Marc Benioff: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So what I imagine is you're trying to get people to even know Salesforce exists, to differentiate, to get the name out, and I feel like that's something a lot of founders struggle with. They don't really know how to get their name out, how to get people to pay attention. Just looking back at that success, I guess, just any lessons from what you did right to get the word "Salesforce" out to get people to pay attention at all to what you were doing? Well, it's a noisy world, Lenny, and you can see that. You can get on Twitter. It's like... I mean, there's a lot of noise, and how do you break through? We have that challenge today. We're introducing a huge new product called Agentforce. I've only been working on it for a couple months now. I introduced it at our Dreamforce Conference, and that was one way to break through, which was I took our conference and said, "It's just going to be about Agentforce." I'm trying to think about, "What are all the things I need to do to get my company 100% on Agentforce, my customers, everyone?" because I know I have a window of opportunity here. We're first, we're ahead. We have hundreds of customers on this now. We're on it, which is amazing. We've moved our whole help infrastructure to Agentforce. We're seeing incredible results. We've cut our human escalation from our support infrastructure down by 50%. We're resolving 83% of all of our inquiries robotically. It's incredible. So, now, how do I get that message out? How do I do it globally? How do I find my KNMS moment where I can come up with something that's viral and exciting? I'm trying lots of different things. I have Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson who are two friends of mine helping me. So they said, "We'll cut ads for you." They have not been together in an ad ever, and they haven't done anything together since True Detective. They're friends of mine. Again, very generous people to agree to do this. We've shot three ads so far. I put them out on Twitter to get feedback from folks. Is this a good idea? I am running this help.salesforce.com to show what we can do with it. Is that a good idea? I'm training all my salespeople in how to sell it. Is that a good idea? I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product, Copilot, that I have to position against and market against. Is that a good idea? Should I be marketing and positioning against them? I'm trying lots of things, and what I'm trying to do, Lenny, is what I recommend to all entrepreneurs. The message is really in the medium here, which is that I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. I don't know actually which one of those things is going to be the most important thing in launching this product, so I'm trying a lot of things with that old expression. I'm throwing everything against the wall. I'm looking at what's going to stick. Then, once I find that thing, I will then grow that as my strategy, and that is what I'm trying to do. I'm even expanding my distribution organization. I'm trying to hire an additional one to 2,000 account executives just to focus on Agentforce. w that as my strategy, and that is what I'm trying to do. I'm even expanding my distribution organization. I'm trying to hire an additional one to 2,000 account executives just to focus on Agentforce. So I'm trying to do everything I can to get that light switch to go on where I can show customers this is an incredible opportunity to lower your cost, to make things better, and to show that for the first time, we can have digital labor, that Salesforce isn't just managing your data, but we're a digital labor provider. So this is that moment.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.