Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff terms AI amazing; stresses on aspects of trust, values

San Francisco: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described advances in Artificial Intelligence as "amazing" and "incredible", while drawing attention to tenets of trust and value and outlining the company's commitment to building trusted AI platform for customer companies.

Technology is moving faster than ever, right from cloud, to mobile, to social and "now a burst of AI" is "nothing like any of us have seen before", Benioff said at Salesforce's flagship event, Dreamforce.

Benioff noted that business is the greatest platform for change, his keynote address filled with references to AI, and, in equal measure, on aspects of values and trust. He emphasised on Salesforce's tenets of trusted, ethical and humane AI.

"It is amazing what is happening with AI. It is incredible what is going on," said the top honcho of the world's third largest software company, whose revenue in FY23 stood at USD 31.4 billion dollars.

"Technology is also moving faster than ever. We have seen over and over again from cloud to mobile to social to the data explosion we are experiencing now... plus now this burst of AI... nothing like any of us have ever seen before, this has got everyone's attention," he said.

Citing the rising popularity of ChatGPT, generative AI, and Large Language Model (LLM), he said while the AI revolution will impact how everything operates "it is going to bring us back to our core values".

"It is our values that are going to guide us," he said.

According to Benioff, there is no question that AI opportunities will change anything and everything.

"For all us we have learnt in this room over 25 years that what we do, matters. The decisions that we make... how our companies are using these technologies is very important," he said addressing a packed hall.

AI is going to radically change the landscape, he said, drawing attention to the issues of trust gap.

"Where is this data going when I am using my LLM... These LLMs are hungry for our data, it is how they get smarter," he said. Benioff's address covered LLM challenges of hallucinations or "lies", bias and toxicity.

"These LLMs are very convincing liars. They really are, and of course they can turn very toxic, very quickly," he said.

Salesforce's focus is to build a trusted AI platform for customer companies, he said, adding that trust is the highest priority.

Salesforce has introduced the next generation of Einstein, its AI technology, bringing a conversational AI assistant to every CRM application and customer experience.

Einstein now includes Einstein Copilot (a new and trusted conversational AI assistant built into the user experience of every Salesforce application) and Einstein Copilot Studio.

According to Salesforce, Einstein Copilot will drive productivity by assisting users within their flow of work, enabling them to ask questions in natural language, and receive relevant and trustworthy answers that are grounded in secure proprietary company data from Salesforce Data Cloud.

The Einstein Copilot Studio is a new way for companies to build an entirely new generation of AI-powered apps with custom prompts, skills, and AI models to close sales deals faster, streamline customer service, auto-create websites based on personalised browsing history, or turn natural language prompts into code, as well as hundreds of other business tasks.

"Coming in pilot this fall, Einstein Copilot and Einstein Copilot Studio will operate within the Einstein Trust Layer, a secure AI architecture natively built into Salesforce that allows teams to generate higher-quality AI results by grounding responses with customer data, while preserving their company's data privacy and security standards," the company release said.