Look forward to having a Slack teammate, says Salesforce's Benioff

No, that's not someone on your team who doesn't pull their weight

Salesforce is promising every Slack user a "digital teammate" to help with tasks such as providing summaries of channels and taking notes from meetings. And responding to office banter on the user's behalf, The Register can only assume.

Speaking days after the CRM giant entered into an $8 billion agreement to buy data management and analytics biz Informatica, Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, said users were on the "very cusp of a huge transformation for their enterprises" in what would become an "incredible AI revolution" built on software agents. These will likely be the company's own "AgentForce" agents.

The co-founder offered listeners on an investors' call the example of Slack, the office collaboration platform Salesforce bought for $27 billion in 2021.

"I know a lot of you are on Slack. With AgentForce in Slack, every employee has a digital teammate that can make notes for your meeting, summarize your Slack channels. You see AI taking place on Slack when you look at Slack Recap or you look at agents just coming right into your channels to talk to you in real time," he said.

Whether all enterprise software users would share his joy is an open question.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, recently warned AI could take half of entry-level white-collar jobs. But Benioff continued with his enthusiasm undimmed, brushing off the apparent threat to a cohort's employment prospects.

He said internal use of AI agents meant that Salesforce employees were being "repositioned" in the company in other areas. Meanwhile, the SaaS vendor was still trying to hire more people.

"I can't hire as many people as I want right now. We have account executives I'm trying to hire. We have a lot of opportunities throughout the world and we are held back by [the fact] there isn't a lot of people to hire," he said.

Benioff later pointed out that "we're not exactly at that point where the computer is completely conscious, has human consciousness… to the point where it's running its own manufacturing facilities, [or] creating its own rocket ships. While [agent AI] is very exciting in the enterprise, it cannot do everything. And it doesn't have the accuracy yet because it's built on a word model [which] are inherently not 100 percent accurate."

Research from economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard recently showed AI chatbots have had "no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation." The authors added that their research also failed to find a huge transformation in productivity.

Salesforce's call was to announce its Q1 results for the three months ended April 30. Revenues were up 7.6 percent year-on-year to reach $9.8 billion. Net income was $1.54 billion, up $8 million. ®