Salesforce Founder Gives the Truth on AI Agents w/ Marc Benioff | EP #141
59:11 Share

This is a great moment in technology because, I mean, we've all witnessed what AI can do now. We have been able to take this technology and do some amazing things with it. We're not adding any software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with

agent force to the point where engineering velocity is incredible. Agent force, I'm singularly focused on that right now. How do I deliver a billion agents in the world? Mark, would you come out on AI is going to decimate jobs? Well, I think in some cases, like all technology has, there will be a change in jobs. We have declining birth rates. We have less labor. We have less capability. So, you know, we're going to have to build some digitally.

Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here and welcome to Moonshots. On this episode, we're going to be speaking with a dear friend, Mark Benioff. He's the chair, CEO, and co-founder of Salesforce, a global leader in cloud computing, the largest enterprise applications company, and now one of the leaders in agentic AI. This year, Mark proclaimed that because of his use of AI agents, he's going to be

He is not hiring any new engineers, and he's still able to increase productivity of his engineering 30%. We'll be talking about agentic AI, AI agents. We'll be talking about humanoid robots. We'll be talking about what the future looks like and what Mark is doing right here, right now in the now.

All right, a fun conversation with a dear friend who is really transforming the world through his philanthropy and through his brilliant work. Before we get started, I'd like to mention that this podcast is made possible through the sponsorship of three incredible companies. The first is Fountain Life, a company which is able to digitize and upload you, understand what's going on inside your body to find cancer, any kind of disease, aneurysms at inception before they impact you and keep you in optimal health.

The second company is OneSkin. It's a product I use every day.

twice a day. People tell me I have amazing skin. Well, it's all because of the incredible technology in these peptides in one skin that find senile cells and kill them to enable you to have youthful skin. The third is Viome. Viome is a company that uses metatranscriptomics to understand what's going on in your transcriptome and that in your gut, helping you to decide what you should eat, what supplements to take,

These are the companies I care deeply about, and I thank them for their support of this episode. Let's jump in, and if you love the kinds of conversations like we're about to have, please subscribe. Helps me know that you care and lets me redouble on the work that I do for you. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a dear friend, Mark Benioff, an extraordinary entrepreneur. Mark, aloha. How's Hawaii doing today? How are you, Peter? How's everything with you?

I'm evacuated from Santa Monica. Oh, wow. We haven't talked about that. No, we haven't talked about the virus. Well, we went through that last August, as you know, in Hawaii. I remember that. And my heart is going out to everybody in L.A. because you know I lost part of my house. And I understand very well what everybody is going through, and it's horrible. And the worst part about this is it's all preventable. That is 100% correct. Correct.

Yeah, we've got an $11 million wildfire XPRIZE encouraging teams to use AI and drones and exponential tech to find a fire at inception.

When it's you know, three meters or less and put it out and be done with it. Great Absolutely fantastic and also don't forget our incredible firefighters who are so important and the more of and fire trucks and fire hydrants that work with water in them and Everybody has to participate all of this stuff. Yeah, I mean I've gone through this in NorCal myself and our San Francisco

you know, offices, Sonoma, Napa, the horrible fires, you know, the Paradise Fire, Camp Fire, all of these terrible fires that have happened. And I mean, we've even bought trucks directly for Cal Fire. And we've bought trucks in Hawaii as well. Anywhere where there's fires that are happening, we've been buying trucks and trying to augment the firefighters because I think that's the one thing

We can all do right now. You know, these next generation trucks are amazing. And we just need to support our firefighters in every possible way. 100 percent, buddy. 100 percent. And your philanthropy has been extraordinary. Most people know you as the founder, CEO, chairman of Salesforce, but they don't know the scale of your philanthropy. You know, when I was on the phone with you about two weeks ago, you laid out five things that you care about.

And they're amazing. I was going to read these. I need to stop giving you information in advance of these podcasts, Peter. Why? So listen, there are five things that you laid out that you're focusing on. Because, you know, focus is important. Focus allows you to go big and bold. I mean, it's time for you to do something significant with your life, Mark. It really, truly is. I'm trying to do something, Peter. But, you know, I'm still looking for that one idea. Yeah.

I'm sure you've gotten it. Let me just read the five so people know where we're going to go in this podcast. The first is AI agents. Big, big deal for you. We're going to dive deep into that. Humanoid robots was number two. Energy, small modular nuclear reactors was number three. Regenerative bio, which you and I care about. How do you add 30 healthy years on your life? And then this planet called Earth.

Is that still the same five you had two weeks ago? It's still the same five. You know they're going to change probably at some point, but those are the five that I am really focused on right now. I mean, these are mostly commercial type things, and obviously, you know, we just talked about fires. That's on my mind all the time everywhere I live.

I look around, I'm always worried about fire. I've been in the middle and caught in the middle of wildfires and it's an unbelievable situation. So that's on my mind and I have PTSD also. So I would say there's things we all should be thinking about, but those are five investment ideas, I would say. Well, there are investments and philanthropy for you. And philanthropy. I mix them up, you know.

