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Tag: Salesforce

  • Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This isn’t our first SaaSpocalypse | TechCrunch

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    Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution won’t be its death when it announced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

    Salesforce reported a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the year, it reported $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% over the previous year, with both results boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May.

    Net income landed at $7.46 billion, and the company offered strong guidance for the year ahead, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a 10% to 11% increase. It also said its “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a figure that shows revenue under contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned revenue.

    The numbers, though, could only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been getting hammered lately. Investors fear the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The situation has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.”

    The concept hung so heavily in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times.

    “You’ve heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a few of them,” he said, later adding, “If there is a SaaSpocalypse, it may be eaten by the Sasquatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents.”

    In an attempt to convince the world of its continued health, Salesforce threw everything and the kitchen sink into this earnings report. The company increased its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new $50 billion share buyback program. That’s always a favorite with shareholders because it both creates a sturdy buyer of shares and reduces the number of shares in circulation (which can boost the stock price).

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    The company also revamped the earnings call itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part normal Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts.

    Instead of running through the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to testify to their love of its new agentic options: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, just to hammer the point, the CEO of SaaStr, the software industry conference and media company. We’ll truncate the interviews to the shortest summary: They all love Salesforce’s AI agent products.

    Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agentic products: agentic work units (“AWU”). The idea here is that instead of simply counting “tokens” — the standard unit of AI processing volume — AWU attempts to measure something more meaningful: whether an agent actually completed a task. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot but really is not in the AI world.)

    “You can ask it a question and it can write you a poem, but that’s not really all that valuable in the enterprise world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes said on the call. So AWU is intended to measure when the agent writes to a record or does some other verifiable piece of work.

    On top of that, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision of the coming world of agents. It shows SaaS software like itself owning most of the tech stack, with the AI model makers on the bottom as unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines.

    This was a direct counter to one of the causes of a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, after OpenAI released its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural vision shows OpenAI owning most of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS providers (the databases and business-software platforms where companies store their core data) on the bottom as the unseen engines.

    And if all that wasn’t enough to influence investors: Benioff was dressed in a black leather jacket, echoing the signature look of the CEO clearly crushing it in the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

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    Julie Bort

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  • AWS revenue continues to soar as cloud demand remains high | TechCrunch

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    Amazon Web Services ended 2025 with its strongest quarterly growth rate in more than three years.

    The company reported Thursday that its cloud service business recorded $35.6 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025. This figure marks a 24% year-on-year increase and the business segment’s largest growth rate in 13 quarters. Annual revenue run rate for the business segment is $142 billion, according to Amazon. The cloud service also saw an increase in its operating income from $12.5 billion in the fourth quarter compared to $10.6 billion in the same period in 2024.

    “It’s very different having 24% year-over-year growth on $142 billion annualized run rate than to have a higher percentage growth on a meaningfully smaller base, which is the case with our competitors,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We continue to add more incremental revenue and capacity than others, and extend our leadership position.”

    That fourth-quarter growth was fueled by new agreements with Salesforce, BlackRock, Perplexity, and the U.S. Air Force, among other companies and government entities.

    “More of the top 500 U.S. startups use AWS as their primary cloud provider than the next two providers combined,” Jassy said. “We’re adding significant easy to core computing capacity each day.”

    AWS also added more than a gigawatt of power to its data center network in the fourth quarter.

    Jassy said AWS still sees a fair amount of its business coming from enterprises that want to move infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud. AWS is, of course, also seeing a boost from the AI boom, and Jassy credited AWS’s top-to-bottom AI stack functionality.

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    “We consistently see customers wanting to run their AI workloads where the rest of their applications and data are,” Jassy said. “We’re also seeing that as customers run large AI workloads on AWS, they’re adding to their core AWS footprint as well.”

    AWS made up 16.6% of Amazon’s overall $213.4 billion revenue in the fourth quarter.

    AWS’s success wasn’t enough to appease Amazon investors, however. Amazon shares fell 10% in after-hours trading after investors reacted to the company’s plan to boost capital expenditures and missed Wall Street’s expectations on earnings per share.

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    Rebecca Szkutak

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  • OpenAI launches a way for enterprises to build and manage AI agents | TechCrunch

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    OpenAI has launched a new product to help enterprises navigate the world of AI agents, focusing on agent management as critical infrastructure for enterprise AI adoption.

    On Thursday, AI giant OpenAI announced the launch of OpenAI Frontier, an end-to-end platform designed for enterprises to build and manage AI agents, on Thursday. It’s an open platform, which means users can manage agents built outside of OpenAI too.

    Frontier users can program AI agents to connect to external data and applications which allows them to execute tasks far outside of the OpenAI platform. Users can also limit and manage what these agents have access to, and what they can do, of course.

    OpenAI said Frontier was designed to work the same way companies manage human employees. Frontier offers an onboarding process for agents and a feedback loop that is meant to help them improve over time the same way a review might help an employee.

