Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm
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Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night. Cybersecurity. According to Vanta's latest State of Trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses. And that's where Vanta comes in. Whether you're a startup, growing fast or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches.
And Vanta allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team not only get compliant, but stay compliant. So stop stressing over cybersecurity and start focusing on growing your business in 2025. Check out Vanta and let them handle the tough stuff. Head to vanta.com forward slash the times tech to learn more.
Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. You sound like you've got a bit of a cold again. I do have a little bit of a cold, but I can't complain. I'm up in the mountains in Lake Tahoe skiing and I was out all day yesterday and I woke up with a little bit of a sniffle, which is kind of par for the course because both of my kids have one as well. So I apologize for the...
my nasally intonations today. This is the Times Tech podcast from London to San Francisco, or at least it usually is. I'm Katie Prescott, still in the city of London. But Danny Fortson, where are you? I'm not in the valley. I'm actually about three hours away up at the mountains in beautiful and very cold Lake Tahoe. Oh, wow. Lucky you. Yeah, it's lovely. We're up here. It's what
what they call ski week out here. So the kids are off. So we decided to, I'm taking a week off, but of course, you know, the podcast never sleeps. So we're still doing the podcast, but we're up here doing a bit of skiing, hanging out. It's quite lovely, actually. I'm not getting very snowy vibes from the picture on the screen. I'm just seeing your head looming out of a black darkness. Well, I'm actually calling from my car in the garage. Sorry, sorry, the garage garage.
Because we're staying in this cabin, which is quite lovely, but there's really no good space. And I was going to use my bedroom, but our six-year-old decided to climb into bed in the middle of the night and he's still sleeping. And I didn't want to kick him out because that's bad for me later today if he doesn't get the sleep he needs. So here I am in the car, in the garage, doing it for, you know, our listening public. I think it sounds good. It looks good. Yeah.
So I'm still in London, but today's episode crosses even more time zones than usual because I've been speaking to Silicon Valley stalwart Mark Benioff, who's the CEO of Salesforce, the owner of Time Magazine, and he was at his home in Hawaii. Like that's literally almost like from one end of the planet to the other.
It was a bit like that. And it also means that everyone I'm speaking to at the moment, including you, is having a far more exciting time than I am. He had this tantalizingly beautiful sunshiny view out of the window behind him. And he did that thing where he spun his computer around to show us the view out of his enormous windows. And it was beautiful. Just a massive contrast to a very cold London right now.
But Katie, Salesforce, most people have heard of it. Maybe they've seen a little cloud logo. Perhaps they've even seen a Salesforce tower shoot up in a city near them. Actually, in San Francisco, it is the Salesforce tower is the largest or the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi. It's huge and it really kind of dominates the San Francisco skyline.
So yeah, they're all over the place. They're a very, very big company and Benioff started it from scratch. Yeah, there's a massive Salesforce Tower in London too actually. So if anyone is looking, is bored and in London and looking for something free to do, Salesforce Tower has the UK's largest private aquarium in it with this enormous corollary. And one of the funny things is you can actually see, so if you're walking down Bishopsgate, which is in the city of London,
near Liverpool Street, you can see scuba divers inside this aquarium. It's so big. Cleaning it. Really? Yeah. There you go. And it's completely fascinating. Oh, wow. I never saw those, actually, when I was living there. But fish aside, many people may not be entirely sure about
what Salesforce actually does. That's right. I think most people know that it's a big company and they might know the name, but it's one of those things that it does make a lot of sense when you unpick it. So it's all about customer relationship management for businesses. And that sounds very straightforward, but really it's just providing software that helps companies sell more stuff and help businesses manage more.
customer relationships. So if you're a business that sells furniture, for example, you might have a website and sell stuff online, but also physical showrooms. And Salesforce can do things like if a customer comes online and signs up for a design consultation, then they'll get automatically passed to a showroom sales rep based on location. That rep might get an automatic notification and told to follow up with the customer. So it's automating all that. And then if you do things like
If you add something to your online basket and don't buy it, you might get an email that says, hey, Danny, you've left a super soaker in your basket. Have 10% off. That's Salesforce behind the scenes. Super soaker for sure. I was thinking of things you might like. Yeah, yeah. My explanation. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that. I'm sure you've brought one on the podcast before. Oh, yeah. And then it has customer support. So if your super soaker breaks, you can contact them and it'll automate all that.
