The CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff on the reasons for which AI agents do not mean the end of the white necklace

Benioff: I look at each function and I ask: How to become an agent company?

Support is an excellent example. We have now made more than a million conversations between customers and agents, and at the same time, there have been about a million conversations between humans and customers. This only lasts for nine to nine months, and we have reduced our support cost by 17% so far.

The second piece is sales. We have so many tracks that we cannot follow them all. Sellers mainly argue the tracks they want to recall. Thousands of tracks, tens of thousands of tracks, hundreds of thousands of tracks have never been recalled. But in the agenic world, there is no excuse for that. Each advance can be followed.

Fortune: With these efficiency gains, what happens to people who worked in customer support? Are they being transitioned to other roles, or do you reduce the job market?

Benioff: I constantly move people and go back to the business. There are many frightening stories planted by executives saying that we obtain major AI layoffs. But the thing about the AI that we have – it is not 100% precise because it is built on word models. Without our data set, these models may be precise at 50% or 60%. When you add our data set, we get 90%precision, but it is not 100%. So you need humans in the loop. Humans are not going. We are increased by these technologies. We get more productivity.

Fortune: You have mentioned that you do not engage the engineers, do not support people or even lawyers this year – only sellers. What does this mean for young people who try to enter these areas?

Benioff: We have not seen negative impacts unfold. I think there are people who do not do the business psyche by saying things that may not be true. What I see is many more small and medium -sized businesses, many more intermediate companies. There will be potentially many more jobs because everyone is increased and has the ability to do more.

I think there will be an explosion of small and medium -sized businesses because they can do more, it is easier to start one, you can create value more easily. We definitely see it in our company.

Fortune: How do you manage internal transition when people have to go to new positions because of these efficiency gains?

Benioff: I don’t think it’s super complicated. We direct something called trailhead that we provide customers and employees – you can train in all our products. We encourage all employees to do so, to be certified, to obtain badges, to train us. This gives them more mobility in the organization.

People must be more flexible in their thoughts. We encourage people to have a beginner’s mind. We tell them: with the mind of a beginner, you have all the possibilities. With the mind of an expert, you have a few. Which is your choice? We have a lot of options. There is nothing more than the opportunity. You can see all the open work that we publish externally and internally.

Fortune: There are concerns about AI leading to mass layoffs through the economy. Do you see that it happens?

Benioff: I continue to look around, to speak to the CEOs, to ask: what is it for these major layoffs? I think AI increases people, but I don’t know if it necessarily replaces them. Even in radiology departments where AI can read analyzes, it is not 100%precise. AI can read the scan, but it could be wrong.

The reason is that many of this is still built on word models. Maybe there is a future AI model that will be more precise, but this is not where we are currently. These are humans and AI who work together. I feel like I have a partner. But that doesn’t always do things correctly.

Fortune: Some fear that companies create more of their own tailor -made software using AI, potentially threatening traditional SaaS like Salesforce.

Benioff: It has always been true that companies can tinker, but only some companies can. Small and medium -sized enterprises will not do DIY because they do not have great IT services. But when you speak to a company like Barclays with 15,000 engineers, this is where the development teams have always considered us a potential competitor.

The applications will become more dynamic, where you will have the possibility of dynamically generating applications. I see opportunities in this area, but we are not yet at that time. No one can give me an example where someone has dynamically built a business application from AI. You can define an application in English now, which is exciting, but it will always be built on a platform like ours with the same framework requirements.

Fortune: What is your opinion on the current state of the precision and capacities of AI?

Benioff: We must be more real on what we have. We have this concept of intelligence that comes out of these tokens, but it is not so exact. Users may have a model to help them write a story, to summarize it, to modify it, to translate it into Spanish or in Arabic. And they are like: “Oh, it’s cool.” But at the end of the day, you will always have to check it.

Each AI needs their own fact verifier, and these fact auditors are humans, not AI, because IS cannot check because they do not have this level of precision. Human must remain in the loop.

Fortune: How do you see it transforming different sectors?

Benioff: In health care, we do not have enough doctors in small towns. There is a company that has withdrawn Salesforce called Artera which has the FDA certification for diagnostic and treatment plans for prostate cancer. In our small town (where Benioff lives in Hawaii), we have neither urologists nor oncologists, which can increase capacity. It is not a substitute for specialists, but it can help.

In education, children use tools like Grammarly to write articles. But this is not an excuse for teachers not to look at grammar history to make sure children really learn. Education can be increased, health care can be increased.

But the Hamburgers store, pizza, supermarket, dry cleaner, producers’ market – a lot from the hearts of small cities will probably not change as much. We will probably not have a robotaxis around. No one is going to map our city for a while. This vision that we have been sold that we will simply return a switch and suddenly, the cars will begin to drive themselves, it turns out that it was not true. And I think it is a good metaphor for what is going on more widely in the AI industry. These are humans and AI who work together, no wholesale replacement of human beings.

Fortune:: Tell me more about how you see this partnership between human work and AI?

Benioff: I think we are all increased in our ability to do our job. I feel like I have a partner, right? Thus, for example, every year, I sit to write the Salesforce business plan – and we use this process that we call v2mom (vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures.) I always sit to do it with a Salesforce frame and now I also work with AI, as Trinity. And I will say, okay, here is all my plan, give me a note on it. And the AI will say “B Plus” but why is it “A”? And that said: “Well, you left it aside, right? You left it aside. I say to myself: “I left that!” It’s true. It is very good, in fact, to find things you have left out. It is therefore good for finding gaps in your conscience. I was very impressed by this and it changed my thinking a few times. But you work with the system. Andi thinks that it is a very stimulating message for people and for businesses. This will help your employees be more productive and move forward faster. But this is not a wholesale replacement of human beings. Or if this opportunity exists, someone must explain it to me, because, as CEO of a company of 75,000 people, I cannot understand it.

Fortune: How does that change the way organizations are structured?

Benioff: It allows you to increase your control period, reduce your diapers (management). But people continue to talk about how robots are going to replace the wholesale departments. Where are these robots? Because I don’t see it. Of course, there are robots there – we are going to have them at DreamForce this year, to walk – but it will be very limited, and it will be somewhat limited, and it is more a vision of what is possible in the long term. But let’s talk about where we are currently. And where we are at the moment is that each company can be an agent company, but we must keep the human in the loop.