    OpenAI touted enterprises including HP, Oracle, State Farm and Uber as customers, but Frontier is currently only available to a limited number of users with plans to roll out more generally in the coming months.

    The company would not disclose pricing details on a press briefing earlier this week, according to reporting from The Verge. TechCrunch has also reached out for more information regarding pricing.

    Agent-management products become table stakes since AI agents rose to prominence in 2024. Salesforce has arguably the best-known such product, Agentforce, which the company launched in the fall of 2024. Others have quickly followed. LangChain is a notable player in the space that was founded in 2022 and has raised more than $150 million in venture capital. CrewAI is a smaller upstart that has raised more than $20 million in venture capital.

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    In December, global research and advisory firm Gartner released a report about this type of software and called agent management platforms both the “most valuable real estate in AI” and a necessary piece of infrastructure for enterprises to adopt AI.

    It’s not surprising that OpenAI would release this platform in early 2026 as the company has made it clear that enterprise adoption is one of its main focus areas for this year. The company has also announced two notable enterprise deals this year with ServiceNow and Snowflake.

    Still, if OpenAI wants to be a meaningful player in the enterprise space, offering a product like Frontier is a promising step.

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    Rebecca Szkutak

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  • Billionaire Marc Benioff challenges the AI sector: ‘What’s more important to us, growth or our kids?’ | Fortune

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    Imagine it is 1996. You log on to your desktop computer (which took several minutes to start up), listening to the rhythmic screech and hiss of the modem connecting you to the World Wide Web. You navigate to a clunky message board—like AOL or Prodigy—to discuss your favorite hobbies, from Beanie Babies to the newest mixtapes.

    At the time, a little-known law called Section 230 of the Communications Safety Act had just been passed. The law—then just a 26-word document—created the modern internet. It was intended to protect “good samaritans” who moderate websites from regulation, placing the responsibility for content on individual users rather than the host company.

    Today, the law remains largely the same despite evolutionary leaps in internet technology and pushback from critics, now among them Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. 

    In a conversation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, titled “Where Can New Growth Come From?” Benioff railed against Section 230, saying the law prevents tech giants from being held accountable for the dangers AI and social media pose.

    “Things like Section 230 in the United States need to be reshaped because these tech companies will not be held responsible for the damage that they are basically doing to our families,” Benioff said in the panel conversation which also included Axa CEO Thomas Buberl, Alphabet President Ruth Porat, Emirati government official Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, and Bloomberg journalist Francine Lacqua.

    As a growing number of children in the U.S. log onto AI and social media platforms, Benioff said the legislation threatens the safety of kids and families. The billionaire asked, “What’s more important to us, growth or our kids? What’s more important to us, growth or our families? Or, what’s more important, growth or the fundamental values of our society?”

    Section 230 as a shield for tech firms

    Tech companies have invoked Section 230 as a legal defense when dealing with issues of user harm, including in the 2019 case Force v. Facebook, where the court ruled the platform wasn’t liable for algorithms that connected members of Hamas after the terrorist organization used the platform to encourage murder in Israel. The law could shield tech companies from liability for harm AI platforms pose, including the production of deepfakes and AI-Generated sexual abuse material.

    Benioff has been a vocal critic of Section 230 since 2019 and has repeatedly called for the legislation to be abolished. 

    In recent years, Section 230 has come under increasing public scrutiny as both Democrats and Republicans have grown skeptical of the legislation. In 2019 the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump pursued a broad review of Section 230. In May 2020, President Trump signed an Executive Order limiting tech platforms’ immunity after Twitter added fact-checks to his tweets. And in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Gonzalez v. Google, though, decided it on other grounds, leaving Section 230 intact.

    In an interview with Fortune in December 2025, Dartmouth business school professor Scott Anthony voiced concern over the “guardrails” that were—and weren’t—happening with AI. When cars were first invented, he pointed out, it took time for speed limits and driver’s licenses to follow. Now with AI, “we’ve got the technology, we’re figuring out the norms, but the idea of, ‘Hey, let’s just keep our hands off,’ I think it’s just really bad.”

    The decision to exempt platforms from liability, Anthony added, “I just think that it’s not been good for the world. And I think we are, unfortunately, making the mistake again with AI.”

    For Benioff, the fight to repeal Section 230 is more than a push to regulate tech companies, but a reallocation of priorities toward safety and away from unfettered growth. “In the era of this incredible growth, we’re drunk on the growth,” Benioff said. “Let’s make sure that we use this moment also to remember that we’re also about values as well.”

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    Jake Angelo

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  • Verizon Begins Laying Off Thousands of Workers

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    Telecom giant Verizon has begun laying off some 13,000 employees as part of a new reorganization initiative. Approximately a week ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Verizon was considering job cuts. Now, the layoffs have begun, according to an email viewed by Gizmodo.

    “Our current cost structure limits our ability to invest significantly in our customer value proposition,” wrote Verizon’s new-ish CEO, Dan Schulma, in an email sent Thursday and shared with Gizmodo (the Journal originally reported on the email). “We must reorient our entire company around delivering for and delighting our customers,” the top executive added.

