Other AI products are ‘science projects'
"Even Microsoft said yesterday, ‘Models are just commodities.' … Many customers are reporting the OpenAI models are not delivering high levels of accuracy and resolving even basic customer service issues for them. … The lack of grounding, the lack of access to the metadata, the data itself, the sharing model, all of the components of a platform that are then needed to be able to achieve this kind of level of accuracy. … We're only about one thing, customer success. … We care about, are you successful … People will come in and say, you have to DIY this, the cloud.
"You have to DIY this part, the mobile. This part, the data. This part, the social. And now this part–the AI and the agents. And we say, ‘No, no.' You don't have to spend that money. This is a science project. They're selling you science projects. And you need to move away from it. And we can prove it to you.
"And over and over and over again, with our best customers all over the world, we have shown them that our approach is better. … Why are you (customers) doing this to yourselves? You're … doing a hyperscaler agreement and a database agreement. And you're hiring an AI engineer. And now you're doing a frontier model.
"And you're hiring a separate team. … Why are you doing this and not getting the result you want in accuracy and in hallucination rate? … The only way you're going to break the hypnosis that's coming out of–not just one, but many vendors–that is not true, is to let the customer at it. … (Salesforce has) hooked it all up and made it work for the average person."
Benioff's AI doubts
"(An AI user launches an agent and) it's wonderful, or they unleash their agent and it completely screws up and their whole job is gone. It's one of those two things.
"I don't know. I hope we're on the right side of history here. … It's a very high-wire act. … We realise we're dealing with the most avant garde technology, the most exciting stuff that everybody wants to talk about and try out.
"But how many of us really have the ability to get our hands in the soil? Usually, we have to rely on what everybody's saying.
"How many times do you have an actual customer in hand that said, ‘Yeah, I resolved 80 per cent of all my customer service issues, and I increased my revenue by 20 per cent. Oh, and employee satisfaction also went up by 30 per cent because I'm resolving more issues for them.' … I think those stories are not quite as, for them, prolific as they are intended to be.
"And I think that we're about to … remove the veil and say, ‘Actually, this is the right approach.' A completely different approach. … I am sure that there's going to be good stories and bad stories. I'm sure that some of this is going to work, and some of it is going to go horribly wrong.
"I hope the horribly wrong stories are not as bad as I have them in my mind that they could be. Because they could be horrible. But they also could be magical. And I'm not sure what's going to happen.
"This is kind of a moment in my career where we are rolling the … dice a little bit. … And we believe that we have to do this. … This is really important. Not just the hype. And I expect you (journalists and analysts) to talk to them (customers) and bust this bubble and to like, show the numbers.
"And say, ‘What are the productivity numbers? How much money are you making? How much money are you saving? Where is this going? What is your commitment to this product, this platform, this technique, this idea? Is this the right approach?' Because we feel very passionate that we are on to this."
