2016
Salesforce was the other bidder for LinkedIn and filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft over that deal.
“the other bidder for LinkedIn was Salesforce Salesforce and then they filed an antitrust suit against, uh, Microsoft about it.”
Topic
Salesforce
91 facts from 39 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2020
Salesforce agreed to acquire Slack for a total purchase price of $27.7 billion, paid in cash and stock.
“$27.7 billion total purchase price works out to, I think 45, 86 a share in cash and stock.”
2020
The offer was a 55% premium to Slack's share price before the acquisition news leaked and an 85% premium to its price after its September earnings drop.
“that's a 55% premium to where Slack was trading before the news was leaked last week, 85% premium to the most recent Slack stock price crash after their, their earnings in September.”
2020
Salesforce is paying about 27.7 times Slack's next-twelve-months revenue.
“So it's a moderately sized business, like you're paying 27.7 times next 12 months revenue.”
2020
Packy McCormick argues Salesforce is a large acquirer that has avoided the congressional antitrust scrutiny faced by other big tech companies.
“Salesforce is kind of the biggest acquirer that didn't get dragged up in front of Congress.”
2020
Salesforce planned to use debt to help finance the Slack acquisition.
“So like Salesforce is taking out debt to finance this.”
2020
Clara Shih returned to Salesforce in late November or early December 2020 to lead the Service Cloud applications business.
“I came back to the company in late November, early December 2020. This was before there was a vaccine.”
2020
Before the pandemic, Salesforce offered Einstein bots as a chatbot and AI agent assist, but they were used mainly by sophisticated customers.
“we had Einstein bots as our chat bot solution, we'd had AI agent assist, but I'd say it was like more niche”
2020s
Levie says Box, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday are incumbents that could pivot successfully to agents in their existing categories.
“We're betting that we'll be one of those, and Salesforce is one, and ServiceNow is one, and Workday will be one for the its existing categories.”
2021
According to Clara Shih, Einstein AI adoption at Salesforce grew 700% from December 2020 to December 2021.
“we grew Einstein AI 700% in in adoption in those twelve months, right from from December 2020 to December 2021.”
2022
Codeium initially used Salesforce's CodeGen model to get its product running before training its own.
“And we originally, actually, to get a product up and running, we used Salesforce's CodeGen product.”
2023
Salesforce created the Salesforce AI CEO role to unify its AI work and avoid redundant stacks, with one model gateway, one Einstein trust layer and one data cloud.
“you know, that we had one model gateway, that we were building one Einstein trust layer to handle, you know, citations and data masking and grounding”
2023
Salesforce's in-house CodeGen model powers its developer GPT product, generating code snippets and test cases for Apex and Flow.
“we've initially launched with our own Salesforce research models. It's called code gen, and it's primarily used for our developer GPT product.”
2023
Marc Benioff said Salesforce spent about two years rewriting Tableau to integrate with its data cloud and agent layer.
“we rewrote it, and we wrote it, we wrote it over the last, uh, two years, and we rewrote it.”
2024
Salesforce offers partner foundation models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Cohere and Amazon.
“So we're we're partnered with with OpenAI, with Anthropic, Google, Cohere, and Amazon.”
2024
Heathrow Airport set up Salesforce service reply recommendations in ten minutes, according to Clara Shih.
“One of our customers, Heathrow Airport, they got up and running with service reply recommendations in ten minutes.”
2024
Salesforce built its retrieval-augmented generation pipeline inside its virtual private cloud, which it says matters for customers' trust boundary.
“we built them. rag, um, within our VPC, that's very important for our customers in terms of of the the trust boundary”
2024
Salesforce released Prompt Builder, Copilot and Copilot Studio, letting customers customize prompt templates and query data across Salesforce, Data Cloud and MuleSoft.
