Benioff calls fears of SaaS decline unfounded
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said investors’ fears that artificial intelligence will displace traditional software are unfounded. In an interview with CNBC Top News, he said advanced AI models depend on customer relationship management (CRM) systems rather than replace them.
Market reaction
Salesforce shares rose by more than 12% after the company reported strong quarterly results and issued better-than-expected guidance. At the same time, by the close of trading on Wednesday, Salesforce shares had lost 22% of their value since the start of the year.
Previously, investors feared that increasingly powerful AI models would allow businesses to perform more tasks with fewer subscriptions to traditional software. Wall Street also suggested that companies could use AI to create tools for which they now pay software-as-a-service providers.
Customers among AI companies
According to Benioff, AI is strengthening Salesforce’s business rather than displacing it. He noted that nine out of ten leading artificial intelligence companies use Salesforce and Slack, and their spending on these platforms increased by 435% compared with the previous year.
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Salesforce is known primarily for its CRM solutions. The company also owns the corporate messaging service Slack and the data analytics platform Tableau. Benioff believes that models such as Anthropic’s Claude need customer data, business context, and workflows hosted on the Salesforce platform.
Partnership with Anthropic
Salesforce and Anthropic introduced the Claudeforce plug-in, which enables sales professionals to use Claude to work with customer data stored in Salesforce. In particular, the tool allows users to draft emails and update records.
Benioff called Salesforce primarily a data company. According to him, AI models need data, business context, security, and control tools for users.
