The Boston Conference

I interviewed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and famed entertainer Will.i.am for an Imagination in Action event April 9-10. (Imagination in Action is an organization that I am a part of; we put on several events around AI per year.)

Here’s what I asked Benioff at the outset: “You started Salesforce in a San Francisco apartment, with a wild idea to reinvent enterprise software. What gave you the conviction, and how do you recognize a truly transformational opportunity?”

Here’s how Benioff responded, with the “origin story” of his first forays into business technology.

“I was in Hawaii, at home at my house, and I was just swimming with some dolphins,” he said. “And as the dolphins went by, they said to me, ‘listen, the cloud is coming.’ And I said, ‘let's go. We're going to go do the cloud.’”

Will.i.am weighed in on this.

“I had a life vest on,” he said of a recent joint maritime adventure. “So Marc’s like, ‘hey, well, everything is going to be OK, and in 10 seconds, a whale is going to appear.’ I’m like, ‘Whatever, Marc.’ And 10 seconds later, a whale appeared. So when he says he was talking to dolphins, I don't take that lightly, because he is connected to the oceans, and he does an awesome job helping clean up the oceans.”

May the Force be with You

Fast forward to today, and Salesforce has 83,000 employees, over $46 billion in revenue this year and more than 16 million customers on Slack.

“We’re stoked about the agentic future,” Benioff said of the new idea that AI entities will be able to manage diverse workflows and business systems. “It's happening fast, and it's happening now. So that's number one. That's the single most important thing, right? Nothing is more important to realize than: that the speed is really incredible. What we see is a level of productivity that we could not have anticipated.”

He also revealed that, to date, Salesforce has fielded millions of customer service inquiries without humans.

And then there’s Slackbot, a technology that can change how a company communicates internally.

“The agents go out, and they can do things to augment us, elevate us, take us to another level,” he said. “If you look over the last 27 years of Salesforce, probably somewhere between 20 and 100 million leads, there were a lot of people who tried to contact Salesforce. I didn't have the people to call them back. Now every single person is being called back with these agents.”

Education Around AI

Later in the discussion, Will.i.am mentioned how he teaches a course at Arizona State University, called “the agentic self,” which more fully explores the idea of using AI this way, as an extension of the human self or an assistant.

“We help onboard folks building personalized agents, configurable down to the agent's concerns, beliefs, perspectives and expressions,” he said. “They mint their own voice. They put it on their own GPU, that VR partnership with Nvidia.”

What do they learn?

“It's a very intuitive path, but through the course, we teach ethics and accountability and responsibility on the agents that they build,” Will.i.am said, “so that when students graduate, not only do they have the ability to create the jobs of tomorrow, if they are to get an enterprise or a corporate job, they show up to work with an agent that is certified and has a diploma, and ASU is providing a diploma and certification for the agent that students build during the agentic self course.”

Moving Things Forward

“We’re in an unusual time,” Benioff said. “It's an exciting time. And, you know, our job is to help to harness all this technology and make sure that our customers all have the technology to be better companies, more connected to their customers, more connected to their employees.”

When I asked him who is going to be dominating the AI world in five years, he started by acknowledging that no one really knows.

“Obviously, some companies are incredibly well positioned for this new reality,” Benioff said, also noting the impact of Chinese models and distillation. “Every day is an opportunity to bring everyone together.”

Bringing Value — With Values

“Values bring value,” Benioff said, in response to a later question about the fundamentals of leadership (yeah, I know, we got deep). “So what’s really important to you? What are your core values? What is it that you're going to really build your company on? At Salesforce, of course, it's trust, it's customer success, it's innovation to quality, it's sustainability.”

Benioff went over some of what Salesforce does, the company’s track record in living these values, for example: putting 1% of equity, profit and time into a foundation, with over 10 million hours of volunteerism with 65,000 nonprofits and NGOs, and the provision of over a billion dollars in grants.

“Technology is temporal,” he continued. “We know that. The technology at MIT that was there 20 years ago is irrelevant. It's not material to the conversation we're having. What's happening now is relevant. So technology is temporal. Values, relationships, you know, our interactions with each other, that is what's permanent.”

Remaining Open to Change

Benioff also described a mindset he has learned over the years, one that I think is useful to our young people at MIT. It’s the idea of using a “beginner’s mind” or a blank slate for broadening what you can imagine, in an age some would describe as abundant opportunity and others as chaos.

“In the beginner’s mind, you have every possibility,” Benioff said. “In the expert’s mind, few to none. You want to cultivate your beginner’s mind. Every day, when I wake up, I try to open my mind, meditate, have some mindfulness, try to see what’s possible — not what was, but what will be.”

I liked this nod to Goethian metamorphosis, and I’m going to include more of his comments on this, because again, I think it’s instructive.

“Where is the trust?” he asked, focusing, again, on that corporate principle. “If we're not focused on building trust and guardrails into the models, where are these models going? Those engineers, what are they doing? What kind of guardrail systems are they putting together?”

On what he desires for the new grads:

“I want them to dig deep inside themselves and get in touch with their passion. I want them to do what's really important to them. I want them to get back down to that first question, what do they really want? I don't want them to do what anybody else wants. I want them to do what they want to do. It's their life. We're at an incredible time. You are more powered and elevated than ever before with these next generation models. Use them to create the company you want.”

On meditation:

“We all have to go do our meditation. We all have to do our existential quest to find that inside yourself and then do it. Focus on it. Execute it. Don't second guess.”

On a personal legacy:

“Your business needs to be more than just yourself and your products. It needs to be your values and needs to be your contribution to society, and hopefully it's positive.”

This was most definitively one of my best interviews to come out of the April 9-10 conference. One more thing: at the end, I asked Will.i.am, who has graced us with his presence at IIA enough times to earn a Chia pet, about how AI impacts human creativity — whether AI is enhancing our creativity or sapping it.

“It all depends on your definition of creativity,” he said. If your definition of creativity is doing exactly what we did yesterday, AI is going to, you know, clobber that, because doing exactly what we did yesterday is not activating your full capacity and spectrum of the imagination. What AI is not doing is imagining. It's a regurgitation of the imagination. Dream up things that have not been dreamt, and use the tools of AI to materialize them faster, because going from ideation to materialization is daunting, time consuming. It takes a long time.”

That’s all for now.