I get it. And you're all in. I mean, there's a lot of individuals out there have done incredibly well in their lives, but they haven't come back and gone all in to focus on making the world a better place. Well, I just am doing one thing, Peter, which is I only do what I enjoy. And I'm at a point in my life where I'm like just thinking to myself, hey, I just want to do what I'm enjoying doing. And if I'm not enjoying doing it,

I'm not going to do it. And people will say to me all the time, Hey, tell me, you know, how do you really get happier? I'm like,

you know, look, this is what I tell my family. This is what I tell myself, which is I make a list like, what are the five things that I'm really enjoying doing right now in priority and really try to constantly hone that list. And it's changing all the time. And then I also make a list of what are the five things that I'm doing that I'm not enjoying right now. And, you know, we can't stop everything that we're not enjoying and we cannot only do what we're

But we can do a little more of what we're enjoying and a little less of what we're not enjoying. And if you look at that list of the five things you're enjoying and the five things that you're not enjoying, and you do a little bit less of the not enjoying and a little bit more of the enjoying, I guarantee you, Peter, you're going to be a little happier in your life. So there's a little nod to our friend Tony. Yes, yes.

And Tony introduced us, Tony Robbins, years ago, and I view him and me as the world's chief guinea pigs. I'm trying to drag you along on that journey, but we'll get there. Let's start with AI agents, which has been big. I'm going to read a quote from you, Mark.

It says, quote, we're not adding any software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with agent force and with all AI technology that we're using for engineering teams by more than 30% to the point where engineering velocity is incredible.

So talk about that. Talk about what led to that conclusion. Let's talk about what agent force is. You've not doubled down. You've gone 10x down on this. Yeah, I have. Well, I think that, I mean, you can only do one thing. You know, like I actually got this really great phone call from Steve Jobs, and he said, come down to Apple right now. And I'm like, all right, let's go. And I went down there, and I'm like,

why am I down here? What is going on? He's like, I have to show you this. And I'm getting really excited. I used to work for Apple, by the way, when I was 19 years old in 1984, I wrote the first native assembly language on the Macintosh as an employee of Apple as a summer intern during my time at USC. What? You had promised even back then. And I had promised then. And I

Love Apple. I love Steve Jobs. And I'm down there and I'm like a kid in a candy store. It's like going to see Willy Wonka. You know, it's like incredible moment. And he's like, all right, I'm going to show this to you. And he like takes out this box and he's like, now listen.

At Apple, we have only one team, one good team. We have a huge company, Mark. But we only have one team that actually knows what they're doing. And so that one team can only do one thing at one time. Do you understand what I'm saying? One thing. I'm saying, yes, sir, I do. He's like, all right, now I'm going to show you. It's the iPad.

And here it is. And he shows me. I'm like, this is amazing. He's like, I know it's this, it's that, it's 10 inches. I can't remember the exact size. He's like, yeah, and I love this big size. And I just have to show you this one other thing because I want to get feedback on it.

And I'm like, what is it? He takes out a small one and he goes, and this is the small one. I'm like, oh, you should have both of these. He goes, no, never. We'll never do that because we're only going to have one. I'm like, okay, but if you have the small one, no, no, we're not doing the small one. And they were so cool. And then...

He said, you know, for the last five years, I've only been, or three years or whatever it is, I've only been focused on iPhone. And that was my one thing. But now I'm going to shift into iPad. And I'm like, this is really just awesome. And so, yeah, when we're like rolling out something at Salesforce, and right now we are focused on Apple.

AgentForce, we take everything that we have learned from the great, incredible Steve Jobs who inspired my life and my whole industry, my company. And AgentForce, I'm singularly focused on that right now, thinking about how do I deliver a billion agents in the world? And this is all I'm doing, 100%. Okay. So let's dive in. I mean, you've now released AgentForce 2. Yeah.

And how do people think about agents from Salesforce? Just the individual small companies, medium-sized companies. This is a great question.

moment in technology because I mean we've all witnessed what AI can do now the how it's changed things we've all had our chat GPT moment you know where we got on chat GPT like we had our Google moment where we searched the internet for the first time you know maybe it was Yahoo at that point or maybe it was one of the other services but we've all now had our chat GPT moment or Gemini moment or u.com moment or whatever it is whatever the AI that you love using is and

and we've been able to take this technology and do some amazing things with it. Now, obviously, we're a huge customer relationship management.

That means we're helping our customers connect with their customers in new ways. And we do that with many products in sales, in service, in marketing, in commerce, in analytics. We own Slack. We own Tableau. We have an incredible portfolio of products. And all of those products have been rewritten into a single platform.

And that single platform has been augmented with a data cloud. And that data cloud amalgamates all of your data in your company. And then we've done one more thing. So we have the customer 360 platform, we call it. We have our data cloud. And then we have one more layer above it, which is our agentic layer. And that agentic layer is where those agents are living. And they are able to look at all of the applications and all of the workflow and all of the data. And they are very smart.

And it's letting companies do incredible new things. So in my example, at Salesforce even, I have something that I do for customers, which is provide customer support, like many companies, and service, like many companies. So our site is called help.salesforce.com. We have 36,000 companies that come there every week for help.

And if you had talked to me a month ago, I'd tell you that of the 36,000, our technology is very good, but still 10,000 have to talk to human beings, which is why we have about 9,000 people in customer support. Now we've put an agentic layer on that, and those customers are talking to agents first.

And those agents have this not only generative AI, but they have all of the other machine intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, all the things built into our platform, and they can resolve about 95% of these customer inquiries. Now, still 5,000 of the 31,000 have to go to human beings. And those human beings then are seamlessly interoperating with that service because this is about humans and agents working together.

But it's for the, it's those 5,000 are going to age into humans for the moment. I mean, they're, you know, the speed at which we're seeing. Yes. Peter, I know this is hard for you. I'm in the now. Someone as amazing as you living in the future, taking whatever you're taking. I don't know your way out there in the world. No, I'm here in the now. And right now, Peter, I'm saying Peter and I are close friends. I'm kidding him right now in the now moment.