“we just um released our prompt builder and our copilot and copilot studio and so this is what this means is that customers now can take any of this the generative AI use cases”
2024
Salesforce lets customers fine-tune open source models on their Salesforce and Data Cloud data through an offering called Einstein Studio.
“Some customers come to us and they say they want to fine tune an open source model using the the data that they have in Salesforce and in Data Cloud.”
2024
Marc Benioff said Agentforce was announced in September, launched in October and used internally at Salesforce in November.
“we announced it in September, we launched it in October, we started using it ourself in November.”
2025
Marc Benioff said Salesforce expected about $41 billion in annual revenue and had about 75,000 employees.
“We'll do about $41 billion this year in revenue, and we have about 75,000 employees.”
2025
Marc Benioff said Salesforce had about 9,000 customer support agents.
“we have about 9,000 support agents at Salesforce.”
2025
Marc Benioff said Salesforce's AI agents completed about 380,000 customer conversations on its help site over ninety days.
“our agents completed about 380,000 conversations with our customers in the last ninety days.”
2025
Marc Benioff said the agents' accuracy and resolution rate was 84%.
“They did that at 84% accuracy and resolution rate.”
2025
Marc Benioff said Salesforce was expanding its customer organization by 10 to 20% in the year.
“I'm expanding my customer organization by ten to 20% this year, and I'm still focused on growing many functions.”
2025
Marc Benioff said Salesforce was holding engineering headcount flat because of productivity gains.
“in engineering. I've achieved more productivity, so I'm holding the headcount flat.”
2025
Marc Benioff said Tableau Next is a new version of Tableau built on Salesforce's data cloud and agentic layer.
“So now we have a new version of Tableau, Tableau Next, this incredible new platform that is built on our data cloud and our agentic layer.”
2025
Marc Benioff said the Veterans Administration uses a Salesforce platform for veteran support and healthcare.
“including like the Veterans Administration, which provides, you know, support and healthcare for our veterans on a Salesforce platform.”
2025
Phil Fersht says software vendors such as Salesforce, with Agentforce, and ServiceNow are pushing into agentic AI to take market share from services firms.
“You've got the big software companies like Salesforce in particular, with their agent force rollout and ServiceNow.”
2026
Tim Crawford says business processes span systems such as ServiceNow, Salesforce and SAP, each with its own governance layers that must be reconciled for agents.
“we might have some data in ServiceNow, we might have some data in Salesforce, we might have some data in SAP, and so each of those systems have their own governance layers.”
2026
Aaron Levie says he uses Salesforce about five times more than before by connecting its MCP server to Claude Cowork.
“I use Salesforce more today than at any point in history, maybe like five times more.”
2026
Bussmann says Salesforce announced it is still hiring graduates, even more than the previous year, particularly those with AI backgrounds.
“I think Salesforce announced that they are still hiring even more than last year.”
2026
Ed Sim says Salesforce changed its model about six months before the interview so agents can use its platform but pay per access.
“Salesforce actually changed their business model, uh, as well about six months ago where they're saying, hey, have at it. Agents have at my platform, you're just gonna have to pay per access, right?”
2026
swyx says Salesforce is embracing a strategy of offering APIs and MCPs so users plug its data into their own agents instead of using Salesforce's agents.
“it's interesting that Salesforce, you know, being the one of the system of record companies, the the biggest, probably, or the most well known, um, is embracing that path as as, like, uh, like, you will not use our agents, like, we will just provide APIs and MCPs for you to plug into”
Undated
Salesforce.com told Veeva Systems during the Pfizer competition that Veeva would never win the deal, but Veeva won it, according to Peter Gassner.
“There was a partner at the time, actually, Salesforce.com actually at the time said, oh, you know, send a note that Veeva will never win this deal.”
Undated
Salesforce Service Cloud added an incident data model in which one parent incident groups many related child customer cases so they can be handled together.
“we expanded our data model to capture what we call incidents, which are, you know, it's like a parent incident with many child cases, where we could address them all at once.”
