• Salesforce isn't investing as much in AI as some of its competitors, and its CEO likes it that way.
• Marc Benioff said some of its rivals are in "a race to the bottom" with "excessive" AI spending.
• Benioff's plan? "I'm going to take advantage of their spending to make my products better," he said.

Salesforce's CEO says the company isn't spending as lavishly on AI as some of its tech peers — and he isn't worried about falling behind.

Instead, Marc Benioff says the company will capitalize on the vast AI spending gap between it and some of its competitors and avoid a "race to the bottom."

"I think they're going to keep spending and it's going to be expensive for them and it's going to drive their margins down," he said on a Monday episode of the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast. "I'm going to take advantage of their spending to make my products better and lower cost and easier for my customers."

Salesforce offers multiple enterprise AI products, including Agentforce, its newly announced suite of AI agents that automate workplace tasks, and its AI Cloud, which hosts LLMs from partners like Amazon Web Services. It also offers Einstein Copilot, a generative AI-powered assistant for customer relationship management.

The Salesforce CEO said "the way we've architected our platform" has allowed the company to spend less on AI and its AI models "are incredibly efficient."

"We do things a little differently, the way we train, the way we write the software," he said. "And also we tend to use other people's data centers, so we will use Amazon and Google and others and not rely on too much of our own hardware — although we have some, it's not our philosophy."

Benioff said some of Salesforce's competitors were "excessive" with their AI spending and "it's becoming a race to the bottom for some of these companies."

"While there is a big movement of a lot of companies into these kind of public clouds I think that we have to be careful exactly how much we're investing," he added.

It's not clear exactly how much Salesforce has invested in its own AI efforts. However, the company's research and development costs for the third quarter were $1.35 billion, a year-over-year increase of around 12.6%.

Benioff said the spending by Salesforce's rivals was evident in the companies' energy use, which he said should also be managed. He also highlighted that some have invested in nuclear energy and nuclear power plants.

"This is really an unusual development," he said.

Some of the biggest names in tech have announced major deals to source nuclear energy to power their data centers.

Meta a few days ago said it's putting out a request for proposals from nuclear energy developers in a bid to help power its AI ambitions and sustainability initiatives. In September, Microsoft inked a 20-year power purchase agreement with energy company Constellation in a deal that would bring part of Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear energy accident in the US, back online. In October, Google announced a deal to buy nuclear energy from small modular reactors to be built by Kairos Power.

While Wall Street has been keen to hear from CEOs when the billions invested in AI will start bearing fruit, there are signs the spending isn't slowing down.

Meta said in its latest earnings report that it expects "a significant acceleration in infrastructure expense growth next year" and "significant capital expenditures growth in 2025," owing in no small part to its work on AI. Microsoft's CFO similarly said in its recent quarterly earnings that the company expected its own capital expenditure to increase owing to demand for its cloud and AI services.

Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity AI, touched on a similar sentiment as Benioff when he said in a recent talk at Stanford that building proprietary AI models is extremely costly and his startup would much rather build off of other firms' models.

"We had a conviction that, number one, models are going to get increasingly commoditized and if you do want to be one of those players that are a provider of the models, you need to have an insane amount of funding and you need to be a company that is losing billions of dollars a year and it's still fine," he said.

"We were not in a position to be and we didn't want to be either," the Perplexity CEO said. "So we decided to use other people's models and shape them to be really good for end-to-end consumer experience."

• Salesforce's stock rose 10% after hours Tuesday after beating third-quarter revenue expectations.
• On the earnings call CEO Marc Benioff stressed the importance of digital labor and AI agents.
• Benioff said humans are already working with AI agents and that robots will be next.

The future is here and it's humans working alongside robots, according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Salesforce reported its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, beating revenue expectations and sending the stock price up around 10% as of market close on Wednesday.

During the earnings call, Benioff made it clear he's all in on Agentforce, the company's service that clients can use to build AI-powered agents. AI agents, which can operate computers and complete tasks that might otherwise require human hands, have been touted by some as the next big thing in generative AI.

Benioff seems to agree.

Agentforce became generally available in late October and allows companies to create their own custom AI agents. Benioff said the company delivered 200 deals in that first week and that he expects demand for AI agents to increase, calling Salesforce the "largest supplier of digital labor."

Benioff said some Salesforce clients already building out their digital labor force include FedEx, Adecco, Accenture, Ace Hardware, IBM, and RBC Wealth Managements.

Benioff said that in addition to humans working alongside AI agents, they'll soon be working alongside robots as well.

"On top of this agentic layer, we'll soon see a robotic layer as well where these agents will manifest into robots," he said, adding, "These agents are not tools. They are becoming collaborators."

Benioff has previously said he thought the "upper limits" of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT, had been reached and that the future was AI agents.

Salesforce isn't the only tech company focusing on agents. Microsoft helps customers create agents through its AI studio, Copilot. Meta is working on agents, Google its making AI agents with Gemini, and Bloomberg recently reported OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, plans to launch AI agents next year.

Benioff also said on the earnings call that the rise in digital labor means "productivity is no longer tied to workforce growth, but to this intelligent technology that can be scaled without limits."

"This isn't just some far off future," he added, "It's happening right now."

• On an analyst call, Marc Benioff described an injury he sustained recently while on a trip to Fakarava.
• The Salesforce CEO brushed off the incident and highlighted early traction for Agentforce.
• Wall Street sees Agentforce's success as crucial for Salesforce's growth.

There's nothing like an AI-powered stock surge to take your mind off other problems.

