A lot has changed from last year's Salesforce Dreamforce conference. The biggest is the focus on AI. Salesforce Co-Founder and CEO Marc Benioff (CRM) tells Yahoo Finance that AI is "the most exciting business opportunity of our lifetime, maybe any lifetime." "Every business will get recreated with artificial intelligence. People are here trying to do that," Benioff says. Benioff says in his business, for example, AI is helping engineers become more efficient. Benioff also discusses what AI means for his business and the importance of protecting customer data. AI LLM systems are "hungry for your data, your personal data, your company data. Our customers are not so quick to turn over all their corporate assets to these LLMs," Benioff says, adding that his company has a "trust layer" to help companies protect data.
Benioff argues that AI is coming in four different waves. The first is predictive, which has existed for the last several years. Currently, we are in the generative AI wave. The third wave will bring more autonomy, where "you have the software working on our behalf." The final stage is where AI is "kind of thinking for you," citing popular pop culture AI systems such as HAL. When it comes to how fast AI is developing, Benioff says, "things are happening much faster than any of us realize."