    Yes, to “delight” customers, the company must apparently very much not delight its workforce. Schulman, who took over the top spot in October, said in the email that the layoffs would reduce Verizon’s “outsourced and outside labor expenses.” To help the workers who are losing their jobs, Verizon has established a $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund, Schulman said. This fund will “focus on skill development, digital training and job placement to help our people take their next steps,” he shared.

    The CEO added that technological change was sweeping through the economy. “Changes in technology and in the economy are impacting the workforce across all industries,” he wrote. “Change is necessary, but it can be difficult—especially when it affects valued teammates. It’s important that we direct our energy and resources to set Verizon on a path to success. The actions we’re taking are designed to make us faster and more focused, positioning our company to deliver for our customers while continuing to capture new growth opportunities.”

    When it comes to job security, this has been a tough year for tech workers. Amazon recently announced 14,000 layoffs, Accenture and Synopsis have announced thousands of layoffs, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle have made similarly dour announcements, and Intel has promised to reduce its workforce by a whopping 25,000. There are many other tech companies that have made similar moves over the last twelve months.

    Yes, lots and lots of people are getting fired right now, and, according to reports, it’s increasingly difficult for entry-level workers to find positions. Some people blame AI (which is promising to help America’s C-suite gut certain segments of their corporate workforce) while others merely blame our shitty economy, which seems to be suffering under the yoke of the Trump administration’s dopy fiscal policies. There’s no reason why both can’t be to blame. Whatever the cause, one thing is clear: Silicon Valley is in its downsizing era, and it’s not so much fun.

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    Lucas Ropek

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  • This 26-year-old was laid off from his ‘dream job’ at PwC building AI agents. He’s worried the tech he built has led to more job cuts | Fortune

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    Titans of industry like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Intel have all been slashing staff, and employees are hand-wringing about being next on the chopping block. Donald King, a 26-year-old who built AI agents for PwC, never thought he’d be the next one out the door—but he soon realized why consultants are called “hatchet-men.”

    After graduating with a degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, King landed a job at one of the “Big Four” consulting giants: PwC. He packed his bags and moved to New York to start his role as an associate in technology consulting, working with major clients, including Oracle, during his first year. But everything changed when PwC announced a $1 billion investment in AI; King was already intrigued by the tech, so he pitched himself to join the company’s AI factory team. Working 60 to 80 hours a week, he immersed himself in the tech, even throwing knowledge-sharing AI agent block parties within the firm that drew up to 250 participants. King logged a ton of hours—sometimes at the expense of his weekends—but was confident he was excelling in his role as a product manager and data scientist.

    “I was coding and managing a team onshore and offshore. It was crazy, it’s like, ‘Give this 24-year-old millions of dollars of salary spent per month to build AI agents for Fortune 500 [companies],’” King tells Fortune. “[It was] my dream job…I won first place in this OpenAI hackathon across the entire firm.”

    Although King was proving himself as a key AI talent for PwC, he did begin to question the impact of his work. The AI agents King was building for major corporations could undoubtedly automate swaths of human roles—perhaps even entire job departments. One Microsoft Teams agent his group created mimicked an actual person, and King was a little spooked. 

    “We had a late night call with all the boys that are building this thing, like, ‘What the hell are we building right now?’” King says. “Just saying ‘Treat them like humans’ is probably not the best way to think about it.”

    Behind the scenes, a layoff was brewing—but this time, for King. In October 2024, just eight months into his final role at PwC, the Gen Zer presented his winning project from the OpenAI hackathon: a fleet of AI agents that automated manual tasks. King was proud and felt confident in his place at the firm, but two hours later, PwC called King to inform him he was being laid off. The 26-year-old recorded the meeting and posted it on TikTok, raking up more than 75,000 likes and 2.1 million views. Commenters under his videos expressed shock that King would be let go after winning the hackathon.

    “I thought I was safe, especially after I won first place,” King says. “I just got a little blindsided.”

    King clarifies he doesn’t think there were any “nefarious” intentions behind his layoff, reasoning he was likely a random staffer dismissed after the firm had overhired in previous years. However, he does connect the dots between the AI agents he built for PwC customers and the layoffs that soon ensued at those client companies. 

    Fortune reached out to PwC for comment. 

    King believes his AI agents may have been connected to layoffs 

    While King doesn’t believe his former role at PwC was automated, he recognizes that the AI agents he built likely had an impact on others. The year after his layoff, King observed that some of the Fortune 500 clients he served were implementing staffing cuts. Those AI agents he helped create may have had a hand in the layoffs. 

    “It’s 100% connected,” King says. “I knew that consulting was a hatchet-man type job, I knew you’re going in to potentially lay people off, but I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

    While King believes AI agents are akin to the reasoning power of a five-year-old, they still know “all the corpus of information in the world” and can automate mundane tasks. Oftentimes, that means entry-level jobs are most at risk of being disrupted. 