And then those emails that say, hey, Danny, customers who bought super soakers often like water bombs.
Right. So, yeah. Right, right, right, right. Grabbing customers and looking after them. I mean, I described Mark Benioff as a Silicon Valley stalwart, and this is all a bit of a Silicon Valley legend, isn't it? Yeah. So he, going way back, he founded the company about 25 years ago in Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. And he came up with this idea along with three other co-founders, Parker Harris, Dave Mellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez.
And they wanted to create a platform that was easy to maintain and update without dealing with complex kind of software maintenance. And as a result, they offered a product as, you know, software as a service. And really what they did is take advantage of the rise of the cloud, hence the little cloud logo. And he was very, very kind of high up in Oracle business.
And Larry Ellison thought really highly of him and wanted him to stay. And he's like, no, I'm going to leave your company, go off and do my own thing.
And, you know, because Oracle itself is a huge company, but he saw the cloud coming and this idea for a new software as a service model and really kind of led the way. It's such a big business. I mean, some of its customers can be very cultish about it. They evangelize about the software and become real advocates of it. Just looking at some of the numbers, it's got a market value, as we were recording this, of $314 billion. Wow.
Share price has gone up 14% in the last year and it bounced off the back of its latest earnings figures, which showed the quarterly revenue in the third quarter of $9.4 billion, up 8% from the year before.
So it's a lot of sales at Salesforce. Yeah, it's a huge company. It's a huge company. And everybody's coming for it now, right? In the age of AI. That's what I want to hear. I have not heard your interview, but that's the one thing I want to hear about is just like... Everybody's coming for it. And it is coming for Microsoft.
I think is the way we could sum that up. So it's putting AI at the center of its business. You may be surprised to hear. That's stunning. Which makes sense because it's about customer relations. And they've developed a platform which they launched last year called AgentForce. AgentForce. That sounds like a Steven Seagal film.
You can say that. Steven Seagal in Agent Force. The number of startups I talk to who are like, we're going to kill Salesforce because we're going to build this new thing from the ground up with AI, blah, blah, blah. And he's trying to bolt AI into this $300 billion machine.
That's going to be fascinating. Spoiler alert. He doesn't think that Salesforce is going to be killed. I mean, it won't be killed, but you know what I mean. He's got lots of people coming for him. It's a big company, though. Should we hear the interview? Yeah. We'll start with Agent Force. Agent Force! If we can...
Start off with what you're doing at the moment with agents, because this was one of the big things you announced last year. If you just explain to listeners what Salesforce agents are. Well, what Salesforce agents are is the beginning of probably the most exciting revolution in the history of technology, which is the digital labor revolution. I think that for my entire career, I've been mostly helping companies manage and share their information.
manage their data. And now we're seeing that our company is providing digital labor to companies. And I think that's only going to expand. Even today, I tweeted that agents plus robots is the catalyst of this multi-trillion dollar digital labor revolution with a video of a next generation dancing robot out of China.
Because I do believe that we are at the beginning of something incredible that none of us are going to believe. How good are they? Because I'm not sure I want to hear the sales pitch, but using chatbots at the moment, I always feel that I need to check whatever they do. How confident can someone be really that actually using an agent is going to be as good as a human? Well, we're not at a point where it's 100% and everybody knows that.
And when we get to that point of 100%, we have the code word for that. It's called AGI. So when you hear people say an AGI, all that means is the AI is now 100%. And right now the AI is not 100%. Maybe it's 85%. But it's better than it was a couple years ago where it was maybe 20% or 30%.