Late on Tuesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described a painful injury he sustained recently while visiting Fakarava, a remote atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

"Everybody knows I've been wearing a boot because I ruptured my Achilles on a scuba-diving trip to Fakarava, which is an incredible place in the Tuamotus in French Polynesia, for my birthday," he said during an earnings conference call with analysts.

Benioff brushed it off swiftly, though.

"I'm sure we all know the international motto of Fakarava, which I have close to my heart, which is 'I don't give a Fakarava,'" he joked.

The CEO has reason to be in a buoyant mood. Salesforce stock jumped 9% to a record on Wednesday.

The company's $9.44 billion third-quarter revenue was up 8% compared with the same quarter last year, beating Wall Street expectations.

More importantly, Benioff shared some early signs of positive traction for Salesforce's latest AI product, Agentforce, which helps customers design AI agents.

The CEO said Salesforce "delivered" 200 deals for this new generative-AI offering after it became generally available in the last week of the quarter.

This is a far cry from the challenges Benioff grappled with back in 2022. It was two years ago nearly to the day that Salesforce announced Bret Taylor, the co-CEO and likely successor to Benioff, would step down. Activist investors, including Starboard Value, were pushing Salesforce to improve profit margins.

"This call is the two-year anniversary of our transformation," Benioff said on Tuesday's call. "It's been a financial transformation, and it's been a technology transformation."

Benioff pointed to AI investments over the past two years, the integration of its core customer-relationship-management platform, and the increase in the number of engineers at the company.

In an October presentation, Starboard said Salesforce had significantly expanded operating margins and improved growth, but it added that the company could "continue to become more efficient and more profitable." Starboard also said Agentforce had the potential to improve revenue growth.

Benioff boasted that Agentforce had an "incredible" pipeline of future transactions, but Salesforce still needs to prove it can get customers to buy the product, which has been a challenge for many generative-AI tools so far.

Benioff touted what he called Salesforce's "unfair advantage" over other generative-AI tools because Agentforce is grounded on customer data, such as purchases and returns.

He also took the latest in a series of recent jabs at Microsoft's generative-AI assistant, Copilot, calling it a "repackaged ChatGPT," meaning a derivative of the chatbot made by Microsoft's partner and competitor OpenAI. A Microsoft executive recently responded to Benioff's jabs in an interview with Business Insider, saying, "History tells us that when competitors talk about you, it's because they're behind."

In written remarks after the Salesforce earnings call on Tuesday, the Third Bridge analyst Charlie Miner said Salesforce needed a transformative catalyst such as Agentforce to overcome the risk of "sliding into the stagnation typical of a mature, legacy software platform."

"Despite Salesforce making AI its defining narrative, the true turning point hinges on Agentforce execution and adoption," Miner wrote. "If it proves to be an AI winner and delivers as a revenue driver, Salesforce's business could see a significant leap forward as early as mid-2025."

Are you a Salesforce employee or someone else with insight to share?

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• Tech titan Marc Benioff says we're near the "upper limits" of LLM use in AI advancement.
• In a podcast, the Salesforce CEO said the future of AI lies in agents that work autonomously.
• "'Terminator'? Maybe we'll be there one day," Benioff said, referencing the 1984 film about a cyborg assassin.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in an episode of The Wall Street Journal's "Future of Everything" podcast, said he thinks the future of AI advancement lies in autonomous agents — not the large language models used to train bots like ChatGPT.

"I actually think we're hitting the upper limits of the LLMs right now," Benioff said.

Over the last several years, Benioff said, we've all "got drunk on the ChatGPT Kool-Aid," leading the average consumer to believe that AI is more powerful than it is and that LLMs are key to advancement in the technology. But there is a burgeoning use of artificial intelligence — autonomous agents, which can be deployed to conduct tasks independently, such as executing sales communications or marketing campaigns — that he says will be more significant than LLMs have been for companies trying to become more efficient and transform the world of work.

Salesforce offers prebuilt and customizable AI agents for clients seeking to automate customer service tasks. OpenAI is closing in on a launch date for its own agents, which Bloomberg reported will be able to complete assigned tasks like writing code or booking travel.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he believes we'll all eventually be working alongside agents and "AI employees."

"We have incredible tools to augment our productivity, to augment our employees, to prove our margins, to prove our revenues, to make our companies fundamentally better, have higher fidelity relationships with our customers," Benioff said. "But we are not at that moment that we've seen in these crazy movies — and maybe we will be one day, but that is not where we are today."

Benioff said the general public has learned about the power of AI agents from movies like the 1984 film "Terminator," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and about a cyborg assassin, and the 2002 hit "Minority Report," about police preemptively arresting would-be criminals using AI-powered technology to detect crime before it occurs.

Benioff said there are some industry insiders and AI evangelists who suggest the tech, which hasn't yet evolved too far beyond LLMs, is capable of feats like curing cancer or solving climate change — but not only is that overstating what the technology can do, he said, it's misleading to people who could benefit from it through applications in which it is currently useful.

"This idea that these AI priests and priestesses are out there telling the world things about AI that are not true is a huge disservice to these enterprising customers who can increase their margins, increase their revenues, augment their employees, improve their customer relationships," Benioff said.

He added: "Yes, you can do all of these things with AI, but this other part — that we are all living in 'Minority Report?' No, we're not there yet. Maybe we'll be there one day. 'Terminator?' Maybe we'll be there one day. 'WarGames' — I hope we will never be there."

In the 1983 film "WarGames," starring Matthew Broderick, a high school student hacks a military supercomputer, activating the country's nuclear arsenal and risking World War III.

Representatives for Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.