capabilities locked inside Salesforce systems, and it’s the first time he’s ever said something like that: that Salesforce itself hasn’t been able to unlock that, unleash that over time.
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01:55 — And he said, “When we showed them CloudForce,” he said, “the executive committee’s jaws just dropped as they saw what was possible here, how this could quickly spin up new types of applications.” They weren’t going to have to hire lots of new people to unlock this value, but that it could be done, you know, very quickly and precisely.
02:53 — He said applications are not dead. He said they’re just being reinvented. They’re being upgraded in some ways with new, new AI capabilities. So he said this, this idea that businesses have perhaps wasted or squandered investments in applications and all that’s going to go by the board now with AI coming up, he said that’s absolutely nuts.
04:50 — But either way, I think it’s going to change the face of what I’m going to call, accurately or not, the enterprise app space. People are going to have to react to this and see: How do we pair up AI and applications and data in ways that provide new and rising value for customers?
