Where’s My AI Pop? With Software Under Siege, Salesforce & Benioff Struggle

Companies including PepsiCo and Formula One say big investments are needed to make new AI tools pay off.

Marc Benioff roared into Dreamforce last week, as he typically does, on a wave of bluster and some incendiary statements.

His flippant remark to the New York Times that he’d have no problem with the national guard getting dispatched to San Francisco made headlines, but to savvier Salesforce watchers it was also a regularly scheduled piece of his pre-show media cycle. That he so quickly backed off the point days later was another indication of that.

What’s less typical for Benioff, and the software sector more broadly, is the place it finds itself in. There’s a brutal reality looming over these companies in the AI era: software-as-a-service could be replaced by the new wave of chatbots and agents, mostly made by startups. Salesforce shares have been down 20% this year and, as many people pointed out on X, even a day-one announcement of an OpenAI partnership didn’t give the company the coveted Altman stock pop.

Hence the extra bit of urgency on Benioff’s part as his company leaned aggressively into its agentic AI Agentforce product, and tried to convince customers and the street that it is in fact controlling the AI moment, not getting steamrolled by it.