So it's been an evolution in terms of accuracy, capability, functionality. And it's just an exciting moment in technology that, you know, gender of AI has given us another level of capability. What sort of things are your agents doing? Well, I think that when we look at, well, I'll tell you even my first, I'll start with my own company. You know, at Salesforce, we have something called help.salesforce.com. What do you go to if you're having trouble with our products? We have 9,000 humans that back that up.
And it's kind of like what you were saying. It was kind of a chatbot site, but backed up by humans. And that's how it is for most companies. Now we've replaced that chatbot site with what we call agent force. So we have an agent force in the front of it. And then we have our humans behind it. And the agent force is very productive. So we probably need a few less humans on the back end so we can move them into new positions to let us grow in new areas. And we're very excited about the...
opportunity of an agent force and a human force. When you talk about a few less humans, what sort of jobs do you think are going to be most affected by this? Well, initially, like these call center, contact center, customer service positions are going to definitely be impacted. Of course, you also can see that those jobs also can be augmented. So in some cases, we've put
these agents in and jobs are not reduced. In fact, what happens is jobs are created because the humans can do more. In the case of Gucci, we augmented their call center in Florence, Italy.
And when we put it in, you never know what's exactly going to happen. But in that case, revenue went up 30% because the call center agents were able to sell products that they did not previously have the expertise to be able to sell, you know, a bag, a jacket, whatever it is. Amazing. And so, you know, one area can be productivity. Another area can be augmentation. And so it's an exciting moment in technology. It's a whole new level of capability. Yeah.
It's an exciting moment in tech, but you can see for people that it's quite scary looking into this future about what it really means for the labor force. Yeah. How are you seeing that within Salesforce? I mean, you made some layoffs this year, 1,000 people. Do you see your workforce shrinking? Well, it's de minimis for us. I mean, we have 75,000 or almost 80,000 people. So if we're moving 1,000 people around or 2,000 or 4,000 or even 8,000, these are –
constant reshaping of our company as we realign our business to continue to grow and serve our customers and create various levels of customer success. What's exciting for us is that this is a whole new capability and
you know, one of our new customers is Heathrow Airport where you are. And, you know, I mean, we've all been there. It's quite an airport. It can get crazy at times. We've all had the crazy moment where we're going from one end to another end to this terminal to that terminal. It's the most complex airport I've ever been through. And we're deploying agent force to help our customers to
in this case Heathrow, serve their customers, me and you, with incredible new ways. And we're very excited about that idea. So can you see a time when Salesforce shrinks from your 75,000 workforce to half that, a quarter that? No, I don't have that in my business plan right now. I'm growing and I'm excited.
And I've never been more excited, really, about my career, about what's happening in technologies. There's so much innovation. Like every day, there's something new. I'm sure you feel the same way where it's like, I know you're covering a lot of these same things. And every day, it's like, oh, my gosh, I didn't know that. What? That competitor is now doing this and this vendor is doing that.
It's like, wow, when did this happen? And how did that happen? And this is exciting. So if you are excited about it and you want to follow along, you're going to take your skills and your capabilities and your understanding to a whole new place. And for me,
Our employees, for people in our industry, for people who want to be in our industry, this is the moment to learn and grow as much as possible. So what does the workforce look like to you if you're imagining in 20 years' time? Oh, gosh, in 20 years. I mean, I don't completely know. I guess we have to, though, think about there's – I call it four levels. One level is there's these humans like me and you
working on these applications just like we always have. And then for us, it could be in sales and service and marketing. It could be in commerce. It could be in analytics. It could be in a lot of areas. And those humans are working on their applications. So that's one thing we're doing. The second thing is they're filling up these databases with lots and lots of data. That's been going on for decades, but that will really accelerate because these AI systems, they only work well
on these comalgamated databases. So they only really work well when there's lots of data that they can interoperate with. And the third one is agents, like we were talking about, the idea that you've got these agents that are not exactly humans. They're like, you know, you're having a conversation and you think it's a person, but then you realize it's not exactly you.