Undated
Clara Shih says Salesforce can use records of customer outcomes, such as case resolution time and satisfaction scores, as feedback signals for AI.
“we're not just a database of customer data, we're actually database of customer outcomes.”
Undated
Clara Shih says Salesforce's customers divide roughly into thirds: large enterprise, mid-market and small and medium businesses.
“We have a third large enterprise, a third mid market, and we have a third SMBs.”
Undated
Salesforce Research built AI models for early detection and self-healing of Salesforce's own data centers.
“they've developed a bunch of AI models to to do early detection and kind of self healing of our, our systems, like our, our first party data centers.”
Undated
Slack is part of Salesforce, which Jackie Rocca says has a strong AI research team.
“We are actually part of Salesforce for folks who might not know, and Salesforce has an amazing AI research team as well.”
Undated
Taylor describes Quip, the company Salesforce acquired from him, as a product-led growth company in the mold of Slack and Atlassian.
“though I don't think the term had been coined yet, was a product led growth company, like Slack and Atlassian and others”
Undated
Taylor calls Salesforce founder Mark Benioff the greatest of all time in enterprise software and credits his focus on customer success.
“Mark Benioff is just a remarkable, the greatest of all time in enterprise software”
Undated
Howie Liu's first startup, Etacts, was acquired by Salesforce about one year after it started.
“my first company lasted exactly a year, um, almost to the day, from start to acquisition, right, by Salesforce.”
Undated
When a customer connects Salesforce, Rippling replicates much of its Salesforce data into its platform for analysis.
“when you plug in Salesforce, we're replicating a lot of the data out of your Salesforce instance”
Undated
Bret Taylor was chief technology officer at Facebook, co-CEO of Salesforce, and is now chair of OpenAI's board.
“He was also CTO at Facebook, now Meta, co-CEO at Salesforce, and now serves as chairperson at OpenAI”
Undated
Rana El Kaliouby says Bret Taylor started a company that was sold to Facebook and another that was sold to Salesforce, where he became co-CEO.
“You started and sold a company to Facebook, so you spent some time there. You started another company and sold that to Salesforce and became the co-CEO.”
Undated
Zhang says incumbents such as Salesforce are also pursuing AI customer support agents and will be alternatives buyers benchmark against.
“a lot of the old school companies, like Salesforce, are gonna be this is a very exciting space for them too.”
Undated
Aaron Levie says Box plans to connect its content agents to other systems such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft.
“So I want to connect it to Salesforce, I want to connect it to ServiceNow, I want to connect it to Microsoft.”
Undated
Aaron Levie says Salesforce, perhaps with a couple of other companies, invented the per-seat subscription model for software.
“Salesforce basically invented, you know, maybe with a couple other companies, basically invented the idea that you pay per seat on a subscription basis.”
Undated
Praveen Akkiraju says Salesforce launched its own agentic offering, called Agentforce.
“Salesforce, uh, la you know, launch their own sort of, uh, agentic, um, agentic workforce, agent force, as they call it”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce had developed its own AI for more than a decade through its Einstein platform.
“we've been aggressively developing and engineering our own AI solutions for more than a decade with our Einstein platform.”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce built Trailhead as a platform for reskilling and upskilling people for the AI era.
“We built a platform called Trailhead, it's available at Trailhead dot com, to help educate and to tune people up for this world, to reskill and to upskill their capabilities.”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce has been rebuilt to run on cloud infrastructure from Amazon, Alibaba and Google.
“We've been rebuilding Salesforce so that we run well, for example, in Amazon and Alibaba and Google”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce executives, including him, publish their personal business plans in Slack for transparency.
“At Salesforce, all of our executives publish their personal business plans in Slack. I publish mine so everyone can see what I'm doing.”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce dedicated 1% of its equity, profit and employee time to charity.
“we took 1% of our equity, our profit, our time and put it into a charity.”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce's giving has delivered more than $1 billion in grants.
