Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled his company's new "AI Cloud" at an investor event in New York City. Benioff sat down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to discuss Salesforce's vision for AI.

Video Transcript

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RACHELLE AKUFFO: The talk of the town is AI, and Salesforce is going all in. The cloud company announcing a big new generative AI enterprise at its AI day on Monday in New York City. Yahoo Finance's very own Brian Sozzi attended the conference and got to check out some of the new technologies firsthand. He also spoke to Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff about this moment in AI for businesses. Take a listen.

MARC BENIOFF: We've seen a lot of exciting waves of technology in our industry-- the cloud, social, and mobile, but this AI wave is going to be the biggest that anyone has ever seen. I think that the success of OpenAI is the point of evidence that this is going to be one of the fastest growing moves, not just in the consumer market but in the enterprise market.

And we had some of the largest, most important enterprises in the room today. And every customer is excited to get their hands on our new generative AI products, which are shipping this month.

BRIAN SOZZI: You said something in your presentation really early on, you said, this is the new Salesforce. What did you mean by that?

MARC BENIOFF: What I mean is, you know, we've been very focused over the last five months of transforming our financials. We just delivered our highest margin ever. We are extremely excited about our new management team that we've introduced last week and now a whole new product strategy as well.

And I think the right combination of financials, people, and technology is the right capability for this software company, which has become the third largest software company in the world and is really just getting its, I think, sea legs when it gets to the next generation of artificial intelligence.

BRIAN SOZZI: I saw a lot of presentations or a lot of screens up there on GPT, GPT this, GPT that. How will that change Salesforce and what is the order flow look like for those products?

MARC BENIOFF: Well, about 10 years ago, I had my first existential freak out about AI. And I ended up buying a lot of companies and assembling teams and making things happen. And that was very exciting to me. And this is bigger because this is now the next wave. Of course, Salesforce is already a leader in AI CRM. Because of that, we introduced Einstein in 2016. We're doing a trillion transactions a week of Einstein.

Now, we're going to enter generative AI as well. I think it's going to be another wave. The amount of data that we already see being entered into the system through our data cloud is at record levels. So I think it's an indication of how well these generative AI systems will do.

BRIAN SOZZI: I think a lot of folks on Wall Street, they're interested in how does Salesforce monetize all this amazing new technology. How do you see that?

MARC BENIOFF: Well, today we introduced all kinds of new monetization models around generative AI, including our AI cloud, which is our starter package to help customers move forward. It's $360,000. It gives you all the licenses and capabilities and services to get going. I think for a lot of customers, trust will be the most important thing.

They're going to want to make sure they don't have any data leakage, that their companies and their employees are properly trained to work in this area. And that all of the corporate playbooks and customer data sets aren't going out the left window. So that's our job, to make sure that, you know, the company is architected correctly and ready to go for this new generative AI era.

BRIAN SOZZI: You seem very passionate about trust and doing AI from an ethical standpoint. Do you anticipate some form of global regulation here at some point?

MARC BENIOFF: I think trust and generative AI are going to go hand in hand and then responsibility and generative AI. I think this idea that AI is kind of in a next level is true. And I think every business and every government and every individual is going to have to come up with their own way of looking at this technology and what is the right way to manage it.

BRIAN SOZZI: Do you view AI as job creating?

MARC BENIOFF: There's no question that AI is going to create more jobs. It could also take jobs. It can be a balance. In the work that we showed today, which is something that's been going on for 18 months with Gucci, we've actually seen the Gucci call center expand because what it did was it made their employees more capable-- their own words, to augment their call center.

Now, the call center, which only did service also can do sales and marketing and commerce as well. That's a big step forward. They call it Gucci 9. It's like a next generation capability. And I'm excited to go to Milan and see what's going on there.

BRIAN SOZZI: It sounds high-end.

MARC BENIOFF: It sounds expensive.

BRIAN SOZZI: It sounds expensive. How important is it-- you know, I'm not-- it wasn't lost on me that you're in this room. You're a co-founder. Parker was in this room, co-founder. That Salesforce is founder-led at a moment like this. How important is that from [INAUDIBLE]--

MARC BENIOFF: Founders can go faster. You're 100% right. And I think that we've transformed the company a lot in the last five months. We go back and look at the interview we did four or five months ago. The interview we're doing now, the questions are different.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yes.

MARC BENIOFF: The questions are different.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yes.

MARC BENIOFF: The position is different. Everything is different because we've transformed the company in a relatively short amount of time. And we're excited about where we are and where we're going.

BRIAN SOZZI: How is that the past five months changed you as a leader? Because you seem-- you've always said, you're always very passionate about this. But you just-- there was a different level of focus here today. And I don't know. It's just it was really cool to see you in that zone.

MARC BENIOFF: Well, I think number one is we've really focused on changing the financials. And you saw we just hit our highest margin levels. We've increased margins by 1,000 points. That's tremendous for our investors. We just hit some record cash flow numbers. You reported that as well. And very excited about the quarter we just delivered.

Number two is we've brought back some great leaders. We had our new Chief Marketing Officer here today. Ariel Kelman, of course, Ariel has worked at for Salesforce for six years, running product marketing that he went to AWS, where he was the CMO for eight years. And then he went to Oracle as the CMO for three years. So we're very excited to have him back at Salesforce.

But also we have a number of new executives that we're very excited about. And augmenting also our Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham, giving him some great new capabilities, including leading our business technology team and our HR team, as well as our marketing team.

BRIAN SOZZI: Does it take time for these new or this next generation of leaders to settle in? How do you think about it?

MARC BENIOFF: Well, I just brought back my former Chief Marketing Officer Kendall Collins as my new Chief of Staff. And it's been great for me because he already hit the ground running. He had been with Salesforce for, you know, a dozen years. Left for a few years. Bringing him back, he was able to hit the ground as if he never left. And that's the kind of executive I like right now.

BRIAN SOZZI: You also talked a lot about a dinner you had with OpenAI Sam Altman. And one thing that blew me away was your voice was replicated, I guess, at that dinner. Tell us about that. And as a tech leader, that had to blow you away.

MARC BENIOFF: Well, we're seeing generative AI do a lot of amazing new things. And you're going to see this concept being able to create deepfakes, audio, video, the ability to do things rapidly. But as I mentioned, where is this data stored? You know, it's not stored in a file. We all have seen like an MP4 file or an MP3 file on our phones. But that's not how this data is stored.

Its data, you know what, in these weights inside these neural networks. And it's not the traditional enterprise storage mechanisms. So we're going to have to find these new ways like we introduced here with our Einstein GPT Trust Layer to store these things safely and correctly with the highest levels of trust and protection.

BRIAN SOZZI: Is there a societal risk to that if my voice is replicated and goes out there in social media? What does that do?

MARC BENIOFF: Well, I think we realize that we're in a world now where AI is able to do things that we've only seen in movies. "The Minority Report" was partly written by a Salesforce employee Peter Schwartz. And I think we all remember that from our childhood. We didn't think it was going to be our present moment reality, but it's turning out to be more like "The Minority Report" than not.

BRIAN SOZZI: Marc Benioff.

MARC BENIOFF: Thank you.

BRIAN SOZZI: Salesforce CEO. It's always a pleasure to get

MARC BENIOFF: Brian, thank you very much.

BRIAN SOZZI: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

MARC BENIOFF: All the best. Thank you so much.

BRIAN SOZZI: Thank you.