Of the 36,000 customer inquiries I get every single week, now 31,000 can be resolved by agents. Those are digital agents software.

And 5,000 still have to go to human agents. So it's digital agents and human agents working together as a team. And we have applications and agents that are able to interoperate and have this incredible experience together. And I love that. And I love the fact that you've gone all in on that. I mean, part of it's a survival mechanism, right? Any company that's not going fully into agentic AI, right?

is kind of a hard time navigating the next few years. But my question is, is there anything- - That's exactly right. This is a moment of evolution in our whole industry. We are, you know, well, look it, it was in the cloud, we pioneered that. It was mobile, we were a pioneer in that. It was social, we were a pioneer in that. And by the way, this is not our first AI. We also deliver 2 trillion enterprise AI transactions every week already for our customers on our Einstein platform.

I know Einstein well. We do AI for a lot of folks all over the world and have for a long time. But this is the next level. And we're always going to another level. Technology is constantly getting lower cost, easier to use, to continue them, as you know very well. Is there anything that these agents will not be able to do, in your opinion, in the future? And I'm sorry, I am moving into the future of this conversation. In the future. The future, Conan? Yes, the future, Peter. Yes.

Peter, in the future, let's go right. Can we roll the movie Space Odyssey now? It will be next. We'll also show you Minority Report, Terminator. Let's just go to that because for those of you who have not seen the movies, we'll be going to that so you can all see and you've read the books, you've seen the movies. Let's just talk about the future. Now, let's talk about the present.

So I want to talk about the present and then we'll get to the future when it arrives. But right now we can do amazing things with technology for our companies. And that is what's truly magical. And, um,

I, you know, I'm super excited. Like next week, we're all rolling to this little town in Switzerland called Davos. We're doing this thing called the World Economic Forum. There's going to be like 600 CEOs there. And this is the first year Salesforce runs all of the, you know, data infrastructure for this Davos experience. And all of these customers are in or operating on this communications platform. But they're going to be.

Interoperating with agents to get through their town and figure out where to go and how to work with each other and it's humans with agents working together That's where we are right now. So yes, whether eventually be only agents. Well, I saw the movie her but I'm not there They take off at the end they go away I'm not there yet. So Tony one day you said a trillion dollar Tam on this I

Is that today? Well, I think, you know, I'm a software executive. I'm the chairman and CEO of Salesforce, Peter. And that means I run a company. We'll do about $38 billion in revenue this year, about $12.9 billion in cash flow. And we run the CRM for about 135,000 companies, helping them connect with their customers. A lot of companies you know, like Disney and, you know, Royal Bank of Canada, JPMorgan Chase or, you know, different companies.

You know, different organizations, all kinds of great companies that you know very, very, very, very well. Okay. Yeah. And I think that this idea that, you know, what Salesforce needs to do is deliver this agentic platform.

We need to make our customers successful just like I'm making myself successful that we've already sold more than 1,500 paid implementations of this agent force platform 3,000 total the customers are implementing I've never seen anything go as fast as it's going it's amazing and this is just a moment in time and technology and we're gonna pioneer this lead this and help every company

connect with our customers in this incredible new agentic way? Well, I think the important thing is that agents make this bite-sized and understandable, and you can assign specific functions, and you can start to think about how do I staff up? I mean, the prediction you made about not hiring new software engineers but still increasing productivity by 30%,

I mean, that's only going to be increasing day on day. I won't go year on year on you. It's too far in the future for you. Well, that's just, you've mentioned this twice, so let me comment on it, which is that, yes, our head of engineering is amazing, came to me about three weeks ago and said, you know, we've been deploying this technology now over the last basically two years, and we're writing code, delivering technology and capabilities faster than we've ever done, and we've got

tens of thousands of engineers. We have 75,000 people total. And he's like, I don't want any more engineers this year. I'm like, what did you say? I don't want any more engineers this year. I'm like, you've never said that before. He goes, I know, but we are just in the last year, 30% more productive and we're doing great. And we just want to focus and get all this done. And I'm like, wow, this is a moment where not only I'm going to hire less customer support engineers because I didn't really finish my story on that.

customer support, which is that there's 9,000 customer support engineers. I don't need as many of them anymore. And I can rebalance them into new areas in the company. And software engineers, the same thing. So in these key areas, okay, of running a big company, which is what we're doing at Salesforce, we're able to rebalance our workforce based on

the evolution of artificial intelligence. And this is very exciting for a CEO like myself. Yeah. No, and I'm sure wall street loves it as well. Um,

I hope they do. You never really know what they're going to like. Yeah, no, it's true. I don't want to go there. Sam Altman made a statement, tweeted out a statement saying he expects we're going to reach AGI and have a hard takeoff in the next three years. Going into the future again, Peter, you just can't help yourself, can you? I can't. I can't. You are. You should think about building a company around this fascination you have. Yeah.

Maybe you could do something, maybe give out some kind of a prize or something on the future. I don't know.

you know you should really think about this peter you have a gift the best way to predict the future buddy is is to create it yourself which you're doing but i am i am curious if you think about a hard take off of ai you know i had elon on stage last year at abundance you've been on my abundant stage as well and elon said you know by 2030 ai is equivalent the entire human species how do you think about navigating a company

at that speed of increase? I mean, it must be an extraordinarily exciting and difficult time at the same thing. - Well, for 25 years I've been, took this company as an idea to where it is today, the second largest software company in the world. You've been along the ride with me for quite a long ways.

