Name: Marc Benioff’s Race to One Billion AI Agents | The Circuit
Uploaded: 2025-06-26T20:56:49.000Z
Duration: 24 min 2 s
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There's one building that rises above the rest of the San Francisco skyline.

It's home to a software giant whose story begins somewhere more tropical.

I heard something. Did you really come up with the idea for Salesforce while you were swimming with dolphins in Hawaii?

I did. I did. I do a great dolphin imitation. Did you know that?

Can you? Oh my God. How do they respond? The dolphins?

This is Mark Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, the world's number one customer relationship management, or CRM, software provider.

They sell cloud-based business tools for sales, marketing, e-commerce, all that good stuff.

It might sound niche, but their clients include the likes of Apple, Boeing, Amazon, and more than 150,000 companies.

Benioff has been called a master networker, a force of nature, Mr. Disruptor, and the fresh prince of software.

Let's just say subtlety isn't really his thing.

He spent more than $20 million to license Einstein's likeness for the face of Salesforce AI.

And if you're wondering why they have so many cuddly mascots.

It's all part of the strategy to make tech and AI seem friendly, accessible, and fun.

Is this supposed to be a flying squirrel? What is this?

Today, Benioff is all in on the AI boom with a new product, AI Agents, a digital workforce to autonomously complete tasks.

This is what AI was meant to be. These are agents who are making you more productive, reducing your costs, making things easier.

He isn't the only one betting big on agentic AI, but true to form, he's all in.

Don't worry, we'll give him a chance to explain that one.

We're so happy to have you. How do you know what Ohana means?

I was born in Hawaii, born and raised. And you love Hawaii.

But next time if we do this, I want Mai Tais on the big island.

I've interviewed you many times. Does Steve ever ask you for advice?

No, I don't think I have a lot of advice for Steve Jobs.

We're more on that dispute and Mark Benioff's version.

But our vision of the future is different.

What are we really trying to achieve here?

But I want to go back a bit to young Mark growing up in San Francisco.

Your first job was cleaning jewelry cases.

Do I even exist? Is this an existential thing?

Should I bring in some spiritual guru? I don't know.

But seriously, tell me about you as a kid.

My grandfather was a supervisor and worked right there in City Hall.

And he also was an attorney at 690 Market Street right there.

And we used to walk right back and forth there.

And I walked across the street to a Radio Shack store, which doesn't really exist anymore.

And in that computer, I became fascinated.

I sold my first piece of software when I was about 15 called How to Juggle.

At its core, this is a story all about software.

A self-taught teenage programmer turned visionary tech billionaire.

And believe it or not, it all starts with a customer service job.

In 1986, you could find Benioff answering customer calls at a not-so-little future competitor called Oracle.

Under the wing of longtime CEO Larry Ellison,

Benioff's knack for sales took him straight to the top.

At age 26, he became the youngest vice president in company history.

Then in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom,

Benioff struck out on his own, founding Salesforce.

And the Software as a Service, or SaaS, industry was born.

Nonetheless, Benioff's vision, and the first of many over-the-top marketing campaigns, paid off.

Within five years, Salesforce went public.

And within a decade, both Benioff and his company were counting cash by the billion.

He's been no stranger to top billing ever since.

I caught up with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Brad Stone to get his expert take on what makes Benioff a cover man.

So, you've been covering tech for decades.

What made Salesforce such a game-changer?

I mean, we have to go back to how software was sold back then.

You had these very powerful IT departments that were in charge of managing the installations.

Salesforce was ahead of the game in selling software over the internet as a service, hosting it in their own data centers.

And not only was that an entirely new model for selling software, it moved the center of gravity, the power center in companies from these IT departments to business planners and executives.

You founded the company now 25 years ago.

So, you've seen the rise of mobile and social and the cloud and now AI.

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Marc Benioff’s Race to One Billion AI Agents | The Circuit

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