Name: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the Rise of the “Agentic Enterprise”
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T19:46:00Z
Duration: 8 min 39 s
Description: Marc Benioff, Salesforce co-founder and CEO, speaks with WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray in Davos as AI agents begin to change the way companies operate. He says businesses may soon be “kind of running themselves.” Benioff also reflects on why this year’s Davos marks a turning point for business, technology, and geopolitics.

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Marc Benioff, Salesforce co-founder and CEO, speaks with WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray in Davos as AI agents begin to change the way companies operate. He says businesses may soon be “kind of running themselves.” Benioff also reflects on why this year’s Davos marks a turning point for business, technology, and geopolitics. Photo: Michael Claudio/WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260123/4205b9ae-c444-4620-adbe-3ede362f7595/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Marc Benioff, Salesforce co-founder and CEO, speaks with WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray in Davos as AI agents begin to change the way companies operate. He says businesses may soon be “kind of running themselves.” Benioff also reflects on why this year’s Davos marks a turning point for business, technology, and geopolitics.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the Rise of the “Agentic Enterprise”

I'm here with Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. Marc, thank you for taking some time to be with us.

Always great to be with you, Alan.

You've been coming to-

Of course.

Thank you. You've been coming to Davos for years. I think of you as Mr. Davos.

We've a long history together, haven't we?

Yes, yes. You're tied very closely, together, in part because you throw the best party in Davos happening-

Oh, thank you. That's the only reason why you're-

Well, that's one reason.

Come on.

But tell me-

We won't go into all the details, will we?

Oh, there are many details, but tell me what you've learned this week. What are you taking away from Davos this year?

Well, there's so many dimensions because there's so many things happening all at once. It's impossible to put it into a sentence or a phrase or even a word, because this is probably, and I've been coming here since 2002, when actually Davos moved to New York for one year.

Alan: Remember that?

I think that this is the biggest and best Davos ever.

Alan: And maybe the most consequential in some ways.

And most consequential, and I think most multidimensional. And there's kind of a funny thing going on where there's a little bit of a FOMO going on, where people are flying in who said they would never come to Davos. Like Elon Musk is about to do a presentation in the Congress Hall at 4:30.

Alan: Is that right?

He's literally about to land because he feels that he has to be here to say his message also. And of course, we just had two days with President Trump, including the launch of his Peace Initiative. So this is a very powerful Davos. And of course, in addition to all the political things, there's 70 heads of state. I think there's about 1,000 CEOs here. There's never been as many people in a Davos before. And one other thing, there's a huge set of revolutions going on, including technology revolution.

Right.

So this is something.

Yeah.

It's almost hard, as I said, to put into words.

Yeah, well, but let's try, right, because-

Let's try.

But let's try because there's an ROI here, not return on investment, return on interactions, so many-

Oh my gosh. You're a natural marketer,

Thank you. But so many synapses clicking back and forth.

Yeah, true.

And you have to, like, take a deep breath and think at the end of the week, "What have I learned?" But let me try and get you to do that. What have you learned here? How is the way you view the world different today than it was four days ago?

Well, I think that it's not just how, you know, I think when you say kind of return on interactions, I think it's also really about the people you're meeting, you know, getting updated with people, hearing what's going on. And usually, and this is kind of something I think you'll quickly agree with, people come to Davos, and, you know, the thing is, "Well, it's kind of a measurement of how the economy is doing," or they're anxious about, "Oh, this is gonna be a good year." That isn't really what's going on. I haven't heard anybody say, "Well, it's a measurement of, you know, economic conditions." And I think economic conditions are gonna be actually very good.

Alan: Yeah.

But I think it's something bigger, which I think they're looking at what is the state of the world right now, the political situation, the social situation, the technology situation, that this is a bigger frame in this Davos. It's a bigger, more comprehensive thought. And I don't know. That wasn't really in the planning. You know, the planning, it was called The Spirit of Dialogue, and we're gonna be just more voices, more types of voices. But something has definitely shifted here. There's no question, and I think it is impacting all of us.

Yeah, well, let's take those three levels you talked about because it is kind of a world geopolitical level. It's a technology transformation, corporate transformation, and a social transformation. Let me start with the corporate, if I can, because that's where you do business. A, I think the CEOs I talked to here all agree 2026 is a transformative moment for how AI will change business. But there are all these reports coming up that many of their employees are skeptical, anxious, worried about their jobs. So how do you close that trust gap?

Well, those things are related.

Yes, so how do you close that gap?

Well, I think that the CEOs have to close the gap there. There's no question companies are being reshaped. I mean, we've even reshaped our company last year as we've implemented our own technology. You know, there's, you know, the fundamental restructuring of how data is being managed in the enterprise. That's critical for AI because if you don't have your data right, you're not gonna get your AI right to the types of applications you're using in the enterprise because if those applications aren't then integrated into that data and have that AI capability, it's not gonna be that intelligent enterprise that everyone is seeking. The third piece is, I think everyone now fully understands we're all gonna be building these agentic layers. We've been calling it Agentforce for a couple of years now. I think when we first came up with the Agentforce name, people were like, "What's an agent? What is Agentforce?" Now, they're like, "Well, yeah, of course, we're gonna build an agentic layer on our company, and okay, we're gonna look at Agentforce as an opportunity." And then there's one more level that's now emerging, which is everybody's manifesting a customer agent. That is, you can interact with companies directly through these agents, but employees now have agents also that can do to research for themselves or to get critical information, you know, from company systems. And so those four layers, that's the restructuring of the enterprise, and gonna move from kind of where we are today, which is kind of this new, next-generation, agent-based enterprise. We call it the agentic enterprise, okay, to, eventually, what's gonna be autonomous enterprises where these businesses are gonna be kind of running themselves. That's still a long way off, but there's gonna be an arc here in the way that we've had an arc to get to the agentic enterprise.

And how do you create the trust that you need to get people, your employees, et cetera, to go along for the ride?

Well, I think only through transparency.

Yeah.

You have to really show exactly what you're doing. For us, you probably know that, well, I just mentioned customer agent. We've deployed customer agents in a couple of different ways. In service, of course, we have thousands and thousands of customer service agents. We have a little bit less right now than we did, a couple thousand less. And we deployed our technology, and then we were able to rebalance our sales, our service personnel. We have more employees than ever, I will tell you that. We have almost 80,000.

Well, that's important.

You know, but I had to rebalance because I think for an agentic enterprise, it's gonna be slightly a different shape.

Yeah, we're almost outta time here, but I have to ask you the geopolitical question because I think geopolitics kind of took everybody by surprise. Strong reaction from the Europeans about the whole idea of taking over Greenland by the United States, strong words from the President and half his cabinet that was here. What's the right business response this geopolitical moment?

Well, I'm so glad he came because I was sitting next to a friend of mine who is one of the very top leaders here in Switzerland, and she had never heard him speak before. And we were sitting there, and it was a long speech. Maybe it was an hour and a half or something like this.

Alan: A little longer than that, but yes.

Was it?

Yeah.

How long was it?

It was pretty good.

Almost two hours? Well, if you count the Q&A, it was like an hour, 50.

Yeah, si it was a couple hours. And at the end of it, she goes, "Wow, I didn't really understand all the details, the nuances." I think there was a lot for people to kind of get, but you have to remember, you know, a lot has already happened in the first year. You know, there's peace in the Middle East. That is something that we did not have a year ago. And he has a unique vision for the world. He's executing that. I, you know, wanna see how that plays out.

Yeah. Marc Benioff, thanks for taking time to talk with us.

Thank you, Alan.

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