    “It’s automating tasks, 100%, those are gone,” King says. “If your job is doing those menial types of things, if you’re just emailing a spreadsheet back and forth, you can kiss your job goodbye.”

    Pivoting to his new life purpose: founding a marketing agency 

    While being on PwC’s AI team may have once been his dream job, the layoff didn’t crush his spirit. 

    “I’m grateful for it happening…It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but then it turned into the best thing,” King says. “Overall, [I’m] very grateful that I got laid off.”

    In the aftermath of being let go, King says he was inundated with job offers from major tech companies to join their AI operations. However, the scrappy young entrepreneur sidelined the idea of returning to a nine-to-five gig; instead, King started his own marketing agency, AMDK. The business officially launched in December last year, less than two months after being laid off from PwC. 

    So far, King says AMDK has roped in clients ranging from small companies to billion-dollar enterprises, many of whom are looking for AI agents of their own. His end goal is to build a swarm of agents that help companies with their back ends—but after his experience on PwC’s AI team, he says he’s being cautious about the ramifications of his creations. He’s still learning the ropes of entrepreneurship, but wouldn’t trade the highs and lows for a salaried corporate job.

    “This is my purpose in life, versus this is someone else’s purpose,” King says. “[I’m] way happier.”

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    Emma Burleigh

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  • Two sides of the coin: Smarsh’s approach to AI

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    AI-driven communication compliance company Smarsh’s approach to AI is twofold: it builds proprietary AI technology for regulated industries while also outsourcing its AI-driven customer service capabilities.  Smarsh offers AI-driven platforms that monitor, collect, manage and analyze communication data within regulated industries, including financial services, Chief Customer Officer Rohit Khanna told FinAi News.   For example, […]

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    Whitney McDonald

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  • Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff apologizes for saying National Guard needed in San Francisco | TechCrunch

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    Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, appears to be walking back comments calling for the National Guard to patrol San Francisco.

    “Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” Benioff said in a post on X. “My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused. “

    Benioff stirred up controversy last week after giving an interview with The New York Times in which he declared his support for President Donald Trump’s threats to deploy National Guard troops in San Francisco and other cities led by Democratic politicians.

    While Benioff’s comments were apparently prompted by his concerns over public safety costs at the massive Dreamforce conference that the company held in San Francisco last week, the previously liberal-leaning billionaire also used the interview to embrace Trump, at one point saying, “I fully support the president,” and adding that Trump is “doing a great job.” (At the end of the interview, he reportedly asked his shocked PR person, “Too spicy?”)

    And although Benioff’s pro-Trump stance seemingly aligns with a larger rightward shift among tech executives, his call for the National Guard to come to San Francisco quickly led to pushback from longtime allies and Democratic politicians. Well-known VC Ron Conway stepped down from the board of the Salesforce Foundation, with Conway reportedly telling Benioff in an email, “I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired.” 

    An event scheduled to feature Benioff and San Francisco Mayor Dan Lurie was also canceled, with organizers citing rain.

    State Senator Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, told Politico, “I’m grateful that Marc walked back his call for the National Guard to be deployed in San Francisco. Marc has done so many good things for our city — and supported so many civic needs — and I’m glad to see this shift.”

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    Trump has already deployed the National Guard in other cities including Washington, DC and Chicago, while a judge has thus far blocked his attempts to do the same in Portland. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, has repeatedly described this as an “invasion” of his state.

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    Anthony Ha

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  • As Jobs for New Grads Vanish, Execs Say AI Is Filling the Gap

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    It seems clear that AI is having an impact on the jobs market, mainly in the technology sector, and mostly impacting entry-level positions. A new report from Goldman Sachs confirms and expands on this trend, and also sketches out a near future where companies will see their productivity grow mainly thanks to improving AI tech, with only a small contribution from increasing their headcount. This is a “jobless growth” situation, Goldman economists David Mericle and Pierfrancesco Mei wrote in an investor note this week.

    What Mericle and Mei actually predicted was “modest job growth” in the coming years, even as the economy sees “robust GDP growth.” This disparity implies that the solid increases in productivity aren’t coming from more and more people entering the workforce — instead something else will drive up companies’ output, and that something is AI. As to why there will only be “modest” labor supply rises, the economists suggest it’s a mix of “population aging and lower immigration,” Fortune reported.

    The other effect the report highlights is that while we’re seeing AI impact certain jobs, the bigger impacts and long-term structural changes to the job market won’t really be visible until a recession hits. In a poor economic environment where cost cutting gets prioritized, “companies use recessions to restructure and streamline their workforce by laying off workers in less productive areas.”

    But we’ll also see AI hitting jobs more in the near future too — Fortune notes that the share of company leaders mentioning “both AI and employment in the same context on earnings calls,” has reached “historic highs.” Given that the modern AI era, kicked off by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is really only a handful of years old, the use of “historic” may be overblown here. 