You know, like how you're using ChatGPT now or something like that. And then the fourth level is robots, where we've all seen, you know, these movies, The Terminator, Minority Report, but we haven't exactly walked into that Gap store or that, or even Heathrow Airport, there's not robots walking around helping you. You know, you've got the help desk or the kiosk,
And I think what will happen is you will walk up to a robot and say, hey, I am Mark Benioff and I'm trying to get my flight back to San Francisco and I'm flying in from Dubai. And can you tell me where to go? And the robot says, yes, I'll escort you right now. I know exactly where you're going. Your flight is on time. Everything is OK. You can relax and let's go.
And so is that around the corner? That's probably around the corner. And so that's a whole different capability because you know and I know that when you go to Heathrow, nobody is going to escort you to your gate right now. They don't have the personnel. They don't have the labor to do it. You know that. And in this case, they will. They'll have a digital laborer.
And that digital labor is going to come in the case of agents, like we talked about, and also in robots. And those robots can be, in some cases, like I just expressed, a manifestation of the agent. So when you said at Davos that your cohort of CEOs might be, and I'm paraphrasing what you said, but might be the last to have a workforce that's entirely human. Yeah, yeah.
Do you see that? Do you see anyone being a CEO of a company where there aren't humans in it? No. I think that, look, I think that I'm having to learn how to manage agents and humans together to create customer success. And in that case of the Heathrow Airport, we'll go back to that. It's kind of a good story, I think. You know, vision. We actually ran this commercial in the Super Bowl over the weekend around Heathrow Airport.
and agents. But yeah, we're going to see agents, digital agents, robots as agents, helping you to create labor where we don't have labor. That could be you walk into a hospital and you are talking to the agent saying, yeah, I'm ready for my procedure. I'm this, I'm that. And then there's a robot that's helping you check you in and
you know, helping to fill in the gaps. And I think we all know that in a lot of industries, healthcare is a great example, airports is another good one, where there aren't all the people that we need to kind of have the level of quality experience that we could have. And we can fill in some of these gaps with digital labor, and we're going to. What did you make of the recent DeepSeek announcement from China?
Very important because it really goes to show how everything we thought was true five years ago or even five months ago may not be true. So this idea that things are changing so quickly that everyone in the industry was shocked when they saw the quality of the technology, the architecture,
How it was built, the type of data center they used, what they were saying that they needed going forward was nothing like what the deepest insiders thought in the industry. So technology is constantly getting lower cost and easier to use, and it transformed itself once again in front of our very eyes.
And you use lots of models, don't you, at Salesforce? I think you use all of the big frontier ones. Yes. Models are just algorithms. A whole series of algorithms put together as a model. And this idea of these models, there's companies that make these models and that's all they make. These companies like OpenAI and Anthropic or DeepSeek. And then there's companies like ours. We make a lot of our own models. We have for years. We put them in open source models.
And we also can use other people's models. Our main focus is making sure that our customers are having a great experience with AI. And would you use a Chinese model? I mean, would you use one of DeepSeek's as part of your roster? I'd be happy to use anybody's model if it's the best. Okay. So you're not worried about any sort of Chinese influence? I have no bias. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta.
Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night. Cybersecurity. According to Vanta's latest State of Trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses. And that's where Vanta comes in. Whether you're a startup, growing fast or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches.
And Vanta allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team not only get compliant, but stay compliant. So stop stressing over cybersecurity and start focusing on growing your business in 2025. Check out Vanta and let them handle the tough stuff. Head to vanta.com forward slash the times tech to learn more.
Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm
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It's really interesting watching all of this happening now from London, sort of on the outside looking into Silicon Valley. We've described it a few times on the podcast as like a medieval court. You've got these big, powerful figures jostling for power, perhaps with Elon Musk as a kingmaker and all of that. I don't know if we can touch on that in a little bit.
What's your strategy to try and succeed in all of this? It seems like a lot of the big players are just throwing billions at it and you're not. You're spending a bit less, to be fair, quite a substantial amount less. Well, there's two different points there I think that need to be addressed. Number one is if you feel like you're on the outside looking in, I think you should make a change because I think you want to be on the inside of this. I think this is so big and so exciting and so transformational for the world.
that you want to be on the inside. And if it's your country or your company or yourself, and you feel like you're outside of all this, try to get inside this because... That might mean a job change for me, but... I can't speak to you personally. All I can say is I think that this is kind of what's going on. And so I think it's good advice. And then number two is,
Yeah, there's a lot of different approaches, which is some people feel they have to spend tens of billions of dollars and be on the race to the bottom on data centers. That isn't where we want to be. We are building high value software and data management systems. We think that's a better place to be and a higher value place to be.
But every company is going to have a different approach and they're going to all have different positions in the future based on what they own and how they're leading and what their position on the future looks like. How do you feel about Elon Musk's role in the Trump government? You know, I think that in all of these administrations, they're constantly, you know, there's an upheaval at the beginning as these things change. We have these, you know, peaceful transitions of power.
And as one group of people leave and then a new group of people come in, you may remember like even in the Obama administration, which is not that long ago, there was a whole bunch of high tech people that came in and created the digital core. And it's very much reminiscent for me of that. It's not unusual in the United States because we do have a big tech industry where
The tech industry does get involved in politics now and then, like it did in the last election. And then they want to come in and kind of, you know, have their say.
But it's particularly interesting because of his role in AI and the fact he has an AI company. I imagine for companies like yours that have contracts with the US, to think about that dominance, it's quite unusual. Well, I have an open mind. I have an optimistic mind. I tweeted about this in November that I felt that he has a unique set of skills where he could really have a dramatic impact.
on how the government is structured. So I will maintain a case of optimism. You and I have known each other for a while, so you know I'm a naturally optimistic person. So I'm going to take an optimistic case here. Because he, I mean, obviously, you talk about drama. He tried to buy, well, offered to buy OpenAI the other day. What did you think about all of that and the shenanigans there? I think shenanigans is a good word because, you know, these things are, well, I'd use another word, negotiations. Negotiations.
I think when you do see things coming out of the United States, even our government or even our bureaucrats or even our entrepreneurs, you know, there tends to be some negotiations going back and forth and they can be coming into the press. And you need to kind of peel them back and say, is this real or is it a negotiation? And how does the change in administration feel to you, this new Trump presidency? New, different. Second one. Yeah, I would say with this administration,
In the last administration we had, they weren't, I would say, especially business friendly. They weren't very interested in CEOs or business or what any of us were working on. So it was kind of a strange thing. The door was mostly closed. And that was unfortunate, I think, in a lot of cases. Every administration is different. Every administration has a different view of business and its relationship with business.
And that is playing out now where this is more of a business friendly. They're more interested in finding out what everybody is working on or how they can help them. So it lasts as long as it does. And then we move on to the next group. Government tends to be like a different industry. Like you're in an industry media, which I understand because I own Time magazine.
And I'm in technology as a different industry. And I also feel the government is a different industry. And having a different set of skills for every industry, just like you have a set of skills as a reporter and a journalist, or I have a set of skills as CEO of a tech company. You have to have a set of skills to operate in government. Have you seen President Trump since the inauguration? Or have you spoken to him? I haven't. I have not. Um...
And I hope to. He tried to reach out to me, but unfortunately, we didn't connect. And no, I would love to. And, you know, I am very optimistic that this will be very successful for our country and I hope for the world as well.