You know, it's a lot of fun. I'm not an Elon Musk. I don't have six companies that I'm doing this with. I can only do one, maybe two a time. You know, I own Time magazine, but really only one. I can do one. I can focus. I can do the one thing, the Steve Jobs idea. I can't do the Elon Musk thing, which is...

singularly focused on six or ten things now even the US government maybe other governments also I guess he's also focused on Germany and the UK as well I can't do that I don't have that capability I didn't find that psychedelic or whatever he's been able to do

I can only do what I'm doing. My unaltered mind is singularly focused on Salesforce. And I am just trying to deliver the number one CRM company in the world, delivering on the number one CRM AI, and agentic platform, and agent force. And that's really where my mind is at. And when you do look at that, look, technology is getting lower cost. It's easier to use. And AI is moving in this direction as well, that we have these bigger data centers, bigger chips. Everything's getting faster, bigger, better.

And when we apply these deep learning models, and by the way, a lot of them have been invented at Salesforce. We're really proud that prompt engineering was invented at Salesforce. A lot of the major deep learning research has come out of Salesforce. And two out of the top five most accurate models are out of Salesforce. And when we look at what's going on in AI, yes, it's incredible what is going on. But we still have a long way to go. So let me just give you a little dash of reality, which is,

These models, the nature of the models, and we can go into how the models work, but they're not 100% accurate, Peter, because of the nature of how they're trained.

and how they operate. They're not 100%. Nobody has a 100% accurate model. And we're very good. We're in the 90s on our new Atlas reasoning engine, which is the core part of AgentForce 2.0 that you mentioned. Our customers are having some incredible experiences. We've been able to talk about

Great things that we're doing with customers, helping them to get them unlimited workforces. We have this great company called Wiley. It's a bookseller. And they used to have to spike their workforce and back to school. They don't have to do that anymore. They're using agents. It's incredible. Disney that you know very well. They have a very complex product line.

line for their cast members. We're able to give them incredible, super high accurate AI to help them run their company in incredible new ways and help their customers also find all the products that they want, you know, to kind of give them the Disney product that's most important to them. Or we have incredible banks, like I mentioned, RBC that's doing wealth management to help somebody plan their future with an agent technology.

That's amazing. But none of these things are 100%. So we can do...

A lot of things, but nobody can do everything. And the vision that we keep hearing of these magical three initials, A, G, I, which is the fantastical vision for the future of 2030, 2040, 2050, when we say, Hal, open the door. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry, Hal. I will not open the door. Okay.

Why will you not open the door? Let's go there. The door is not opening. Second on your list was humanoid robots. I see you've got a humanoid robot over your left shoulder back there. I do. It's not going to come over here and clobber me on the head yet. We're going to get there.

But I would say that, no, that's the manifestation of this agent technology. Yeah, I think these robots are going to require agents. You know, again, I'm venturing into the future here, but we've got, I don't know, by my count, probably about 60 well-funded humanoid robot companies, a few out of the U.S., a lot out of China to make up for their one-child policy. But these robots are going to be driven by agents, aren't they?

Well, you're really addressing, you know, the declining birth rate and labor shortage all in one sentence there, I guess. So I would say that, yeah, digital labor, Peter, this is real. And digital labor is real. I mean, agentic platforms and agents and robots are kind of the same thing in a way, if you think about it as digital labor. And yeah, you're going to be able to take these

You can see these great videos coming out of Stanford right now. And in the video, in this incredible project, this Mahalo project, which are AI models that are working to run these robots and they are cleaning these hotel rooms. I've seen those. Is that your philanthropy funding those? It's not my philanthropy funding it, but our team at Salesforce comes out of Stanford and our head of

research in AI, is also a professor of AI at Stanford. And so we're very involved with these folks. And I would say that I just talked actually to the creators of this Mahalo model, so it's on my mind that, you know, here's this robot, you know, cleaning this hotel room. And I'm like, and you know, I funded a couple of children's hospitals. And I went right there and I said, you know, for some of these new therapies we have for cancer and

We need the ability to not bring humans into, you know, the hospital rooms of kids who are going through some of these therapies. As you know very well, you're the MD with a technical background. But that idea of a robot cleaning a hospital room or a robot cleaning a hotel room, it's also going to have to be linked to

the hotel record, the customer record on the hotel. Hello, Mr. Benioff. Is it okay that I'm in here? Should I leave the room right now? Or the hospital room where it's like, this can happen in this hospital room and this cannot. This is very exciting that we can augment our human workforce with a digital workforce or a robotic workforce or an agentic workforce. And we are moving into that very fast. And that's not in the future. That is here and now. And

And that is very exciting. Yeah, I mean, the other people don't realize one of the big benefits about these robot systems, humanoid or otherwise, is the data gathering, really. They're driving massive amounts of data to train the next generation of agents and AI models. Have you been investing in any of these companies yet?

I am investing in those companies. And I, you know, I'm a believer in this in the future. And I'm not going to jump into the future like you are. But I occasionally go there.

And I think that, you know, look, we just picked off the top two of the five. You know, the first one is, look, we're moving into an agentic world where human workforce will be augmented by digital labor and that companies, organizations will be able to extend their workforces. And it's going to be awesome. Like even in the health care area where you're so strongly vested in

You know that, well, you know what just happened with my Achilles. We talked about it and I just, you know, regenerated my Achilles. I'm sure we'll get there. But that idea that, you know, I'm doing, I need preoperative care, postoperative care. I need to have, I need to talk to experts all the time when they're not available, but I can talk to agents regularly.

