Salesforce at Goldman Sachs Conference: AI-Driven Transformation

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) participated in the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025, outlining a strategic vision centered on AI integration and business transformation. CEO Marc Benioff discussed both the opportunities and challenges as Salesforce aims to enhance profitability and customer satisfaction through AI-driven solutions.

Key Takeaways

• Salesforce is transforming into an "agentic enterprise," integrating AI with human employees.
• The company aims to achieve $100 billion in revenue while maintaining strong cash flow and profitability.
• Salesforce is focusing on consumption-based models and agentic enterprise license agreements.
• AI integration is enhancing productivity and creating new opportunities, despite concerns about job displacement.
• Strategic acquisitions like Informatica are part of Salesforce’s AI strategy.

Financial Results

• Salesforce expects to deliver approximately $15 billion in cash flow.
• Profitability targets are set in the mid-30s, reflecting strong financial health.
• The company aims to re-accelerate top-line growth and return to double-digit growth rates.

Operational Updates

• Salesforce processed 1.5 million conversations using AI agents, supported by 4,000 human agents.
• CSAT scores for AI agents are comparable to those of human agents, indicating successful integration.
• Salesforce is running its operations with AI assistance, demonstrating a shift towards digital transformation.

Future Outlook

• Salesforce plans to scale AI across diverse customer segments using a three-layer architecture: application, data, and agentic layers.
• The company is investing in data strategy, including partnerships with Snowflake and Databricks, and developing its Data Cloud.
• Salesforce is committed to organic growth while remaining open to strategic acquisitions to enhance AI capabilities.

Q&A Highlights

• Benioff addressed concerns about AI potentially eliminating jobs, emphasizing the technology’s role in enhancing productivity and creating new opportunities.
• The company is focusing on providing a clear path for customers to adopt AI and become agentic enterprises.
• Customer success stories, such as those of Williams-Sonoma and Disney, highlight the impact of AI on improving accuracy, efficiency, and customer experience.

For the full transcript of the conference call, please refer to the detailed document below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Mark, this is, we are going to make it memorable. This is our last fireside chat, I’m told.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I’m just trying to get over this news that you just told me, and it’s upsetting.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: It’s been a good run.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I mean, you’re retiring?

Kash, Goldman Sachs: On the last year of your fiscal year. I timed it. Yeah.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I mean, it’s unbelievable. How long have you been now at Goldman Sachs?

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Five years.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Yeah, before that?

Kash, Goldman Sachs: A total of 31 years.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: 31 years. Congratulations.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Amazing career.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Thank you. Thank you. I didn’t mean to elicit claps.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: You said you just want more time in your life to do things.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Open page. The blank page. We don’t know yet.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Like getting a haircut or something.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Yeah. Not time for that. I want to, first of all, thank you for what you’ve done for the industry. You created the SaaS industry. You created the cloud. I still cannot get over the fact that when I first met you, it was the first Dreamforce, 2003, and you were doing $50 million in revenue. You had this audacious dream to build what we call now a SaaS company, a cloud company. You had the goal that you wanted to be as ubiquitous as Windows and as sticky as SAP. Here we are, I mean, 22, 23 years later. What is ahead for Marc Benioff? What is ahead for Salesforce? What does the company look like? This is the rate of the time of tumultuous change and all kinds of questions. What’s ahead for Marc?

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Yeah, I got a haircut, so I’m OK. First of all, congratulations, Kash. You’ve done an incredible service to our industry, our community, and to the company. We’re also grateful for everything that you’ve done. How many earnings calls?

Kash, Goldman Sachs: 135.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Yeah. It’s amazing. If you want to take it to the tippy top, I guess, when I get up every day, I’ve never been more excited about my job. I really think that right now we are at the kind of beginning of something that is going to be the biggest transformation in enterprise software that any of us have ever experienced. Already, at a high level, I’m excited about where Salesforce is, what we’ve become, where we are. I think at that point when we met, we were doing something like $50 million in sales or something crazy like that. You can do the math. You can look at the numbers from this quarter and see where we are and probably only spending a couple of years in the $40 billions and on our way into the $50 billions.