    Or maybe not. Bloomberg reports that Goldman Sachs told its own staff this week that they can expect to see another round of layoffs, driven by the bank’s efforts to cut costs. Goldman’s also decided to “constrain headcount growth” until the end of the year. One simple way for a company — particularly one in the financial sector — to cut costs is AI adoption at scale, tasking new tech tools to tackle mundane duties that lower level workers may have performed beforehand.

    Meanwhile, sales software giant Salesforce has put a number on AI cost savings to date: $100 million, yearly. Bloomberg notes the company has been “vocal” about its own adoption of AI technology, even as it sells agent-powered AI tools to its many customers through its new Agentforce platform. The AI moves have been driven by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who said recently that he’d “never been more excited about anything in my entire career.” Speaking at the company’s Dreamforce conference this week, Benioff said that AI tech has allowed the company to reach out to customers who’d previously have fallen through the net, with human workers not having the capacity to call them back. 

    This means as well as saving the company millions (thanks to aggressively slashing its customer support worker numbers) AI is helping bring in more revenue. This combo is exactly the kind of benefit AI evangelists promise the technology can deliver if it’s applied carefully.

    What’s the lesson here for your company?

    You may see these different headlines as a solid thumbs-up for the potential benefits of deploying AI technology across your own enterprise, in search of some of those promised savings and worker productivity boosts. Salesforce’s example is particularly eye-catching. But remember: this company is a sales-focused software outfit that is deploying carefully developed AI tools it’s in control of throughout its own sales-centric operation. This is a reminder that you need to very carefully choose which third-party AI tools you’re using, and make certain you’re deploying them in the right way in the right places in your operation.

    The other takeaway is that you’ll likely see some dramatic shifts in the talent pool when you’re looking to hire new staff members, both because there may be more people looking for entry level work than before, and also over the longer term as AI begins to reshape the job market.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Salesforce announces Agentforce 360 as enterprise AI competition heats up | TechCrunch

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    Salesforce announced Monday the latest version of its AI agent platform as the company looks to lure enterprises to its AI software in an increasingly crowded market.

    The customer relations manager giant unveiled the new platform, branded Agentforce 360, ahead of its annual Dreamforce customer conference that kicks off October 14. This newer version of Agentforce includes new ways to instruct AI agents through text, a new platform to build and deploy agents, and new infrastructure for messaging app Slack, among others.

    A notable aspect of Agentforce 360 is its new AI agent prompting tool, called Agent Script, which will be released in beta in November. Agent Script gives users the ability to program their AI agents to be more flexible and better respond to “if/then” situations. This allows AI agents to be programmed to be more predictable in less rigid situations like customer questions.

    Users can tap into “reasoning” models, which claim to think before responding as opposed to responding based on patterns. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini power these “reasoning” agents.

    Salesforce also announced it is releasing a new agent building tool, Agentforce Builder, which allows users to build, test and deploy AI agents from a singular spot. This tool, which will be released in beta in November, includes Agentforce Vibes, an enterprise-grade app vibe coding tool that Salesforce announced earlier this month.

    The company also announced a broader integration between Agentforce and Slack. Salesforce said its core apps, including Agenforce Sales, IT and HR, among others, will surface directly in Slack starting this month and expand through the beginning of 2026.

    Slack is piloting a new version of its Slackbot chatbot that is meant to be more of a personalized AI agent that learns about its user and will offer insights and suggestions.

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    Salesforce wants Slack to serve as an enterprise search tool in the future too and plans to launch connectors with platforms like Gmail, Outlook, and Dropbox in early 2026.

    This latest update from Salesforce comes at an interesting time for the enterprise AI market. Companies continue to release AI features aimed at their enterprise customers while enterprises struggle to see a return on investment for these tools.

    Last week Google announced Gemini Enterprise, a suite of tools — many of which were already available — for building enterprise-grade AI agents, that counts Figma, Klarna and Virgin Voyages as early customers, among others.

    Anthropic also started to show traction for its enterprise product, Claude Enterprise. The company announced it struck a deal with consulting giant Deloitte to bring its Claude chatbot to Deloitte’s 500,000 global employees — its largest enterprise deal yet. Anthropic announced a strategic partnership with IBM the next day.

    Salesforce touts that Agentforce has 12,000 customers — significantly higher than any of its competitors, according to its Agentforce press release. Early pilot customers of its Agentforce 360 upgrades include Lennar, Adecco, and Pearson.

    This is all despite a recent MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail before they reach production as companies still struggle to justify spending money on these AI tools.

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    Rebecca Szkutak

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  • Salesforce CEO says National Guard should patrol San Francisco — stunning his own PR team | TechCrunch

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    Marc Benioff has long been San Francisco’s liberal-leaning billionaire, the tech executive who funded homeless services, donated to the city’s public schools, and hosted Hillary Clinton fundraisers.

