The AI Grim Reaper Is Coming for Salesforce

Welcome to Wednesday, futurists.

This week, we joined the global elite for a scorcher at the All-In Summit (literally—Los Angeles hit temps as high as 105F). The third annual event hosted by famed venture capitalists was borne out of their associated podcast and featured the likes of JD Vance, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and Peter Thiel.

However, to us it was Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff who provided real insights about the Future of Commerce, with much to say about AI agents and automation…

Even if he decided to take over the interview for himself.

Overheard at the All-In Summit

While the big news out of the All-In Summit was the unexpected appearance of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, and a surprise unscheduled interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin; it was the rocky, stilted interview with Marc Benioff that did the bulk of the future casting this week from the event’s main stage at Royce Hall on the grounds of UCLA.

All-In podcast co-host David Sacks struggled to maintain moderation duties in his interview with Salesforce's larger-than-life CEO, who appeared to want to conduct an interview of his own design, with his talking points, often answering questions he rhetorically asked himself.

“[AI] Agents will take automation to a new level,” piped Benioff. His assertion is that the nature of the work in an organization is to do fewer tasks within the software, and to do more coaching of agents that will pilot the data through dynamic processes behind-the-scenes.

Last week, we wrote in this space about the coming nature of multiplayer dynamics of agent-based systems and how they pose an existential threat for brands. In a future where agents optimize commerce away from a user decision into an ambient, background, service, a brand has to work twice as hard for half of the mental attention of a potential customer. 

Without context, the comments seem benign. But Benioff is likely also worried about his own fate in the future.

Ironically, on the last day of the Summit, just as Benioff took the stage, a 10-day-old story from fractional payments behemoth Klarna began to circulate on social media. The post asserts that Klarna cut costs by de-integrating Salesforce from its organization, replacing the SaaS service contract with internally-built systems. 

Those systems were built using AI coding tools. 

Klarna will also end its relationship with software provider Workday, and will reduce its headcount by 50%. In short, the fears around AI-displaced jobs are quite real, and are here right now.

This is no indictment on Salesforce or Workday; it’s the unspoken waste in many modern enterprise businesses: 90% of organizations use just 10% of their full-fledged software suites. 

As I said in our annual predictions episode:

‍[Enterprise software suites] have another directional challenge. I think that AI software development makes the average developer capable of delivering as good or decent enough experiences that custom development makes a comeback.

The same fate is coming for every brand. In the agent-based automated future imagined by Benioff it will come in the form of offloading brand decisions away from the consumer. Existing website interfaces weave brand messaging in between buying decisions; but an agent maximizing for college savings, paying off debt, or building a nest egg might make more reasonable decisions and optimize spend in a way that deprioritizes brand in that calculation.

This already happens on Temu, Shein, and (to a lesser extent) Amazon. There, convenience and commodity win the day. AI Agents will merely reflect a trend already in motion.

If we spent 20 years digitally transforming enterprise businesses, many will spend the next 20 undoing those decisions.

This is far from the weirdest things we heard at the Summit, including a rumor that Matt McConaughey is a fan of functional beverage shot brand Magic Mind—so much so that he takes up to three shots daily. We’ll cover more in this week’s podcast episode.

— Phillip

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