The 1,000-plus customers that have put Salesforce AI agents into production in just the past three months are developing capabilities “they’ve never seen before” and can expect unprecedented business outcomes that will “thrill them out of their minds,” according to CEO Marc Benioff.
Now, that’s a pretty fancy forecast for a CEO to make, even one as visionary as Benioff and who’s achieved what Benioff’s achieved.
But across every moment of our recent 25-minute conversation for the concluding episode in the Cloud Wars CEO Outlook 2025 series, Benioff was relentless in expressing that buoyant optimism and of what the AI-powered future will hold.
And agentic AI, he said, will be the transcendent animating force behind a wave of disruption that will radically alter how businesses operate, how businesses innovate, and how businesses dominate.
“I’ve never been more excited about technology — this is just an incredible moment in time,” Benioff said. (You can watch my full interview with Benioff here.)
“We are in an opportunity for all of our customers to connect with their customers in this incredible new way that we call agentics or agents. But we’re witnessing something I think, that we’ve only seen in the movies, and we’re bringing this into our businesses to create better businesses that are going to operate at much lower costs and that are going to be creating much better customer relationships. And all of our KPIs for our businesses are going to be better, and this is what technology is all about. And yeah, that’s why I’m so excited.”
While that excitement is certainly centered on helping customers do things they could never do before and helping them create bold new futures, Benioff also described how he and Salesforce are experiencing the AI Revolution first-hand, which he said has provided a series of high-impact lessons. And one of those lessons, he said, is that while Salesforce’s software-engineering in 2025 will be more ambitious and wide-ranging then ever before, the company will not be adding more developers — instead, Salesforce will meet that new challenge with what Benioff calls digital labor.
“We’re just about to go into a whole new area and the way to think about this is in terms of the many TAMs [Total Addressable Markets] that we have,” Benioff said, noting that the company has 75,000 employees and will do about $38 billion in the fiscal year that ends Jan. 31 (tomorrow).
“So that’s all built on multiple billion-dollar TAMs for products that we have like Slack or Sales or Service or Marketing or Commerce or analytics. And if you add that all up, it’s in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the total addressable market,” Benioff said.
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Digital Labor: A ‘Multi-Trillion-Dollar TAM’
“But when we think about the new world that we’re all going into together, which is the world of digital labor, well, that’s a multi-trillion-dollar TAM. It’s the idea that we’re going to provide not only the ability for our customers to manage their data, which has been our primary focus for the last 25 years, but now we’re creating digital workers, digital labor, the idea that we can offer them the ability to do new things with their business,” he said.
In our conversation, Benioff described how Salesforce’s Agentforce now operates the company’s support business at help.salesforce.com and has dramatically shifted what happens with the 36,000 calls that the company’s 9,000 support people receive every week:
- FROM: 26,000 handled by AI agents, with 10,000 getting bounced to humans;
- TO: 31,000 handled by AI agents, with only 5,000 getting bounced to humans.
As a consequence, Benioff said, Salesforce is planning to “rebalance” its support workforce by shifting about 2,000 of those 9,000 support professionals to other positions. At the same time, the rise of digital labor is affecting the company’s development operations as well, which could serve as a model for customers to evaluate and perhaps emulate.
In our conversation, I said that I suspect that not too many executives have experience with planning for and operating in trillion-dollar TAMs.
“Right? Well, I’m one of them,” Benioff replied with a smile.
“I have no experience in that area myself, but we’re all going to have a lot of experience in that area soon so we’ll need to drag each other kicking and screaming into that because we’re all going to go into this new area together. I’m in it now with my company, and we’ll deliver sales agents and marketing agents and HR agents for ourselves, our own company, and by doing that we’ll motivate our customers.
“We’ve already sold this technology to thousands of customers, and we’ve seen now robust deployments of these agents,” Benioff said, “only went into production the fourth week of October 2024.”
Not Hiring Developers in 2025
Part of the wrenching mindset-adjustment to which Benioff referred involves how AI and agents are overhauling our perspectives on what’s required to develop software.
“It may not be the right thing to learn how to code anymore,” Benioff said, “because at Salesforce we’re not going to hire any more engineers this year. “Our head of engineering came in and said, ‘Hey, we’ve doubled our engineering staff in the last five years since the pandemic, and it’s amazing, with tens of thousands of engineers. But let’s look at that: Now we’re like, whoa, we got 30% more productivity this year by itself!’
- “So how do we deploy that capability — how can we make that happen?” Benioff said. “We need to look at questions like these:
- “Where are the jobs today?
- “Where are things going?
- “How do these things make us better?
- “Where is our company going to get stronger?
- “Where are the jobs going to be?”
Not Buying the Microsoft Approach
Benioff went on to share several other intriguing perspectives about the coming year — the vital significance of data, how AI can “make humans more human,” and the unfolding interplay between apps and agents, which has sparked a lot of confusion among customers because the leading apps vendors — Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Workday, and Microsoft — have adopted differing strategies about the ways in which apps and agents will or will not work with each other. I urge you to check out the full video interview for Benioff’s perspectives on that.
And in particular, I think you’ll enjoy Benioff’s perspectives on the different approach around agents that Salesforce is taking versus what Microsoft is doing. I urge you to watch it so you can see and hear it directly from Benioff, but here’s a quick sample:
I think that you’re still going to have databases and app servers and applications and workflow, and that that AI is going to require all of that, and you can see that in how the AI is delivered today. And today, Salesforce is delivering the highest-quality enterprise AI on the planet. We’re happy to do benchmarks against anybody to prove that, and I think that our model and our technology and our capability will prove out, especially over the next 12 months where you just said what I believe is true, that we’ll have thousands and thousands of companies who will be deploying, I think, up to a billion agents. And we will be the absolute leader in agentic technology for the enterprise.
Final Thought
In the agentic world, Benioff said, it will be the customers that “are closest to their data that are going to do the best. And the 230 petabytes of data that we manage for our customers is directly accessible to us, and we’re going to deliver capabilities to our customers that they’ve never seen before. And they’re going to be thrilled out of their minds.”
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