“we've been able to deliver more than $1 billion in grants.”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce runs 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free on its service.
“We run 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free in our service”
Undated
Marc Benioff said Salesforce bought Slack partly because Slack was hitting innovation limits as an independent company.
“It's one reason we bought Slack. You know, Slack was kind of moving along, they were kind of hitting some ceilings in innovation themselves.”
Undated
Bob Safian says Salesforce's Mark Benioff told him his AI agents had not yet been used as widely as he hoped.
“I talked with Mark Benioff at Salesforce several months ago about his embrace of AI agents, but the use of his agents hasn't quite taken off the way he hoped.”
Undated
Bob Safian says Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff told him that use of Salesforce's AI agents had not taken off as hoped.
“I talked with Mark Benioff at Salesforce several months ago about his embrace of AI agents, but the use of his agents hasn't quite taken off the way he hoped.”
Undated
May Habib says Uber, Salesforce, Accenture and NVIDIA use Writer internally.
“customers like Uber and Salesforce and Accenture and NVIDIA are using Writer internally”
Undated
At the cybersecurity company Commvault, Writer's AI agents automatically pull RFP files from Salesforce as the start of a proposal workflow.
“AI agents from Writer were automatically pulling RFP files from Salesforce.”
Undated
A Glean finance employee used Glean to build a customer risk report drawing on Salesforce, shared Slack channels and product usage dashboards.
“look in Salesforce to get out the list of all the customers.”
Undated
Bret Taylor says he announced he was leaving Salesforce within days of ChatGPT's release.
“I happened to announce I was leaving Salesforce within a few days of ChatGPT coming out.”
Undated
Arvind Jain said a common Glean agent turns meeting recordings into action items and updates Salesforce notes automatically.
“you take these meeting recordings, you figure out, like, you know what you talked to the customer, uh, what were the action items? And then the agent goes, updates the notes, you know, in Salesforce with that.”
Undated
Tony Robbins says Marc Benioff attended several of his seminars before leaving Oracle to start Salesforce.
“He actually came to 4, I think, or 5 of my seminars originally in a row, same seminar.”
Undated
A letter from Mark Benioff, read by the host, says Salesforce has 80,000 employees and over $40 billion in annual revenue.
“Fast forward 26 years, and Salesforce now has 80,000 employees and generates over 40 billion in revenue annually.”
Undated
CJ Desai says Salesforce recently marked its 25th anniversary and that SaaS has existed for at least 25 years.
“I think Salesforce had their twenty-five years anniversary recently, and so s aas has been around for at least twenty-five years”
Undated
Allan Thygesen says DocuSign has had a twenty-year partnership with Salesforce and was among the first vendors on its App Exchange.
“I mean, we've had a twenty-year partnership with Salesforce, saying we were, I think, the first or second vendor on the App Exchange and deeply embedded in their flows.”
Undated
Todd McKinnon worked at Salesforce, where he managed a decent-sized team, before he started Okta.
“when I started Okta, you know, I'd worked at Salesforce and I had a, you know, decent-sized team there and felt like I was very decisive.”
Undated
Aaron Levie says forward-deployed engineers could come from vendors such as Box, Salesforce or Palantir, from systems integrators, or from new consulting firms.
“that Ford deployed engineer could come from a vendor like a Box or a Salesforce, or, um, or a Palantir, or it could come from a systems integrator or maybe a new consulting firm.”
Undated
Lassen says AIUC works with ElevenLabs, Fin and UiPath, and that Fin was acquired by Salesforce for 3.6 billion.
“companies like Eleven Labs, companies like Fin that just got acquired for 3.6 billion by Salesforce, companies like UiPath, who've set the standards within their categories.”
Undated
Debanjan Saha says line-of-business agents inside applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday make those applications more user-friendly through chat interfaces.