I don’t think when we had that conversation that we saw that kind of clear growth trajectory. That was a moment then. Now is a moment also. I think a year ago, if I look back when I was here talking with David, we were just at the beginning starting to talk about this kind of revelation that we had where we really saw that so many customers were doing so many things with AI and so excited, but they were still grappling with the value proposition. What are they doing? What is the outcome going to be? We saw that even manifest into this MIT study that appeared in the last month or two where so many customers have spent actually a lot of dough but haven’t completely got the outcome. A year ago, we were on our track.

We had just really, we were coming into this Dreamforce zone, if you remember the conversation. We knew what we wanted to create, but it was still months away from actually even getting the first initial round of code into the market. Now we’re about nine months after delivering the first version of Agentforce, which is in service. At that time, I wouldn’t look back and go, oh, this is that kind of clear revolution of what’s going to happen. Now I feel like I can take a few minutes and give you where I think things are going to go over the next few years. I think that for us, we’ve become our own best example.

That’s different because I think if we’re not doing this first and really showing what’s possible, we’re not going to be able to really motivate all of our customers to be able to achieve it. It’s not that we don’t have, you know, now have, you know, 12,000 customers or something like that already starting to implement Agentforce. It’s this idea that this is very different. A year ago, we had, I don’t know, 6,000 or 7,000 or 8,000 support agents, whatever it is. We had our support application and we’re, you know, managing our information. There was Einstein in there, as you know. We have all different levels of AI going on. This idea that we could somehow harness not just generative AI, but kind of a different way to kind of manifest the technology, this was, you know, an idea. Today, it’s not an idea.

Today, at Salesforce, in the last nine months, there have been 1.5 million conversations done by our support organization, by what’s now about 4,000 humans who are doing customer support. A million and a half conversations have been handled by digital AI agents. There’s an orchestrator that is orchestrating between the humans and the AI, keeping them all in sync. The AI cannot do everything, but it can do some things. The humans and the AI working together can achieve an incredible outcome. What’s cool is that the CSAT score of the AI agents and of the humans is about the same. That is also a huge surprise to me. When we look at kind of what we’ve traditionally called our Service Cloud, now in our mind, we say, no, this is actually agentic service. Sorry, what was our Service Cloud?

I’m going to get to our Sales Cloud in a second. It’s now agentic service. That idea that we have agentic service, where humans and AI are working together to deliver customer service, at Salesforce, that has been transformational. We had an all-hands call yesterday with our employees. We have 75,000 to 80,000 employees. Really explaining, number one, yeah, we’re building these products, but two, we’re also reshaping our company to be an agentic enterprise. We’re showing what we can build with the tools. We are going to be, number one, our own best practice. In the second example, which is another huge surprise, and I mean, I could keep going for a while, is sales. In the last 26 years, maybe there have been between 20 and 100 million people who have contacted Salesforce who we did not call back. We just didn’t call them back.

We didn’t have the people to do it. Now we have an agentic sales, and that is linked very tightly with our sales organization. We have about 15,000 salespeople, and then we have this agentic sales as well. The extension is incredible. This kind of Sales Cloud has evolved into agentic sales. In each one of these products that we look at, whether it’s sales or service or Field Service or Tableau or Slack, in each and every case, you can see that it’s not just about the traditional application working with humans, but then humans are working with agents as well. That is a big change for us. It’s not something I think that was going to happen so fast. Even in my home, I have an Airstream trailer outside.

That Airstream trailer is kind of hooked into my power supply in my home on a device made by one of our customers called Eaton. Eaton has a big field service organization. They come out and they repair it and so forth. They’ve used our Field Service product. You could see it and go on the App Store and get it. Now when that field service agent comes out, there’s an agent as part of the app. Not only is it kind of, here’s Marc Benioff, here’s his home, here’s the device, here’s what it’s connected to, this is the whole service history, but also the agent is able to work with him and to say, yes, here’s how to improve it, here’s how to make it better, all of those things.