    But in a new, wide-ranging phone interview with the New York Times from his private plane, Benioff revealed a political transformation that seemed to surprise even his own communications team, despite that Salesforce has hundreds of contracts with the federal government.

    The Salesforce founder declared he “fully supported” President Trump and thought National Guard troops should patrol San Francisco streets. He gushed about sitting across from Trump at a Windsor Castle state dinner, telling the president “how grateful I am for everything he’s doing.” He praised Elon Musk’s government efficiency efforts and said he hadn’t closely followed news about immigration raids or Trump’s attacks on the media.

    The 50-minute conversation reportedly ended after Benioff turned to his public relations executive, apparently noticing her expression. “What about the political questions?” he could be heard asking. “Too spicy?”

    Though Benioff’s shift mirrors Silicon Valley’s broader accommodation of Trump, the exchange offered a rare glimpse of just how far that repositioning can go. The question now: will other Bay Area tech CEOs follow Benioff’s lead and call for federal troops in their own backyard?

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    Connie Loizos

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  • Sierra CEO Bret Taylor Predicts A.I. Agents Will Redefine Business Like the Internet

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    OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor has held many notable titles in tech. Katelyn Tucker/ Slava Blazer Photography

    A.I. agents are the next big platform shift in tech, on par with the dawn of the internet 30 years ago and the rise of mobile apps a decade ago, according to OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, who also runs his own A.I. startup, Sierra. Speaking at the Skift Global Forum in New York City yesterday (Sept. 18), the tech executive argued that enterprises are now racing to adopt A.I. agents much like they once scrambled to build websites or launch mobile apps.

    “I think this is an opportunity that, probably, the closest catalog would be the birth of the internet,” Taylor said during an onstage interview.

    Taylor has seen several waves of disruption firsthand. At Google in the early 2000s, he helped launch Google Maps. He went on to serve as chief technology officer at Facebook (now Meta), co-CEO of Salesforce, and chair of Twitter’s board during Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover. In 2023, he was tapped as chairman of OpenAI’s board after the ChatGPT-maker briefly ousted and reinstated CEO Sam Altman.

    Now, his focus is on Sierra, the conversational A.I. startup he co-founded two years ago with former Google colleague Clay Bavor. The company has quickly become a “decacorn,” hitting a $10 billion valuation earlier this month after raising $350 million from Greenoaks Capital. Sierra already counts hundreds of enterprise customers across financial services, health care and retail. A fifth of Sierra’s customers have annual revenue over $10 billion.

    Taylor insists that A.I. agents are more than just cost-cutting tools. Increasingly, they’re revenue drivers. Sierra’s platform is helping companies sell mortgages, make outbound sales calls and even manage payroll for small businesses. “These agents are not only doing services, but also doing sales,” he said.

    And the form factor is evolving. While chatbots dominate today’s landscape, Taylor believes voice-enabled A.I. is “as, or more important, of a channel than chat.” Multi-modal agents are also emerging. For instance, retailers are beginning to process warranty claims by analyzing photos of damaged products.

    Just as the internet gave rise to search engines and aggregation platforms, Taylor expects agentic A.I. to spawn entirely new business categories. The challenge will be ensuring that they meet consumer expectations as their desires inevitably evolve with the technology’s development. “Consumers are moving faster than most companies can make decisions,” Taylor warned, noting that ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history. “It’s on all of us leaders to push decisively towards this new world.”

    Sierra CEO Bret Taylor Predicts A.I. Agents Will Redefine Business Like the Internet

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  • Paris-Based Mistral AI Seeks $14B Valuation as Europe Charts Its Own A.I. Path

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    CEO Arthur Mensch is steering Mistral away from the AGI hype and toward Europe’s A.I. sovereignty. Photo by Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images

    Paris-based Mistral AI is on track for a new funding round that would value the A.I. startup at 12 billion euros ($14 billion), Bloomberg reports. The investment, expected to total around 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion), would solidify the company’s position at the center of Europe’s sovereign A.I. strategy and bring it closer to its goal of challenging dominant U.S. rivals.

    Founded in 2023, Mistral has already raised some 1.1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) over the past two years. Its upcoming valuation would more than double the 5.8 billion euros ($6.8 billion) figure it reached last June following a 468 million euro ($550 million) round that drew backers such as Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce and Nvidia.

    Mistral did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.

    For now, the startup still pales in size compared to its Silicon Valley competitors. Anthropic closed a round earlier this month at a staggering $183 billion valuation, while OpenAI is reportedly eyeing $500 billion. Still, Mistral is eager to compete. Its products include an A.I. assistant called “Le Chat,” designed for European customers and positioned as an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude chatbots.

    Mistral was co-founded by Arthur Mensch, a former researcher at Google DeepMind, along with former Meta researchers Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample. Mistral has tried to distinguish itself by emphasizing open access. It has released several open-source language models. Unlike American A.I. giants, Mistral has also rejected pursuing AGI. Mensch, who serves as CEO, has said his firm is more focused on ensuring U.S. startups don’t dominate how the technology shapes global culture.