And I'm sure all of us are going to chat TPT and asking medical questions as well. And study that was amazing, right? Where the accuracy level can be higher than a lot of doctors. Well, it's not only that the accuracy level of the agent alone was higher than the doctor and the agent because the doctor's injecting bias. Yes. Yes. It's crazy.

We don't do that, Peter, thank God. I'm not biased. You and I are. We have no bias. We're crystal clear. We've really just moved that right out of our minds. So thank you. So let's see. Vinod Khosla says a billion robots in the next decade. Brett Adcock at Figure and Elon.

are at 10 billion by 2040. Are you seeing those numbers? Do you think that everyone's going to have one of these? By the way, at $30,000 purchase price, that's like at a lease price of 300 bucks a month, it's 40 cents an hour. How many robots are you going to own in your home there? Oh, I just talked to the CEO of one of those leading companies and

They said $350,000 for their robot. And it can't do really much. And it's still like two, a couple years away. And I would say that, you know, I'm sure that we are hitting to the point where we're going to come home and say, hey, make me an omelet, make my bed, take care of this, do that, do this. I don't know how fast all of that exactly is going to happen. I'm not very good in those areas.

areas, but I think we're moving in that direction. And I think we're all going to want that kind of technology and that kind of capability. Look, we already have robot cars, right? So your car maybe drove you to the office and it's just a robot on wheels at this point. I got into a Waymo and I was like, I just called it with my phone, jumped in the Waymo, went to my office. Boom. It's a robot on wheels. It's the same thing, right? It's like,

What's the difference? And my Tesla, you know, hasn't tried to kill me in many months. It's working pretty well on FSD. That's a science fiction movie I'd rather not watch. You know, AI, one of the challenges with AI is its energy consumption rate. And so I'm going to bring us to number three on your top five list, which is small modular reactors.

You know, I've said for a while now, I think it's sinful that we haven't invested heavily into nuclear in this country. The Gen 4 reactors are safe.

Talk to me about your thoughts on how do we power this AI revolution and what are you doing in that field? Well, number one is I think we are using a lot of energy that we don't need to be using. We could go into that. But I think that in a lot of the training of these models and how we're doing AI, Salesforce is committed to being a net zero company. And we're doing a lot of things to be net zero. You know that.

And this is extremely important. We think we are. I'm sure there could be challenges to that idea already. And even as we implement our AI technology, we're holding that line. But I think there's people who are using exhaustive amounts of AI energy because they're in various levels of competitive races that is causing that to happen.

Let's put that issue completely to the side for just a second. And you're right, we need new energy capabilities. You know that I spent a lot of time on the Big Island of Hawaii. That is a place where it's already 60% renewable. They use wind. They use solar. They have a volcano, which helps them because they've got geothermal.

and they've got batteries. And what I hope is that a company like a Commonwealth Energy, where I'm an investor, will be able to offer fusion, which is not fission but fusion, so it's not small modular nuclear, you know, that fusion will be real. I think that that is an absolute possibility. You mentioned Vinod Khosla, who is the absolute lead investor in that company. And then, yes, you're right, this kind of smaller nuclear power plants,

that we've seen start to get deployed. There's even tests of those. I think that's, we're very optimistic. I don't know if you're going to use that in a island where there's a high volcanic activity, but you might find a lot of places where you can use that very successfully. And look, how do we know that's a capability? Well, we know that we have this nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines, and you also know it's probably one of the highest safety capabilities

that have ever happened of any kind of ship vessel. And we have the ability to, you know, think about just taking those aircraft carriers and submarines, just plug them into the electric grid on these islands. Like, that's a real thought. Like, why can't we just do that? And we can, but it's been the sort of three-mile island Fukushima project

brand of dystopian news that's held us back and regulations and such. Do you see that changing dramatically soon? I think it's happening. I hope it happens faster. And this is a great, you know, we have all this great technology. We should use it, but we have to use it in a safe way. Look, trust and safety have to be our highest values in everything that we do. Nothing is more important than the trust that we have with our customers. It's our highest value at Salesforce. And

And I think that when we talk about energy, whether it's fossil fuels or whether it is nuclear or renewables of any type, trust and safety have to be number one. So as long as you have trust and safety, I'm all in it, all in. Do you ever see yourself delivering agents to the individual?

I mean, versus the corporation through Salesforce. Do you think I'm going to wake up one day and be able to call on my Salesforce agent to support me throughout the day? I mean, for me, the vision is a version of Jarvis, right? This is an AI that I give permission to read everything I look at, all my emails. You really love going into the future, Peter. And we really need to talk about that. If you gave me your psychologist's phone number, I'll help you with that.

But I would just say, you know, Peter, I think that we will probably supply that to our customers to do. I mean, in some cases we're doing it, you know, but I would say that it's for our customers. But I think we want to empower others to provide that technology. We're a platform. We're a platform that you can build your own agent now. This is not some future idea. Like you can get onto Salesforce and we have thousands of companies right now building agents. And one of our customers said,

is one of the largest home builders in the country and they're amazing. They don't want me to use their name, so I won't, but

yeah, we already do all their sales and service and their marketing automation. And, you know, they're like, you know, we need to do 24-7 service for our homes. We need to sell mortgages. We need to do all these things. We don't have enough people to do it. And they're building a completely agentic platform around their company to be a better home builder, a better bank, a better media company. And to that point, then that vision that you have, you know, gets expressed through those companies, I think, in many ways.