In all of these cases, whether it’s sales or service or Field Service, and I can keep going, it’s humans and agents working together to create that customer success. That is what is really exciting. When we get to Dreamforce on October 14th, I hope that you’ll come.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: I will be there, of course.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: You’ll see, I think, just in about every single one of our products.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: I’ve been to every Dreamforce, including the first. I’ve been to every single Dreamforce since the first.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I am very grateful for that, by the way. Yeah. Hey, Trevor, would you bring me my phone for just one second? I’m just going to show you because one really amazing thing is if you just look at my phone, I’ll just show you, like, you know, I run my business on Slack. You know that. It’s great. We have a million customers on Slack. We have 150,000 or something companies on Salesforce. If I just come on here and I just want to kind of look at what’s going on on Slack, OK, you can see right here, if I just go to Slack and then I just go to Agentforce, here you can just see, here you can take it. You’ll see like there’s dozens of agents.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: That’s your forecast.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: You’re not going to see anything.

Don’t worry. I wouldn’t be handing it to you.

What you can do, though, is you could renew some customers. You could sell something. You could even get into the HR benefits. You can see how the agents are just running right inside Slack. That idea, again, now that I’m now working with the agents myself, you can see I have a CEO agent. I have a sales agent. If I go here, I have all my agents. I can get in. I can even get in here. I can operate every aspect of the business right from here. That idea, where we used to talk about I can run my business from my phone, now I’m kind of running it in partnership with these agents. On one part of my business over here, I’ve got service. I’ve got, yes, my 4,000, 5,000 service agents, but they’re working with my thousands of service agents as well.

I’ve got my Salesforce, but they’re working in partnership with the sales agents. I’m working with these agents. In every aspect of my business, this is now happening. That’s powerful. It’s making us more profitable, more successful, giving us higher customer satisfaction. I think we have clarity that for each one of our customers, and I just got off the road. I was on the road, as you know, for eight weeks in Europe, met with hundreds of customers. Each one has the opportunity to go through the same kind of organizational transformation that I’m going through, to be more profitable, to have better cash flow, to have higher customer success, to use technology in this way that’s going to automate me in this incredible new way. It’s going to require a lot of change management for those companies. Very early examples of the success of these customers is amazing.

That vision of an agentic enterprise, a vision of humans and agents working together across every line of business, this is what I believe will be true for our whole industry going forward.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: The future of the software industry has been called into question because of AI. As someone that, I mean, you started Salesforce in 1998, or was it ’98? Yeah. You worked at Oracle. You went through the whole client-server transition. When I met you, you explained to me what the web browser is going to do to the enterprise software industry. You were the first executive that I knew that was able to put a web browser front end on top of a drab user interface and make it look so pretty, right? When I look at AI, I feel like AI is the new UI. People tell me that AI is going to take over software. You don’t need applications anymore. I can custom build an AI that can do forecasting and planning and this and that. What do you think of that?

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I think that, you know, you can see how for customers, they’ve gotten very entranced by these ideas. Should they have their own models? Should they have this? Should they build this themselves? We call it, should they DIY their AI? One of our customers is a bank, not Goldman Sachs, but a large bank, one of the largest. I was talking to the CEO, and they’re like, listen, we have the PhDs. We have this. We’re doing this. We’re rolling our own. We’re going to make this work. I’m like, OK, but in your wealth management, we’re already working with them with Agentforce. Take a look at these results. When it actually got to that level, they could say, you know, in this case, this ability to use a platform that’s going to give you three key things.

First, it’s going to give you the applications that your humans need because at your bank, at my company, at every company reflected in this room, there’s a lot of employees who are going to be automated. Those automations can happen through various levels of applications. Maybe some of the user interfaces on those applications are changing. You can see even in the applications like I just posted on my X feed this weekend, Slack, for example, you know, this is still a very powerful application that I’m using every single day. I still need to direct message my employees. I still need to collaborate. I still need to, you know, look at all my analytics. I still need to understand, get access to all my customer records, as you said, my forecast. I’m working with agents. I’m working with the AI to achieve my success.

