M+E Connections
Salesforce’s Benioff: AI to Have Growing Impact on the Industry… and the World
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Major strides continue to be made in artificial intelligence (AI) and the technology stands to have an increasingly significant impact on not only the enterprise sector, but the entire world, according to Marc Benioff, the company’s co-CEO and chairman.
“You can see the world is changing very rapidly and that AI is definitely on everybody’s mind,” he said Feb. 13 during a “fireside chat” with Goldman Sachs CEO and chairman David Solomon at the 2019 Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco.
Among the issues that people are thinking about when it comes to what’s happening with AI today are “how will it impact our world – not just in terms of our technology and the products, but also the workforce and jobs,” he said. As a result, “we’re going to see very significant implications,” he predicted.
AI is also “being developed much faster than anybody realized,” he said, noting “it’s the nature of how it’s being built [and] there’s some geopolitical implications of that.”
As an example, Benioff pointed out that at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, he met with the leader of a large European country who was “very worried” because his country had “no native development of artificial intelligence” and it was, therefore, dependent on companies in the U.S. and China. He didn’t identify the leader or what country he or she was from.
What’s happening with AI is “different than other shifts in our industry because it really is going to get really back down into the core of society and jobs,” he predicted.
Salesforce has been working on its own AI platform, Einstein, which has been “very successful” for his company so far, he said, pointing to one major component of it that’s “the best AI we have in our industry today, which is deep learning technology that is learning while it’s interacting” with the user.
During the discussion, Benioff also stressed the importance of him and other business leaders playing an important role in helping to solve the major “crisis” of homelessness in the U.S., saying government has just not been effective enough in solving that problem.
Benioff didn’t provide any specific updates on Salesforce’s performance or discuss the macroenvironment because the company is in a quiet period ahead of announcing its results March 4 for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2019.