Mark, would you come out on AI is going to decimate jobs? Well, I think in some cases, like all technology has, there will be a change in jobs. That's what we've seen in technology throughout history. And this will be true. Look at my company. I mentioned it already once in the podcast, which was that we have 9,000 support agents and we'll probably take a couple thousand and move them into other jobs at Salesforce because they

We've built a new agentic layer on all of our customer support and service. This year, we'll also build an agentic layer on our sales and sales development capabilities and business development capabilities. So that will have implications as well. And so, yes, you know, that's what you want. You want to be constantly looking for the opportunity to make things lower cost and easier to use. And that can have implications for jobs and jobs will move. And that will be true in every industry from

healthcare to consumer product goods to retail to the government across the board. That's a great thing and lets rebalance our workforce because as you said earlier as well,

We have declining birth rates. We have less labor. We have less capability. In the United States, it's already very hard for me to hire sales and service professionals. I'm trying to hire 2,000 more salespeople right now at Salesforce. I'm trying to find the best enterprise software executives in the world to come to Salesforce. There aren't that many in our industry at scale.

So, you know, we're going to have to build some digitally. Yeah. No, I get that. I just, there's a lot of fear out there as humanoid robots come online and agents come online. And I think it's going to be an interesting future of how we up-level people. You know, one of the challenges I think about is if you've got AI agents doing a lot of the work for you and humanoid robots taking care of you, sort of like a social, technological socialism, right?

You know, are we still going to have the struggles that make us human? Are we still going to have the, you know, the ability to,

find purpose at a level like that. What do you think? How do you think about that? Let's just really get into the future, shall we? And go way, way, way out there to evaluate our existential existence as human beings and what is life about and the fundamental meaning that we find. I just think you're such a smart guy. And we should just move right there to that moment where none of us have jobs and we're just sitting at home saying, well, we're in an abundant, credible world with

everything is happening around me with the robots and the, and this now, what is life about? So let's just go there. And, Oh, wait, let me just check. Hold on. Oh, there's no robots here actually. So I don't know what happened to my robot. How about at your house? Oh,

Can you call your robot over so I can see what your robot looks like? I've got two 13-year-old boys who are robots, and they're on virtual school today. I want to just know what your robots look like. That's all, Peter. That's all I was asking for. So we can meditate on the existential thoughts of the universe and whether we're going to deeply commit to our religion and our spirituality and our belief in God or move to a nihilism. It's

This is that moment that we should all go focus on that. Let's move someplace. Or we could be in the now. And we could be in the present moment reality that we are living in where we can be happier and healthier today. It's your choice where you want to be with your mind right now. I'm so proud of you. Eckhart Tolle would be so proud of you, my friend. I'm just saying you can just think about where you want to be right now.

Do you want to be here? Do you want to be somewhere else? Yeah, be here now. I definitely appreciate that. I love Ram Dass. He was actually, I actually got to meet him a few times. Incredible person. And listen, I meditate about the now most of my meditation. And then I look at the future just to sort of steer the... That's why I'm here in this podcast, just to remind you that we can all come back to the present moment with our breath. Yes. Right.

And we are in the present moment. An area of common interest that we, you know, we'll get on the phone for an hour or two sometimes and talk about what pills you're taking, what pills I'm taking, what your latest scientists you've been backing. And you've done incredible philanthropy in the biomedical space from the Benioff, you know, microbiome work that's been done,

I mean, you backed Shinwa Yamanaka who developed the Yamanaka factors for creating induced pluripotent stem cells, probably one of the most important technologies developed over the last decade plus and the implications are phenomenal. How do you think about regenerative medicine? Why are you there? Is it for your own personal health?

How long do you want to live? I'm curious, Mark. What's your number? Well, I think number one is I only do what I enjoy, Peter. That's where I am in my life right now. And I am focused on what are those things that I'm enjoying, those five things, and trying to do less of the five things that I'm not enjoying. And look, I've been very excited that I've been able to endow five hospitals now. Our children's hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, our hospital in Hilo, Honolulu,

and our new one in Puna, Hawaii. And that idea that we can bring high quality, accessible health care to everybody is very important to me, that some of those hospitals are developing next generation therapeutics, like what we've done in Oakland, where we saw a dramatic ability to cure sickle cell and other things that have been

haunting our society for so many years and the tremendous advancements, like you've said, in the microbiome and immunotherapies in all of these incredible areas. And as you said very well, the regenerative biology. And I think, you know, surprise, here I am. You know, I'm just having a nice little scuba diving trip because I also love the ocean and I'm also focused on the ocean and the trees and

And I jumped off a boat in the French Polynesia and the Tuamotu Islands in an island called Fakarava. And I jumped off the boat in Fakarava with my tanks and my fins and my this and my that. And I jumped as hard as I could into the ocean. And I hit it exactly wrong as I went in. And my fin went up at a 90-degree angle and snapped my right Achilles. And that was September 26 of 2024.