I’ve been doing this myself for quite a few years. To get it working actually part and parcel as part of the application, that is what’s really been so exciting to me. I think people got a little bit confused thinking like, oh, wow, this is so exciting. Does that mean we’re going to just disconnect from the rest of the organization? How are you going to manage all your sales folks or all your service professionals or yourself? You have to have a platform where humans and agents are going to work together.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: How do you see the, you also not only put the first person to put the web browser on top of enterprise software, but you also had the SaaS model, software as a service. Remember that one? Now people tell me that SaaS is kind of a flat industry. It’s all about consumption. How do you monetize? What does the business model of a Salesforce look like one year, two years, three years down the line? What do you see this consumption versus seats play, interplay in your day?

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I think that, you know, seats have a role. For example, even like I think you had Sarah speak earlier on ChatGPT. You can see that’s a seat-based model, right? You probably have like subscribed for $20 a month or $200 a month.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: The $20, not the $200.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: The seat-based model is a model that will continue in software. Consumption is also a model. For example, we have our Data Cloud that’s a consumption-based product. We have our Commerce Cloud that’s a consumption-based product. Our email marketing, you know, we do 11 trillion emails a year that we send out. That’s trillion with a T. That is all currently, for example, that’s all one-way conversations, right? We’re sending out these 11 trillion emails. Before the end of the year, and you’ll see this also at Dreamforce, that will transform that. At the end of each one of those emails is going to be an agent, right, that you’re going to be in conversation with. That, as a consumption model, will continue. You’ll have a combination of usage models, consumption models, transaction models, all of those things.

For a large company like Salesforce, we’re not a small company and we’re not a single product company. We’re going to have many different models that are going to work together. For our customers, especially our large customers, what they want now is they want, you know, when I’m working with them, they want an agentic enterprise license agreement. They want us to be able to come in and kind of give them one price with everything bundled together over, you know, three years. As we’re starting to deliver those or as they’re getting ready to go through their transformations, that’s what’s exciting to them. Those are obviously extremely large agreements. You saw that those extremely large agreements grew very dramatically in the quarter. I expect for this year, we’re going to see a lot of that.

The customers that I’m meeting with directly, in almost every single case, that CEO, they have a fever for transformation. They don’t have a trajectory. They haven’t really had, they know they can get more productivity from AI. They know they can have better KPIs. They know they can be more profitable. They know all these things. In many cases, they don’t know how to get from A to B. Our job is to be their trusted advisor and say, here’s where you are. Here is where we can get you. Oh, and we have examples of customers in your industry that we can show you. Let’s start with customer zero, us. We’ll look at our numbers and look at what we’ve been able to do on productivity, on all these things, and how this is how we’re going to get you there as well.

That is kind of the last model, which is they’re still going to want some kind of ability to kind of, you know, receive it all in one agreement.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Got it. You’ve got now 12,000 Agentforce customers. If this is to scale, how do you see the underlying technology changing to ensure that this foundational platform can support 15 times, 20 times? We’re talking about Thomas Kudrin was earlier here today. Practically every one of the AI natives is talking about 10x, 20x. To support that kind of growth in transactions, how do you scale this agent technology going forward? Just as you scaled the SaaS platform from you wanted to be a million users, you ended up being like 50, 60, 70 million.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I think.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: You went through a learning experience, right?

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: You know, I would say there is one part of this where we’re better lucky than smart. We were already going through, before really the LLM revolution, you know, kind of a data transformation of our products. We had decided that we would do, first of all, we would take all of our core applications, and we would start to, especially the ones that we bought, acquired over time, that we were ready, we were going to integrate, and we were going to create one application platform, one application layer. We were going to rewrite Tableau, we were going to rewrite MuleSoft, we were going to rewrite Commerce Cloud. We were going to do all this and bring it together so that it could have fluidity at the application layer.

