Amid turbulent economic conditions and trepidatious customers, Salesforce managed to deliver better-than-expected quarterly financial results. But on the company’s conference call with analysts Wednesday, CEO Marc Benioff wanted to talk about the dinner he recently had at his neighbor’s house.
“My neighbor Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, and I went over to his house for dinner and it was a great conversation, as it always is with him, and he said ‘Oh, just hold on one second, Marc, I want to get my laptop,'” Benioff recounted on Wednesday’s earnings call. “He brought his laptop out and gave me some demonstrations of advanced technologies that are not appropriate for the call, but I did notice that there was only one application that he was using on his laptop, and that was Slack.”
The culinary anecdote, part humble brag and part window into the lives of San Francisco’s tech billionaires, helped Benioff promote Salesforce’s messaging service Slack as well as what Benioff described as an incipient A.I. “supercycle.”
“The coming wave of generative A.I. will be more revolutionary than any technology innovation that’s come before in our lifetime, or maybe any lifetime,” Benioff said. “A new door has opened with generative A.I. and it is reshaping our world in ways that we’ve never imagined. Every CEO realizes they’re going to have to invest in A.I. aggressively to remain competitive. And Salesforce is going to be their trusted partner to get them to do just that.”
Salesforce spun up its own new generative A.I. tool this quarter, dubbed Einstein GPT, which is supposed to enhance the productivity of salespeople, marketers, and customer service agents, CNBC reported.
The A.I. talk was likely a welcome change of conversation for Benioff, who narrowly escaped a proxy fight with activist investors. Elliott Investment Management had previously pressured the company to cut costs, causing Salesforce to lay off 10% of its staff, announce its intentions to cut $3 to $5 billion in costs, and disband its board’s mergers and acquisitions committee. The cuts worked; Elliot recently announced it would not move forward with its board of director nominations, seemingly easing its pressure on the firm.
The sweeping cuts at the cloud giant have also bruised morale, making the media wonder if Salesforce’s “ohana” culture (the firm’s way of saying “we’re all family”) is dead. Benioff addressed the claims in the call, saying that despite the “tremendous disruption with human resources in our company,” that “ohana” is still “their superpower.”
During its fiscal first quarter, Salesforce revenue increased 11% to $8.25 billion, while net profit came in at $199 million, versus $28 million in the year ago period. Despite beating Wall Street expectations on earnings and revenue, Salesforce shares slid after hours, down roughly 6%.
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