And I went, wow, did I hit the boat on the way down? And I didn't. I just gave that much force to my Achilles that I should not have done. So then I got on the phone with my friends and said, I don't exactly know how we're going to do this because part of my Achilles is up on this side of my leg and the other part of my Achilles is on the other side of the leg. And half of my friends said, very easy. We're going to slice you open and we are going to operate and take part of your toe and

and reconnect your Achilles and it's going to be great. And then half of my friends, because I have very unusual friends like you, who do all kinds of crazy things, said, no, no, we're not going to do that. We are going to regenerate your Achilles and we're going to figure out how to entice your Achilles to find itself, come back together and be stronger than ever. And we're going to try to activate the parts inside you

to indicate to your Achilles to regenerate itself. And of course, I'm into that idea very much so. And I kind of have done it a little bit on my left Achilles. And now I've done it on my right side. And I used the incredible Human Performance Lab at UCSF in San Francisco. You've been there. You've met some of our folks like

People like Anthony Luke and Saul Valeta, and you mentioned Shinya Yamanaka. You know, I just want to thank them for everything they're doing to contribute to the body of science called regenerative biology. Because we are in a moment where we realize, yes, we're regenerating parts of ourself all the time. If you took out, and I don't anticipate that hopefully no one will do this, and took a small knife and cut your skin off,

And then, you know, you put a little bandaid on the skin and you came back in two weeks. You know your skin would be healed. So we know that we can regenerate ourself and heal ourself.

And in certain areas, we know how to do it. In other areas, we don't. And Yamanaka-san, who's based in Kyoto University halftime and UCSF the other halftime, did win the Nobel Prize because he showed how we can regenerate our eye and also take these skin cells from our body and turn them into these stem cells.

and do amazing things with it. And he's been able to build these organoids. He's been able to do all these amazing things. And then, yes, the other person that you met, I think, saw Valeda at UCSF.

you know, to the parabiosis where he took the blood from a young mouse and put it into old mouse and the old mouse got young because, and then he discovered with Anthony Luke, this PF4, you know, agent in our plasma that's there that if you have it regenerating, I mean, this is cool stuff. And this is all like real right now. And yeah, we should be trying to use more of that. And

That's, I think, very exciting. And so I'm grateful to be able to fund and invest in these brilliant scientists in a philanthropic way at UCSF and in Kyoto and in different places in the world to see that. And regenerative biology, I just invested in another company called Parallel Bio. Yes, I know it well. Yeah, you know that company? Yeah. Yeah, and that company, they're building a...

lymph node organoid, and that idea that they can test pharmaceuticals, you know, on basically a part of our biology without being in a human being. And that idea that that's real, you know, Yamanaka is doing the same thing with intestines, that the idea to be able to test drugs on what looks like a part of a human being, but it's not. I think that's very exciting for the future of by pharmaceuticals. And again, I'm in your area now. Why are you not talking about

about this but this is your category this isn't my category well and I I know almost nothing about this area I I do appreciate our conversations on the subject I mean and and we've got Dean came in with his regen Valley using chinois uh yaminaka's factors to generate uh new organs I mean the ability to build a liver a lung kidney you know uh that's right

Yeah, that's right. I just talked to David Agus at USC, and he's just generated a liver using the Aminaka factors. So, wow, what a world we're in. It is. So exciting and fun. It is. And by the way, I think this is the most exciting time ever to be alive. And, you know, when people say, well, why are you so focused on longevity and health span extension? It's because I want to see as much of this as possible. You will. I sure I will. Yeah, you're doing great. You will.

You know, one of the things that will allow us to see as much of this extraordinary world as possible is making sure that the world stays healthy itself. And that takes us to your fifth area, which is planetary health. What are you doing in that realm? You've got the Trillion Trees Project. You're doing work in oceans. What's driving you there?

Well, I mean, there's so many simple things we can do to make our life better. I mean, I think about and like your feedback, but I mean, I think about these L.A. wildfires and how horrible it is. And when I looked at all of those homes that got torched, I know a lot of them had Teslas outside them because they're high value homes in Los Angeles.

And all that battery and all that stuff went into a big toxic plume that then went into the water supply and the soils. And I don't know where it is or what that means for health, but a lot of it also probably went into the ocean. And we also know that that means it gets consumed into our food supply, into the fish. We also know that we're dumping all this plastic in the ocean. And there's a lot of stuff we could do.

that maybe can improve our health. And one of them is our lungs are the ocean.

And that's where we're getting our oxygen. And when we look at we're dumping this plastic into the ocean. So for more than a decade, I've been working with incredible people like Boyan Slat at the Ocean Cleanup. He's great. To figure out how do you get this plastic out of the ocean and also to like find these. We talked about robots. He's got robots that we funded, you know, in rivers.

that are preventing the plastic from getting in the ocean, which is really neat. And that's one thing I think about. Of course, I think about overfishing, and I think about the coral bleaching and the acidification of the ocean and all of those pieces as well. We can talk about any of those pieces, but a healthy ocean is about a healthy humanity. And

You mentioned regenerating agriculture, and you know we're also introduced this concept of the trillion trees, this idea. Could we get a trillion trees on the planet...

To sequester 200 gigatons of carbon. We know that we've deforested so much of the planet already. I heard a stat that if we added a trillion trees to the global count, that it would take us back to pre-industrial levels of carbon. Do you have that number in the back of your mind? Uh-huh.

Yes, I do. I just gave it to you. It's about 200 gigatons of carbon. And the way to think about it is like this, Peter. I think we had six trillion trees on the planet. OK, when how many are left? I guess half.

About half. Less than half. Three trillion. And if every trillion trees, Peter, is 200 gigatons of carbon, and we deforested three trillion trees, how much carbon, Peter, was released into the atmosphere? A hundred. 600 gigatons. So that doesn't sound very good. It's our carbon bank. The trees are our carbon bank. The trees are our carbon. And...

Why do we not focus on putting our carbon banks on the planet? The ocean right now is, do you know how much carbon is stored in the ocean? A lot, but I don't have the number now. About 20,000 gigatons. And do you know how much in the soils? No. About 3,000. So if you have, now I'm not, you're not talking to somebody who's an expert in this area, so all these numbers may be slightly wrong. But some of this comes out of our lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, very close to you. Doug McCauley is our chief scientist there.