Yeah, and as you alluded to, you've got to, as a business, keep going through different changes and different regimes. But the Trump one feels particularly disruptive. And perhaps it's just sitting here in London, watching the tariffs emerge and seeing how panicked people are about that. How does it feel for you running a global company? As you say, you've got footprint all over the world. Do you worry about the impact on global trade? I'm not worried. I don't have that worry.
And I don't have those concerns because I remember that from his first administration that he tends to float a lot of things like a CEO might do, you know, and we kind of call it kind of wondering by walking around. We're like walking around saying a lot of things as CEOs. He tends to do float a lot of ideas and I find it to be quite creative and I
I think a lot of positive things can come out of that. But if you take everything as matter of fact, then it can be very jarring. And rather than kind of let's see where it goes. Do you feel like you know what you're dealing with this time around? I think we all should have learned. Is it difficult for your workforce, do you think?
with President Trump in power, I don't know, for women, for immigrants? Do you feel like there's a sort of message you have to deliver to them? I think my message is exactly like what I just said to you, which is everybody needs to kind of relax and take a chill pill. Because the idea is that we know that there are certain things that may be too extreme for some people, but the
Vast majority of things based on the first administration are going to be right down the middle. And that just has to be looked at and give it some time to see how it plays out. So where you haven't relaxed and taken a chill pill, I would say, over the past few months is with Microsoft.
And some of your comments about Copilot, you called it Clippy 2.0. Oh, well, it is. It is. It is Clippy 2.0. This is another medieval court moment. You don't use it yourself, so don't try to tell me you're using it. It's terrible. We're a Google house at the time. Horrible product. That's not my choice. I'm agnostic, obviously. How are you planning to try and beat Microsoft?
your big competitor? Well, I think you know, Microsoft's the number one enterprise software company in the world and we're number two. And yeah, they have taken their first swing at AI and enterprise AI with their product co-pilot. And yeah, you're right. It has disappointed a lot of customers. And I didn't say that. I said you'd criticized it.
So I would say you're right in bringing it up, that it has definitely disappointed a lot of customers. And I think that...
This idea that we are on the verge of a huge revolution, like what we were just talking about before, a huge digital labor revolution, that part is totally real. And that's why I'm so excited about our product, AgentForce, and what we're doing for ourself or for others. And we are going to work to make companies successful in incredible new ways. And yeah, it could be Heathrow Airport. It could be the Gucci call center.
It could be a lot of amazing companies that we're working with to try to make them more efficient, more productive, augment their employees. I've never seen a product become more successful faster than AgentForce. And it's, I think, because of the time we're in where AI is moving so fast and we have found a way to
That we're not, you know, basically saddled to any one particular model, like you said, you know. We can use the best of and change and help our customers go very fast using our platform. We have a deeply unified platform that includes the applications for the humans, the data,
And the agents all as one integrated software platform. That's what we've been building for the last 25 years. We have hundreds of thousands of customers with that platform. And I think for those customers, it's a very exciting time for them.
Does it make it harder though for you being a legacy business to try and make this big change into AI? I mean, isn't the danger that you could get smaller, lighter companies that could steal a march on you? Well, that's the nature of my industry that we're in. The tech industry is constantly getting lower cost and easier to use.
That's why I love it. The only constant is change. Things are constantly changing. I mean, we've gone through so many changes in the last 25 years that Salesforce has been around the cloud, social, mobile, the first generation of AI, what we call predictive or machine learning or machine intelligence. And now we're in the generative AI and now we're moving into the agent revolution. And it's not going to be that long. I've made the case that we're going to be moving into the robot revolution too, but
And all of these things are happening very fast. Can we talk a bit about Time Magazine? Because I'd love to hear about your thoughts on AI there. Have you started to use it at the newsroom at all? We have. If you look at our person of the year, which is Donald Trump. Did you choose him? No, I don't make editorial decisions. That's an agreement I have with my editorial team. But
We did choose Donald Trump and it was an incredible, successful issue, maybe the most successful ever. And you'll notice, though, if you went to time.com and if you find the story, that there's two stories. One is the one that our editors wrote. And obviously, we have a fantastic editorial team like you folks do. We have just one letter less than you on your brand. So we...