    Mistral is central to Europe’s A.I. playbook

    Mistral is part of a broader surge in European A.I. investment. In 2024, venture capital rounds involving A.I. and machine learning companies based in Europe were estimated to have reached 13.2 billion euros ($15.5 billion), up 20 percent from 2023, according to data from Pitchbook.

    Mistral is part of a broader surge in European A.I. investment. In 2024, venture capital rounds involving A.I. and machine learning companies across the continent were expected to reach 13.2 billion euros ($15.5 billion), a 20 percent increase from the year before, according to PitchBook.

    As one of Europe’s leading startups, Mistral is central to the region’s goal of building an A.I. ecosystem independent of technology from America or China. Earlier this year, the company partnered with Nvidia to launch a European A.I. platform that will allow companies to develop applications and strengthen domestic infrastructure. French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the initiative as “a game changer, because it will increase our sovereignty and it will allow us to do much more.”

    Mistral’s rapid ascent is tied to broader efforts to bolster A.I. across Europe and France. Its Nvidia partnership followed Macron’s announcement at Paris’ global A.I. summit in February, where he pledged more than 100 billion euros ($117 billion) to support France’s A.I. industry. European players must move quickly, Macron stressed at the time: “We are committed to going faster and faster.”

    Paris-Based Mistral AI Seeks $14B Valuation as Europe Charts Its Own A.I. Path

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  • Salesforce CEO Benioff: Salesforce Can Beat Microsoft at AI | Entrepreneur

    Salesforce CEO Benioff: Salesforce Can Beat Microsoft at AI | Entrepreneur

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    Microsoft has invested billions in AI and plans to reopen a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to power the technology. Still, Marc Benioff, CEO of enterprise competitor Salesforce, says that Microsoft’s efforts aren’t enough and that Microsoft has actually done a “tremendous disservice” to the AI industry.

    “When you look at how Copilot has been sold to our customers, it’s disappointing,” Benioff said in an episode of the Masters of Scale Rapid Response podcast earlier this month. “It doesn’t work, it spews data all over the floors, it doesn’t deliver value to customers. I haven’t found a customer who has transformational work with Copilot.”

    Benioff said that Salesforce customers were “so confused” because of how Microsoft had delivered AI.

    Related: Here’s How the CEOs of Salesforce and Nvidia Use ChatGPT in Their Daily Lives

    “Copilot is really the new Microsoft Clippy,” Benioff said, referring to the paperclip-shaped office assistant that Microsoft discontinued in 2007. “I don’t think Copilot will be around, I don’t think customers will use it.” Salesforce is a Microsoft competitor.

    Marc Benioff. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

    Microsoft says that companies like Visa, Honda, and Pfizer are using Copilot.

    Microsoft has made several high-profile AI investments, including a $13 billion investment in OpenAI.

    Related: Salesforce CEO Says the Company’s New AI Agents Could Replace Human Jobs

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    Sherin Shibu

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  • Salesforce CEO: AI Agents Could Replace Hiring Gig Workers | Entrepreneur

    Salesforce CEO: AI Agents Could Replace Hiring Gig Workers | Entrepreneur

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    For $2 a conversation, a new AI agent from Salesforce can answer questions from customers and schedule meetings — without a human being needed for oversight.

    The AI agent technology, which Salesforce announced earlier this week at its annual Dreamforce event, has the potential to disrupt jobs currently held by human workers. Nearly three million people were employed as customer service representatives in 2022, with the majority (66%) being women, according to Data USA.

    Related: Worried About AI Stealing Your Job? A New Report Calls These 10 Careers ‘AI-Proof’

    Salesforce knows that its new technology carries the power to replace what could have been human hires. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday that the new AI agents allow companies to forgo hiring new employees or “gig workers” in more hectic periods of time, per Bloomberg.

    “We want to get a billion agents with our customers in the next 12 months,” Benioff said.

    Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    Adopting a hiring freeze, and then tasking AI with filling in the gaps, is a strategy being used by other companies like “buy now, pay later” payments firm Klarna.

    One year ago, Klarna simply decided not to hire — not even replacements for people who left. Departing employees and an AI-induced hiring freeze have cut Klarna down from the 5,000-person workforce it was last year to the 3,800 people it had as of late August, without any layoffs.

    Related: AI Is Impacting Jobs. Here Are the Gigs Affected the Most, According to an Analysis of 5 Million Upwork Postings

    In late August, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told The Financial Times that the company wants to get its workforce down to 2,000 employees within the next few years with this approach.

    “Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less,” he told the Financial Times.

    Klarna isn’t the only company using AI to automate tasks that humans once did. Within the next year, three in five large companies in the U.S. intend to use AI for everything from financial reporting to marketing campaigns, according to a June study from Duke University.

    Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could replace or impact 300 million jobs by 2030, affecting writing, translation, and customer service gigs.