We really had a vision that we could deliver that and deliver it at a level of speed and scale that would offer our customers a level of functionality like they’ve never had before. We wanted to add one more thing to that. We wanted to add a data layer. You know, we were early investors in Snowflake. You know that. I think we made.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: You’re the ones who are literally actually here.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Yeah, I mean, it was a great investment for us. I think our return was something like $1.5 billion or more, something like that. One of our best and from our venture portfolio, Databricks will be another one as well.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: I’m going to be here tomorrow.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Great. We’re very inspired by those data companies. As we looked at them, we’re like, you know, it’s even more powerful if we take our applications and we integrate them with a Data Cloud. We love those companies. We partner with those companies. We also want to have our own Data Cloud as well. We want our Data Cloud to federate easily to theirs. That means if you have a Snowflake or a Databricks or, like you mentioned, like a Google BigQuery or an Amazon Redshift or even now IBM mainframes and others, you can just, even Workday, you can just hit the button. Our Data Cloud, it’s as if the data is running in our system, but we can kind of shadow it and keep it running in their system if that’s necessary. It’s an activation of the data onto our Platform.

Now our applications and that whole application layer that I described with all those kind of applications, that is now able to read all that data. No one else has done that work. It was a year ago that we said, maybe there’s a third layer, an agentic layer at the top of that. If you had an application layer, a data layer, and an agentic layer, what would happen? We are writing all of that for scale, for multi-language, multi-currency. Maybe we’re one of the only software companies that is doing it that, you know, a significant amount of our customers are small businesses and medium businesses. Small businesses are like 0 to 200 employees. Medium businesses from 200 employees to a couple thousand employees. General, we call it general business from 2,000 employees to 5,000 employees. Or very, very large companies, the Fortune 100 companies.

We run so many of them, and the government, and then ISVs. Those are our six segments. Those three layers then need to scale across all six of those segments as well. That idea that those, and people ask me, for example, in our example with Disney, we’ve been able to achieve some incredible power with our agentic layer with Disney. One of the reasons why, because for a human doing Disney’s customer work, it’s very complicated. They’ve got such a great product line that they have so many options. You know, I’m going to go to the park. I’m going to make a reservation at these restaurants. Maybe I have these allergies. I’m going to make a hotel reservation. I’m going to get a special promotion.

By the time you get it all put together, you kind of need AI to kind of help you configure this, you know, product that Disney can offer you. Our AI has provided this kind of 93% accuracy. The reason it gets that high is because it has context. The context comes out of the data. If you don’t have the data, you’re not going to achieve that level of accuracy with the AI. That has been a tremendous shift for our customers that were able to apply the applications, the data, and the agentic layer all together. I’ll give you an example just right down the street, Williams-Sonoma based here in San Francisco. We did our first agent maybe six months ago. It’s a service agent. It’s a sales agent. It’s working with their customers. It’s been so successful, they’ve now deployed it for every one of their brands.

We want to be able to turn Williams-Sonoma into a complete agentic enterprise. All of the same examples for me, I want to be able to take them and every single one of our customers and say, here, now all your humans and agents are working together.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Marc, if we were to look at for investors that may have not completely bought into this, what are the indicators that they should be looking for that you will be sharing with us to help gauge that, OK, you know what? I’m confident that Salesforce is a real player in the agentic world, in a SaaS plus AI world or a seats plus consumption world.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: One of the things that’s been very important to me is that we’ve gone through in the last, you know, call it post-pandemic, is this complete financial transformation of the company. I think you now are going to deliver about $15 billion of cash flow. That’s been very exciting for us. Very high levels of profitability, kind of now very squarely in the mid-30s. We’re going to, you know, we have these kind of core financial metrics. We have a very strong traction on getting customers signed up on the agentic layer. The reason why that is, is this is a logical extension of our relationship with these customers. We have to take our 1 million Slack customers, 150,000 core Salesforce customers, and get that agentic layer running for all of them. I think that they’re very motivated to do that.

