Benioff expects customer work to split evenly between agents and people

Transcript

From the transcript The Logan Bartlett Show publishes with the episode.

1. 13:02

   support side a little bit and increasingly maybe on the R&D and development side and now on the sales side is well I guess what how do you think about if you're a leader in trying to figure out how to deal with both the change management process associated with going through that but then also like how do you actually organize and design the business such that KPIs and accountability is actually roiling through the organization well we talked about that two nine months ago which was I really felt I was going to be the last CEO is only managing games remember that yes I do think and I still haven't come up with a better term of like managing agent workers or something for some reason that feels a little dystopian to me but it's it's clearly heading down that path in some way shape or form now I don't think it's dystopian at all I think that this is reality at least for

2. 13:53

   me but I'm managing agents and humans and that means my agents when they show up to a customer like I told you of that sales person now that's calling back all my leads and that sales agent there has to be a certain kind of set of guardrails a certain personality a certain kind of tone the ability to know when it needs to escalate immediately to a human being because these large language models can do a lot of things but they cannot do everything and you know that so and that we're kind of hitting in some ways you know a high evolution of the large language model as we can kind of see as we got in a GPT five looks a lot like GPT four it's more evolutionary than revolutionary so we're seeing a maturation of that type of technology right now that deeply integrated into the tech into the application layer that's where I'm getting the most value and that idea that those agents then

3. 14:47

   when they're directly talking to the customer or directly talking to the employee they need to be you know manage through those guardrails they need to be managed through that structure and that's incredibly important for us as the tech vendor to be able to provide that to the customer when you say 30 to 50% of work is being done by agents today I guess how do you think about the the unit of work being done how do you assess that at an organizational level to try to figure out where the balance is of who's doing what well I think we kind of lay it out like in that support example which is really I think the best example right that if we were having this conversation a year ago and you were calling Salesforce there would be 9,000 people that you would be interacting with globally on our service cloud and they would be managing creating reading updating deleting data we called CRUD database

4. 15:41

   with an app of very powerful interface you know with lightning in some cases if there's a case maybe it gets swarmed on the slack but this is what they're doing maybe they're checking the analytics and Tableau maybe they're over here you know doing doing some others kind of sentiment analysis now it's a different system now all of a sudden here we are a year later and the million and a half conversations that are happening going forward over the next year and a million and a half human conversations that are going forward over the next year how now bifurcated 50% are with agents 50% are with humans and there needs to be also technology and people who are managing how are these working together and because all of a sudden like the agent will scale out and say whoa I can't handle this I need a you got to go help handle have the human work on that it's not any

5. 16:34

   different than have you been like in your Tesla and all of a sudden itself driving it goes oh I don't actually know what's happening you take over and that's kind of the same thing but on a very complex you know you're working with a very complex customer you know in a support environment that is really the magic going forward you know how do we get these two and so that idea of the 50 50 I think that's definitely where we're going in sales in service in marketing in field service in the fundamental collaboration of our employees all of all of these pieces are going to have