“These are agents which are in Salesforce, in ServiceNow, in Workday, a and in many ways, they are essentially making those application a lot more user-friendly”
Undated
Todd Vancil describes retrieval augmented generation (RAG) as an AI agent fetching data from sources such as Salesforce or airline passenger records to enrich its response.
“This is where I've done a request, and based upon that request, the LLM or an agent, an agent says, Hey, I want to augment what I am generating for you as a response with some kind of data retrieval.”
Undated
Daniel Whitenack said that on the day of IBM's drop Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Adobe fell by about 10, 9, 8 and 6 respectively, figures he found through an AI agent's research.
“Workday Workday slid down ten, Salesforce nine, ServiceNow eight, Adobe six, um, all, you know, uh, s similar dynamics going on.”
Undated
Ed Sim raises the problem of whether an agent with its own identity should hold the same standing access to Salesforce as a human user.
“And then also if my agent is actually doing work and maybe has its own identity, should that, uh, identity also have the same access, uh, to Salesforce”
Undated
Veritiv customer service staff assign cases to the AI agent in their CRM and exchange case comments with it.
“they will sign a case and then they will have case comments back and forth with the agent who's actually doing the work on their behalf.”
Undated
Paula Goldman is Salesforce's chief ethical and humane use officer and also advises the US government on AI policy.
“Paula Goldman, Salesforce's chief ethical and humane use officer. She also advises the US government on AI policies.”
Undated
Salesforce redeployed people who know its products into forward-deployed engineer roles that help customers use AI more powerfully.
“we had this huge move to forward-deployed engineers, for example”
Undated
Salesforce decided to hire a thousand new graduates and interns in a year when other companies were pulling back from early-career hiring.
“this is an amazing opportunity for us, and we're gonna hire a thousand new grads and interns this year”
Undated
Paula Goldman had three summer interns on her team, who showed her team better ways to use AI.
“I was fortunate enough to have three summer interns on my team.”
Undated
Salesforce's HR team uses AI to map tasks to skill sets across the company's organizations in order to redesign future roles.
“we have, like, this really cool division within our HR team that sits down with different organizations in our company and is actually using AI to map the tasks that get done to different skill sets”
Undated
Paula Goldman says most roles on her team, such as responsible AI architect, did not exist a couple of years ago.
“most of the roles on my team didn't exist a couple of years ago, like a responsible AI architect, for example.”
Undated
Paula Goldman says Salesforce's engineering department has been completely transformed by AI, which forces supporting functions such as her own to use AI too.
“our engineering department is completely transformed by AI, right?”
Undated
Paula Goldman says Salesforce customers report AI lets them follow up on thousands of inbound sales leads that humans could never reach.
“there are thousands of inbound leads that they could never get to”
Undated
Melissa Ramey is Director of AI Transformation at Salesforce.
“Today's guest is Melissa Ramey, Director of AI Transformation at Salesforce.”
Undated
The host stated that Melissa Ramey's views on the program do not represent Salesforce or its leadership.
“Just a quick note for our audience that the views expressed by Melissa on today's program do not reflect that of Salesforce or its leadership.”
Undated
Woodson Martin came to OutSystems after eighteen years at Salesforce.
“I came I came here after eighteen years at Salesforce.”
Undated
Dasdan described users' work data as spread across platforms such as Salesforce, Slack, email, Notion and Confluence.
“They have, let's say, sales data in Salesforce, they are using Slack, they have email, they have I don't know, Notion or Confluence”
Undated
Alex Lieberman argues that replacing software with in-house builds gets harder the further up market a company is.
“the more you move up market in business, the harder the proposition of ripping out and building from scratch gets.”
Undated
Alex Lieberman says replacing a system like Salesforce or SAP wrongly could cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which is why he does not see them as at risk.
“where if a company gets it wrong, ripping them out, you're talking about potentially hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.”