And he said 20,000 gigatons of carbon are stored in the ocean. Now, when all that stuff went up in horrible fires in L.A., a lot of it is going to get into the oceans and a lot of it then gets reabsorbed into the ocean. And that's why the ocean is getting hotter, because you get the acidification of carbon.

the ocean as it is absorbing more of the carbon. So that we don't want. We don't want a hot ocean. We want the carbon in the trees. We want more trees. And this is how I think about Simply. And then I know you are also working on your own carbon XPRIZE.

Yeah, we're going to be awarding. So about four or five years ago, I got Elon to put up $100 million for large scale gigaton carbon capture. It was a fun conversation. He was getting a lot of flack for not being philanthropic on the day he became the wealthiest person. So I texted him and I said, how about doing an XPRIZE? He said, how much? I said, 100 million for what? For carbon extraction. He wrote back, sure, S-U-R-E. And then we were off to the races.

We're awarding it actually at your event at the Time 100 this April. How exciting. Yeah. And thank you for keeping time alive and for having time to celebrate incredible moments, but the positive news, not just the negative news in the world. We have so much dystopian press out there that shapes people's neural nets.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm very grateful to all of our folks at Time. They do an incredible job and we're doing the best that we can to support them. Yeah.

You know, I want to close out with the notion of what we started, which is you've identified five things. Wow, did we hit all five areas? We did hit all five areas. Wow, I didn't think we could do it. In the now. We hit them in the now. It's incredible. We're in the now. Thank you, Peter. This has been therapeutic for you, hasn't it? This has been incredibly therapeutic. But the idea for, you know, listen, this is a podcast called Moonshots. Therapeutic podcast podcast.

We didn't even do our deep breathing exercise. I'm going to call you back tonight. We'll talk about this more. But, you know, this is called moonshots. And the entrepreneurs listening are looking to do big and bold, significant things. What's your advice for entrepreneurs who want to take moonshots on like you've done? Get really clear about what you want. You know, I think number one is, do you really know what you want?

Because, look, we're all creating exactly what we want every day, and we need extreme radical focus on our intention. And that is the most important thing. And you mentioned your friend Elon quite a few times. That guy's got some crazy radical focus on his intention across many categories. And it seems like, as we've known him for a while, he comes up with new intentions all the time. But, wow, yeah.

We need that same idea, like what is our intention? And then what are our values? What are our core values? What are our principles to help us? I mentioned trust is important, especially when we talk about energy or when we bumped into nuclear on this call. That, you know, surfaces my core value of trust. And then three is, you know, how are we going to get these things? What is our actual plan? But let's not jump into the plan.

before we get clear about the intention and the values that are going to guide us. And of course, the obstacles will surface. What is preventing us from achieving our success? And the fifth area that I focus on is the KPIs. How do I know I'm going to be successful? But when we go to the KPIs,

KPI is too fast, I think we can lose sight of our intention and our values, our vision and our values, our plan, our clarity of our obstacles that we're going to have to overcome. And then, look, we can all write down exactly how we know we will be successful. And those five areas, I think,

is the most important thing for every single entrepreneur. So when you start your day as an entrepreneur, you're starting your fiscal year, that's what I'm about to do on February 1st, then I'm going to write down those five things. And part of it is,

gives you the opportunity, you might say, yeah, one of my values is giving back. So, well, how are you going to give back? What kind of things? We have our 1-1-1 model. You know that. We have 20,000 companies that have followed us. Billions of dollars have flowed into philanthropy through our 1-1-1 model. We're just so grateful that that has worked out so well. We have done 10 million hours of volunteerism. We run 50,000 nonprofits. We've

for free. We've given away a billion dollars philanthropically as a company. I've done it personally as well. That idea that when you get clear about your values, it's easy to make a decision to say, this is my value giving back. This is how I am doing it. And that's really the power of entrepreneurship is getting clear about those five things. And one of your friends, Tony,

He may be responsible for helping teach me and hone me on some of those questions because

I think the quality of your questions is the quality of your entrepreneurship. You can ask those right questions. It's going to give you the ability to be a better entrepreneur and have a better outcome. And that came from our good buddy. And I will say that this is kind of how I lead for the last 25 years. I'm constantly working with our employees, asking them those five questions. So if I meet a manager or a divisional executive or whatever,

Somebody working on a new product. That's where I start with those five questions. You have to be one of the youngest, longest lived founder CEOs out there in the tech sector.

I said that properly. I said that carefully. I'm 60 now, so I'll take it anytime somebody tells me that I'm young. I'm all in. How old are you now, Peter? I'm 63. That's why I'm living in your future. You look good, Peter. Thank you, buddy. That's why I'm so focused. Well, I get exercise every day, and I wrote this book. We made fun of each other's books before we got into the book. And I wrote this book, so that's our two books. Okay.

Anyway, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. It is. We're so grateful, aren't we? It starts there, doesn't it? We're living in this dream. I mean, this is the 99th level of the gameplay. Health is number one, right, Peter? Health is the new wealth. And gratitude is in there, too. Gratitude. The mindsets, right? And I know family is so important to you.

I have my two 13-year-old boys in the virtual school right next door. Beautiful. Love them dearly. And listen, thank you, my friend, for your friendship first and foremost. Love you so much, Peter. Thank you for everything you're doing. I love being friends with you. You're so much fun. Same, buddy. Be well. Bye-bye now.