Salesforce CEO on tech and AI
Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff is part of a vanishing breed among Silicon Valley founder/CEOs: Unlike peers such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page and Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Benioff still runs the groundbreaking company he started nearly a quarter century ago.
Benioff, 58, isn’t ready to leave the software-as-subscription pioneer, even though he has amassed an $8 billion fortune and just went through a challenging stretch that included laying off 8,000 workers and fending off an investor backlash.
The Associated Press recently sat down with Benioff to get his take on the current tech scene.
How does the landscape look to you as the pandemic fades into the rearview mirror?
When you look back at 2019, we had really gone through three huge waves of technology: cloud computing, mobile and social. And now we are going into the fourth wave, which is probably the most important one in AI (artificial intelligence), which is not just the most important technology of our lifetime, but probably the most important in any lifetime.
Is this on the scale of the development of nuclear bombs back in World War II?
Nobody wants a Hiroshima moment to understand how dangerous AI is. We want to be able to kind of get our heads around the tremendous consequences of the technology that we are working with. And that’s going to require a multi-stakeholder approach — companies, governments, non-governmental organizations and others to put together the guidelines for this technology.
Have you been surprised or alarmed by how quickly things seem to be advancing since the release of the ChatGPT bot late last year?
We are moving from the generative ChatGPT phase into a stage where we are about to see agents that are quite alive and aware and able to take these kinds of massive actions. These are called multimodal agents, that is they can move from text to speech to video. And then we are going to move into something that is maybe more multisensory, where these agents are going to be more aware of us and we are going to be more aware of them. We are going to work side by side with them. And, in many cases, they are going to augment or extend what we have been doing. They are going to be taking actions without our knowledge.
Have you given much thought to how much longer you want to remain Salesforce’s CEO?
I think about my career every day, but I have never been more excited about the future of the industry and the potential to help all our customers. This technology revolution that is going on in artificial intelligence and the importance of bringing trust to AI is a real call to arms.