Episodes
- 19 May 2022Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner)1h 8m
- 2 Dec 2020Slack + Salesforce Emergency Pod with Packy McCormick of Not Boring1h 32m
- 15 Jan 2026Tony Robbins: No One Is Ready For What's Coming! Why The Next Decade Will Break People!2h 0m
- 21 Oct 2026AI for the Fortune 2000: How Tenex Builds an AI-Native SDLC — Alex Lieberman & CJ Hess43m
- 13 Oct 2026Connecting Data at Scale With AI: Dropbox's Ali Dasdan18m
- 2 Apr 2024Solving Real User Problems With Generative AI: Slack’s Jackie Rocca30m
- 10 Aug 2026Enterprise AI Biggest Opportunities: A Top VC's Take55m
- 21 Jul 2026AI Agents in Banking: UBS Former Chief Information Officer54m
- 15 Jun 2026Aaron Levie, Box CEO: Advice for CIOs on AI Agents53m
- 16 May 2026Enterprise AI: Shadow AI and Agentic Risk - CIO advice42m
- 17 Apr 2025Will AI Agents Replace Your Entire Workforce in 2025? | CXOTalk #87652m
- 12 Feb 2025An Advanced Look at AI Agents, Part 2 | #86853m
- 17 Sep 2026How AI Is Changing Talent, Not Just Tasks: Rethinking Where Human Judgment Matters Most31m
- 30 Mar 2026Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity1h 13m
- 2 Feb 2026Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts1h 10m
- 11 Sep 2025Sierra CEO Bret Taylor on why the AI bubble feels like the dotcom boom55m
- 14 Jan 2026How SaaS can survive the AI revolution, with Aaron Levie43m
- 30 Jul 2025How Writer is helping Fortune 500 companies become AI-forward35m
- 24 May 2025Rapid Response: The enterprise AI revolution is underway, with Box’s Aaron Levie36m
- 12 Mar 2025Why AI agents are the future of work, with Marc Benioff30m
- 20 Nov 2024How agentic AI will save customer service, with Bret Taylor38m
- 22 Jan 2026No Priors Live: Building Durable Software in the AI Age with MongoDB President & CEO CJ Desai36m
- 16 Jan 2025How AI Agents Are Transforming Customer Support, with Decagon’s Jesse Zhang30m
- 25 Sep 2024Using AI to evaluate employee performance with Rippling’s COO Matt MacInnis31m
- 3 Sep 2024Bret Taylor - The Agent Era - [Invest Like the Best, EP.386]1h 28m
- 20 May 2025The enterprise AI revolution is underway, with Box’s Aaron Levie40m
- 23 Dec 2025AI Enterprise - Databricks & Glean | BG2 Guest Interview45m
- 5 Aug 2025Arvind Jain on Building Glean and the Future of Enterprise AI43m
- 12 Sep 2024From No-Code to AI-Powered Apps with Airtable’s Howie Liu1h 12m
- 23 May 2024The Future of AI in Coding with Codeium CEO Varun Mohan54m
- 14 Mar 2024Transforming Data into Business Solutions with Salesforce AI CEO, Clara Shih58m
- 6 Oct 2026Stop Overpaying for AI Power You Don't Need - with Melissa Ramey of Salesforce29m
- 1 Sep 2026Where Agentic AI Pays Off in the B2B Back Office - with Chris Bradley of Veritiv20m
- 15 Jul 2026Preparing Enterprise Data for Safe AI Deployment - with Todd Vancil of Securiti AI32m
- 4 Jul 2026Reengineering Work with Intelligent Agents - with Debanjan Saha of DataRobot30m
- 7 Oct 2026Software That Never Breaks: OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin on Building Enterprise-Grade Apps at ...1h 10m
- 29 Jan 2025Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, on Box AI, Enterprise Enthusiasm, and the Evolution of SaaS50m
- 23 Jul 2026Surviving the New Economics of a Post-Agentic World35m
- 25 Jun 2026AIUC-1: Building trust in AI agents45m