For my first sit-down with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, I had to know one thing: is the framemogging intentional?
He tells me it’s not, but he also seems to enjoy the memes he creates every year from Dreamforce, the multi-day Salesforce bonanza that takes over San Francisco each September. At this year’s conference, he took over social media by towering beside Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Jensen Huang onstage.
Of course, Benioff has a lot more going on than generating memes. After a brutal, SaaSpocalypse-fueled drawdown, Salesforce’s stock price is up more than 20% in the last six months. Slack is “up into the right in a way that we haven’t really seen,” he tells me. We also discuss the resurgence of San Francisco, his role in the recent acquisition of Hugging Face, his ownership of TIME magazine, the new wealth being created by the upcoming IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, and what he thinks the AI industry can learn from the social media era.
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Benioff highlights
He says Salesforce bought Slack because it saw the future of AI agents coming. “Our premise was that it was going to be the agent for business,” he told me. When I questioned whether that was really the thinking six years ago, he said he still has the paper written by Salesforce’s chief futurist, Peter Schwartz. Benioff acknowledged paying a steep price but argued that Slack’s role inside companies like OpenAI and Anthropic has vindicated the deal: “It was going to trade once, and we felt that we needed to step up.”
Salesforce’s Anthropic bet started with being shut out of OpenAI. Benioff told me Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI prevented Salesforce from investing years ago, sending him toward rival model companies. Salesforce initially invested roughly $50 million in Anthropic in 2023, when its Series C was priced at a reported $4.1 billion pre-money valuation, and has since invested more than $300 million across multiple rounds. He predicts Salesforce could make tens of billions in the Anthropic IPO. That financial relationship is now deeply embedded in the products: their recent Claudeforce partnership makes Claude the default model in Slack, including Slackbot, and brings Salesforce sales workflows directly into Claude.
Benioff thinks the next big AI shift is an interface that changes around you. He pointed to my iPad during the conversation, noting that its icons and email list hadn’t changed. His prediction is that the interface will listen, adapt, and proactively surface useful information, even suggesting a follow-up question based on something he’d just said and my previous interviews. “That is not going to be true for very much longer,” he said of today’s static screens. He expects software to feel “live or living,” and thinks the coming interface change is the part of the AI story people aren’t yet appreciating.
ICYMI
Sources is a newsletter and podcast by Alex Heath about the AI race, featuring conversations with leading founders and technologists. Every week, Sources reaches the inboxes of thousands of decision-makers in tech, finance, policy, and media.