If we went back a year ago, I keep going back to the year ago example, we hadn’t used the word agent before. We hadn’t used the word agentic. I remember even when I was on Mad Money and I used the word agentic for the first time, which was, I think it was about nine months ago. Jim Cramer said, wait a minute, what is the word agentic? What does that mean? That’s where we were in the industry. It’s going very fast. That idea, yeah, we should just get every single one of our customers signed up for that. Yes, it’s going to be a certain amount of consumption out of our Data Cloud. It’s going to be a certain number of transactions, you know, with our agents. It’s going to be, you know, usage. It’s going to be also growing a lot of our seats as well.

We’re still growing so many of our seats in all of our core clouds.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: How does it happen? I thought AI was going to take away jobs in marketing. We’re not going to have marketing jobs. We’re not going to have customer support jobs, developer jobs. What is your view as someone that’s been through these cycles where tech automates, introduces productivity, and there’s this doomsday scenario. It’s going to take away jobs. It doesn’t happen. Could it be real this time?

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I’m trying to be that best practice myself, as I mentioned. You know, we have 75,000, 80,000 employees. They’re not all in the same seats that they were nine months ago. I have already radically reshaped the company. I have thousands of more salespeople, but I don’t necessarily have thousands of more headcount. I’ve moved people around. When I’m on that, I said all-hands call yesterday. My message to my employees also is, you know, it’s time for all of us to kind of get to another level in our capabilities in AI, in this core technology, because all of our roles are going to slightly shift, including mine. Some of the prognosis, some of the predictions that have been made in these areas, I think might be a little bit aggressive or may be made by people who don’t run the companies.

I don’t know exactly what they’re talking about. I know that some jobs will change, but not all jobs are going to change.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: I wanted to also ask you, you talked about the financial discipline. I would imagine that there is a desire to re-accelerate top-line growth rate, because there’s no better way to show improving trajectory than to show a better top-line growth rate. Is that possible for Salesforce?

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I think you’ve seen it, right, in the last couple of quarters that there is some acceleration happening. I expect it to, you know, continue. I don’t want to get too aggressive in my commentary, and I’m not giving guidance, because I just gave guidance. I expect, you know, and my goal is to move into, you know, back into the double-digit growth category, even as we’re kind of starting to enter into the 50s. Like I was saying, you know, we, as I said, we’re all able to do the math and put these things together. I believe that we’re going to go through a huge investment change in our industry. I think that coming out of the pandemic, you know, for a lot of software companies, including ours, a lot of software was sold in the pandemic.

As an example, we’ve more than doubled the size of our company since the pandemic. You know that. Now we’re getting close to tripling the size of our company since the pandemic. When we went through that, there was definitely an overage of software that happened in the pandemic because there was such a, you remember that it was like this kind of frenzy around it. There had to be an absorption, I think, into the customers. I think this was for most software companies, not just ours.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: We’re coming out of it, not just that we’ve kind of right-sized that. In fact, our management team just met a few hours ago to talk through this very point. The next piece is, and I think what we didn’t see is now we’re into that good flow with our customer. Now we want to take that customer and transform them. I want to be able to take every single one of those customers that I mentioned, whether it’s a Williams-Sonoma or a DirecTV or a Reddit or any of the customers that I talked about, you know, on the.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Or Brunello Cucinelli.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Brunello Cucinelli, every single one can benefit from this transformation. This is going to be an incredible opportunity for each and every one of them to go through this. When I was with, I mean, I’m not going to go through each and every customer name, but I was with a very large customer in Paris. They run a very large industrial company, you know, and it’s somebody I’ve worked with for more than a decade. They have a new CEO, and I’m working with that CEO. I just come walking through the examples that I’m walking through with you, but for their own business. As the new CEO, they have an incredible fire to do this transformation. It was crystal clear the benefit that it could bring them. I think in some cases, when we’re selling technology, it’s not as clear to the C-level exactly what the benefit is.