used a generative AI platform, partnered with a company that we're good friends with. And we actually built an interactive version of the story that you can interoperate with. And of course, we have the guardrails to keep you inside the story. But you should give it a try. It's cool because one story you're reading, the traditional approach, the other story you're interacting and collaborating with and
you are conversing with. And it's a different approach to journalism. It's still our journalism, by the way, both sides. So we totally wrote every word that's inside the interactive model as well. And it uses a highly advanced generative AI platform so that you feel like you're having a conversation with us. But obviously what I want to know is, are journalists safe, Mark? Are you...
Are you still going to have journalists at Time magazine? I think that they are safe. I think that they're still an incredible part of our society. And, you know, we have a need to have, I think...
this idea of trusted journalism. I think the citizen journalism components that are going on in the web and social media are fine, but I think having trusted branded journalists are also important as well. And how do you consider this issue that has come up in the last couple of years over copyright? So, you know, we've seen the New York Times suing OpenAI, for example, and Microsoft about the use of their content and their models.
Companies like mine have been doing deals with OpenAI to supply their content. There's been a real worry from the creative industries that tech companies are taking their content without paying for it. How do you see that being resolved? Yeah, well, I think that there's two components. One is that you're right. The first generation of these models, these companies came along and some of them are still operating this way.
And they stole our content, my content, your content, the work that you wrote. They literally stole it and they trained their model. So remember how the models work. The models are just these algorithms, these mathematical formulas. And they turn into models when they deeply integrate these amalgamated data sources, which are all the articles that you wrote.
And that's how it's training the model how to think, which we call tokens. And these tokens have these relationships with each other because they take your words and turn them into tokens. And then they train the model based on your story. So it can say, oh, this is how these words interoperate with each other. And then it learns all of these things. And that's then the model. And that's very interesting, isn't it? So...
This idea that they stole the data, they need to license the data that they're using to train these models. And in case some organizations like OpenAI, they have licensed Time Magazine's data. So thank you to them. And others, they have not. I think the second piece is when we get onto these platforms, especially social media,
Look, all of them need to be more responsible for what they're putting out. And in the US, we have something set called Section 230. That probably should be reframed so that there's more responsibility to the platforms. Like Time Magazine and The Times, both are responsible for what we write. Isn't that true? Yeah. Yeah. And that needs to be true for social media companies as well. So the ship, though, and the older models have sailed. Yeah.
You think the content was stolen and there's very little anyone can do about it. I think you should be compensated for your work and that if you are creating value for the world, which you do, then you should be compensated for that value. And when that value is being used by a tech company to create even greater value, you should be compensated for that value.
As we said at the beginning, we met at the Bletchley Park Summit a couple of years ago, and it was just not that long after ChatGPT launched. And everyone's very, very worried about safety. And regulation now in Europe has really tightened up around AI in a quite different way to other parts of the world. I just wonder if that affects how you see doing business in Europe at all.
I think safety is incredibly important. I think there's a lot of different approaches to safety and technology. We don't want to get to a point where we have a Hiroshima moment where we have to rein in the technology. I think when the world saw that moment with nuclear technology is when they realized they needed a
High degree of safety. I hope that with AI, we don't have to get to that, that we can come up with this on our own. And I'm not sure if that's going to happen or not. So I think we have to keep our eye on that ball. But is it difficult for you running a business around the world where you've got these pockets of different parts, which have such different rules?
No, because that's what you have to learn how to do as a business. You have to respect the geographic region that you're in. Each one has a different culture, language, business system, laws. And that's our responsibility if we're going to work there, that we're going to do business. And then we have to choose what countries we want to be in based on that. And then if we don't have the ability to interoperate there, we shouldn't be doing business in those countries.
