Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says new AI products to be a 'revelation'

June 01, 2023
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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Wednesday that artificial intelligence will be and already is a boon for the cloud software company, especially when it comes to one of its recently acquired products, messaging application Slack.

"My dream is that all that data that's inside Slack, well, as we work on our own [large language model], that Slack is almost going to like wake up and become intelligent itself," Benioff told Cramer. "It's going to be an incredible revelation for our customers, that they've got intelligence by their side with Slack."

Slack announced earlier this month that it plans to add a whole host of generative AI features to the program, including "Slack GPT," which can summarize messages, take notes and even help improve message tone, among other things.

"It means that Slack is going to be my assistant, my partner, my copilot, it's helping me to run my company, just as Salesforce GPT is going to let me, be my copilot in running all of my customer relationships," Benioff continued.

He added that Salesforce's use of AI has already started to benefit its clients, from New York's Northwell Health hospital group to luxury retailer Gucci, which used Salesforce's AI products to enhance their call center employees' performance. Benioff stressed that Gucci's case shows that AI will enhance workers, not make them obsolete.

"We thought it's just going to make them much more productive in handling cases," Benioff said. "It actually transformed the call center agents into sales agents, into marketing agents, it gave them capabilities they did not have, it augmented them."

Salesforce reported a decent quarter on Wednesday after the market's close, with profits up 68% year to date by the market's close. First-quarter revenue was $8.25 billion, comfortably exceeding the $8.18 billion estimate.

Source: CNBC