    Related: JPMorgan Says Its AI Cash Flow Software Cut Human Work By Almost 90%

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    Sherin Shibu

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  • Inside Cambridge Savings Bank’s 3-year digital roadmap | Bank Automation News

    Inside Cambridge Savings Bank’s 3-year digital roadmap | Bank Automation News

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    Cambridge Savings Bank is executing a three-year digital roadmap with automation, client experience and modern platforms at the forefront of the effort.   “Our mandate is digitize everything right now as much as we can,” Chief Operating Officer Kevin McGuire told Bank Automation News.  As the Cambridge, Mass.-based bank kicks off the plan, the mandate is […]

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    Whitney McDonald

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  • Microsoft to unbundle Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism | TechCrunch

    Microsoft to unbundle Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism | TechCrunch

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    Microsoft will introduce a new version of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that excludes Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack.

    The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year. The company introduced Teams as a complimentary offering to the Office 365 suite in 2017.

    Microsoft has enjoyed an unfair advantage by coupling the two offerings, many businesses have argued. Slack, owned by Salesforce, termed the move “illegal” alleging that Microsoft forced installation of Teams to customers through its market-dominant productivity suite and hid the true cost of the chat and video service.

    In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft said the unbundling “also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”

    Reuters reported that Microsoft will introduce the new Office 365 lineups on Monday. Microsoft had not implemented the change at the time of publishing.

    TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft for more details. We will update the story as we learn more.

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    Manish Singh

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  • What a long, strange year it's been in enterprise tech news | TechCrunch

    What a long, strange year it's been in enterprise tech news | TechCrunch

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    From Salesforce drama to the year of generative AI

    Apologies to the Grateful Dead, but what a long, strange year it’s been in 2023 enterprise tech news. It began with a ton of Salesforce drama and eventually got taken over by generative AI and ChatGPT, which seemed to come out of nowhere to completely dominate the news cycle this year.

    But even though AI clearly influenced much of the news, and even my own coverage, there was still a ton of other enterprise stories that made the news this year.

    The rise of generative AI in the enterprise

    It would be impossible to discuss this year’s news cycle without talking about the impact of generative AI. When OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of last year, it would have been impossible to understand the impact it would have on enterprise software in the coming months. Yet it has the potential to be truly transformative, changing the way we interact with software, and perhaps represents the biggest change to UX (user experience) design since point-and-click.

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    Ron Miller

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  • Salesforce escaped from the jaws of activists to find stability in 2023 | TechCrunch

    Salesforce escaped from the jaws of activists to find stability in 2023 | TechCrunch

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    The company began the year with a ton of turmoil

    This year did not start off great for Salesforce, with an unusual level of turbulence and uncertainty surrounding the company. But as the year comes to a close, Salesforce finds itself in surprisingly good shape financially: Its stock is up over 96% year-to-date. Earlier this year, such an outcome would have seemed impossible to imagine.

    The bad news started rolling in even before the new year began, when co-CEO Bret Taylor, who many speculated was being groomed to be heir apparent to Marc Benioff, quite suddenly announced he was leaving the company at the end of November. A week later, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield announced he, too, was stepping down. Losing two key executives in less than a week would be a huge hit to any company, but it would be just the start of an onslaught of bad news for the CRM giant.

    As the year began, we learned that activist investors were, well, quite active inside the company. This included Elliott Management, Starboard Value, ValueAct Capital, Inclusive Capital and Third Point. When activists show up, they usually have a strong opinion on how to “fix” a company, and this would be no different.

    First, we learned that Salesforce was bringing in three new board members, which felt like a way to appease the activists — especially because one of them was Mason Morfit, CEO and chief investment officer of ValueAct, one of those very same activists.

    Activists typically pressure the company to cut costs, and in corporate terms, that usually means cutting staff. Sure enough, Salesforce soon announced that it was cutting 10% of its workforce, or 7,000 people, on January 4, 2023. The excuse was that it had overhired during the pandemic and this was a correction, but it could also have been throwing the activists a cost-cutting bone.

    Either way, reports suggested the company didn’t handle the layoffs well, engineers were being pressured, and Benioff began preaching about going back to the office after embracing work from home, and what Salesforce called the “Digital HQ,” during the pandemic. The company’s reputation as a progressive, employee-friendly organization took a big hit.

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    Ron Miller

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  • Sam Altman to Join Microsoft Following OpenAI Ouster

    Sam Altman to Join Microsoft Following OpenAI Ouster

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    Updated Nov. 20, 2023 6:34 am ET

    SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft said it is hiring Sam Altman to helm a new advanced artificial-intelligence research team, after his bid to return to OpenAI fell apart Sunday with the board that fired him declining to agree to the proposed terms of his reinstatement.

    Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella posted on X (formerly Twitter) late Sunday that Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder who resigned Friday in protest over Altman’s ouster, will lead its team alongside unspecified colleagues. Nadella said Microsoft was committed to its partnership with OpenAI and that it would move quickly to provide Altman and Brockman with “the resources needed for their success.” 

    Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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