So how are you seeing your agents rolling out for the rest of the year then? What developments have you got in the pipeline? Well, we have already moved from our first version of AgentForce to our second version that we call AgentForce 2.0. And the progress, the level of innovation, the capabilities are dramatically better than I thought they could be by this point. And I think customers are going to have an incredible opportunity
level of success. And yes, they're going to be able to put away their failures that they've had with Microsoft's co-pilot that we talked about. And instead, they will be
Looking at Salesforce's successful agent force implementations in their companies, I feel quite confident in that statement right now based on what I'm seeing with my customers. Are you and Satya Nadella talking at the moment? Yeah, we are. Or is he fed up with you firing pop shots at him? No, we're friends, actually. We just had a video conference. Oh, yeah? And then, yeah, but we're also good competitors as well. Do you call him Clippy 2.0, the boss of...
I try not to make it personal. You might notice in my comments that I'm actually, I try to be quite respectful to him and I don't believe in any kind of public humiliation. I think that it's important that like, especially in our world of social media, that we try not to do that. I'm sure we've all learned that lesson somewhere in our life, that that tends to be an incredibly negative thing, both for the person who's saying those words, it can snap back at them in some karmic way, or even for the person- They get repeated by journalists.
That it's better to, you know, not keep it personal at all. It's not appropriate. I'm just looking up now Microsoft Copilot sales because I feel that's only fair. Yeah.
to say that Copilot's actually been quite a success for Microsoft. Okay, when you look at customers who bought Copilot when it was first available, they've now expanded the number of people using it by more than 10 times over the past 18 months. And the number of people who are using it daily more than doubled quarter over quarter. But in terms of the numbers, it feels a bit unfair.
But that's his job, as you said. It's not personal. He's punching up. He said a bunch of interesting things there, like not least of which was, you know, you don't usually hear...
the CEOs of a big tech company, especially ones that are so into AI, just being like, yeah, they stole our work. It was amazing, wasn't it? Yes. And the use of that word stole because people dance around that, don't they? And it's so funny. It's like, yep, it's all stolen. Everybody should be compensated, but we're absolutely using all of these models. You know, it's a very kind of realpolitik type approach of just like, yep, all these are stolen goods.
But these stolen goods created these very useful things for our business. So we're just going to totally go, you know, all the way in on them. But I straddle both sides of the fence as well, he's saying, because he's having to deal do the deals with with Time magazine for their content, too. Yeah, exactly. It's a very interesting position to be in. And actually, I find often when we talk to tech bosses, they come down very much on one side of it.
But I feel like he can see the nuance of the argument. The other thing that I thought was hilarious that he was talking about was Heathrow and how in the future, a robot will escort you to your gate. And I'm just like...
I don't want that. Well, you might not want it, Danny, but you're a bit of a lone wolf. But what about a child or an elderly person? A child? I can see uses. Back in the day, you could send your child. You could. You could send them. I don't know if you probably still can with an air hostess.
When I got sent over to my family in Canada, that's what would happen. Yes. You get like a Paddington Bear thing around your neck, practically. Please look after this child. Exactly. But that's a human. I'm not sending my kid off like, all right, I'm going to entrust my kid to a droid, you know, walking through an airport. I think you're a better parent than I am. I'd be fine with that. Ha ha ha.
Oh my goodness. Quite reliable. But none of it's going to matter anyway. You know why? Why? Because an asteroid is coming. What? Yeah. There's an asteroid headed toward Earth and it has a 3% chance of making impact. This is a story that's come out the past few days. Okay. Which is the highest percentage chance of disaster ever.
of like ever of a an asteroid strike hitting earth it's only like 150 to 130 to 100 300 feet long but they're like it could completely destroy a city it's not going to be our last podcast because it's not coming for a few years no no we've still got time to okay you know yeah to build our audience to monetize you know all the important stuff to do in this life this episode of the times tech podcast is sponsored by vanta
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