In this case, with an agent saying, we’re going to help you become an agentic enterprise. Here is exactly how we’re going to do it and how fast we’re going to do it. It’s very motivating. For me, as the CEO of a large company, it’s been very motivating. That’s where I’m like, oh, no. The reason my pipelines are fuller and richer than ever before is because agents are filling them right now in ways that before I never had that ability. Instead, I was leaving highly qualified leads from my competitors on the floor. I just didn’t have enough people to call back. I was helping fuel the industry. Now I’m calling every single person back. I can have a conversation with every single prospect. I can service every single customer instantly.

The customer, if they don’t want to be talking to an agent, can immediately escalate to a human because it’s seamlessly integrated between the application and the agent because it’s the same piece of code. It’s the same data set. It’s the same agentic layer. That is really unusual. I would say that a year ago, that was not as crystal clear to us as it is now that not only were we just going to deliver a product, but that we would transform ourselves and our customers while doing it.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: CEOs and founders like you that wake up every day thinking about this big transformation ahead and how you position the company for this new tech cycle, you guys are.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: It was kind of a strange process because I get excited about building the technology. Once I have the product and it’s kind of working, I like to get out there and work with the customers. This summer, when I went to Europe and I lived in Geneva and then I was in Amsterdam, I’m in Paris, I’m in London, I’m in all these various places working with these customers one-on-one, sitting just like we’re sitting now.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Is that a change for you? Because you don’t travel to see this many customers.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: No, I do. It’s something I’ve always done. It’s what I really love doing. I would say that each and every customer, you know, it’s kind of, they go to investor conferences just like this. They get, it doesn’t matter what industry they’re in. They could be in financial services. They could be industrial. They could be in tech. They could be in, you know, retail. They could be in any of these things. They get the first question they get, what is AI doing for you? What is your AI strategy? How are you going to create a better set of financial metrics for your business? How is generative AI going to change you? What does this technology mean for you? For a lot of them, they’ve experimented, they’ve tried, they’ve tinkered, they’ve done all these things, but they don’t have the clear answer.

I feel like, no, this is actually where you are going to get the value right now. That is what I think is very exciting. We always knew it was going to come aggressively in the sales and marketing area. This is a very clear step set of actions they can all take. I think that’s going to be a huge accelerator, you know, on our business and our ability to grow our company. Look, you know, because we’ve talked about it many times, you know, I’m going to $100 billion in revenue. I’m not going to do it irresponsibly. I’m doing it responsibly.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Organic $100 billion? Organic?

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: I think that organic is a very critical part of our business, and it always has been. There is always going to be an inorganic part of our business as well, but it has to be a responsible part. It has to be done with the right level of discipline. I think Informatica is probably our best practice. We’re buying it with the right level of the metrics, the right ideas. That Informatica acquisition really amplifies that AI foundation layer. That is that AI foundation layer that we have, which is our Data Cloud, MuleSoft, Informatica, and Tableau. That’s fueling and embedded into all of those apps. Nobody has done anything like that for the enterprise. That is really awesome. When we bought Informatica, we weren’t just willing to pay any price, whatever. It had to be the right level, right capability.

We’re still looking at how do we bring it in correctly into the company. Yes, inorganic has been a part of our business. Slack was a part of it. MuleSoft was a part of it. ExactTarget was a part of it. We had a lot of critical things. We’ve done more than 60 acquisitions. Now look at where we are from a financial metrics point of view. We should be able to bring those metrics forward as well. I think we still have some of the highest cash flow in the industry. I mean, I don’t know the numbers as well as you do, but I think $15 billion this year is pretty high in software. We’re looking at how do we get motivated to get back into double-digit growth, and then how do we get to that, our $100 billion goal?

Kash, Goldman Sachs: On that note, I wish you really well, my friend, and thanks for the last 23 years.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: We continue to work together. I just want to, I think for everyone in this room, I’ll just tell you how grateful we are for everything that you’ve done for us for the last 30 years.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Thank you for creating an industry.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce: Thank you very much.

Kash, Goldman Sachs: Thank you so much. Thank you.

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