Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

We have an ecosystem. Of course, we have our own models and our own technology that we have given to our customers, but we’re also investing in all of these companies, and we plan to be able to offer them as opportunities for those customers as well, and they’ll be able to deliver all kinds of things. And you’ll see that whether it’s going to end up being contract digitization and cost generation or survey generators or all kinds of campaign assistance. And the most recently in our world tour in London, we showed how our Data Cloud did automatic marketing segmentation that was incredible. And you’re going to see a lot more that’s going to happen in all of these things. A lot of it, you can see happening in Slack. Slack has become incredible for these AI companies, every AI company that we’ve met with is a Slack company.

All of them make their agents available for Slack first. We saw that, for example, with Anthropic, where Cloud really appeared first and Cloud 2, first in Slack. And Anthropic, as a company uses Slack internally and they have a — they take their technology and develop news digest every day and newsletters and they do incredible things with Slack — Slack is just a treasure trove of information for artificial intelligence, and you’ll see us deliver all kinds of new capabilities in Slack along these lines. And we’re working, as I’ve mentioned, get Slack to wake up and become more aware and also for Slack to be able to do all of the things that I just mentioned. One of the most exciting things I think you’re going to see at Dreamforce is Slack very much as a vision for the front end of all of our core products.

We’re going to show you an incredible new capability that we call Slack Sales Elevate, which is promoting our core Sales Cloud system running right inside Slack. That’s going to be amazing, and we’re going to also see how we’re going to release and deliver all of our core services in sales force through Slack. This is very important for our company to deliver Slack very much as a tremendous easy-to-use interface on the core Salesforce, but also all these AI systems. So all of that is that next generation of artificial intelligence capability, and I’m really excited to show all of that to you at Dreamforce as well as Data Cloud as well.

Mike Spencer: Thanks, Brad. Emma, we’ll take the next question now please.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brad Sills — Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Brad Zelnick: Great. Thanks very much and congrats in particular to Amy and the whole team on overachieving on profitability. My question, Marc, is for you. I wanted to drill down at the Data Cloud because the things we keep hearing from partners suggest that the interest level just keeps building and building, can you talk about the pipeline and scope of these projects and how this generative AI moment is impacting the opportunity? And why Salesforce is well positioned as the partner of choice, especially in the context of trust?

Marc Benioff: Well, especially as we said on the call as well, which is that we’ve said this is about AI, this is about data, this is about CRM and this is about trust. Those 4 things have to come together as one thing. And that’s what we call Salesforce. That’s a modern version of Salesforce. It’s AI plus Data plus CRM plus Trust. And I think that is really a moment that we have to like really get clear and show that to customers. We’ve tried to really book the last six months. Obviously, we’re going through a huge transformation with all of you. But you can see we’ve also gone through an incredible technology transformation around artificial intelligence to the point where we got these products out was awesome and let our customers really get into it and see what they can and cannot do and what they’re excited about and how they want to move these products forward and what we think is going to be the future of AI.

And it’s these 4 things together that are going to fundamentally help us. And I think Data Cloud, you’re 100% right, is going to be the heart of it. Well, certainly, it’s a huge revenue opportunity for us because as you heard from Brian, customers who have Sales Cloud and they’ve got Service Cloud and they’ve got Marketing Cloud, and they’re using our platform. Maybe they have Commerce Cloud as well, and now they’re adding Data Cloud. And as these clouds get stacked with these customers’, attrition falls, customers become more successful, they develop a single source of truth. And our job is to get all of these things running on our core and getting all of these things ignited with artificial intelligence. So I was very excited to recruit back as my Chief of Staff and as my Chief Business Officer, Kendall Collins.

So Kemble, can you just give us a little insight on the vision of Dreamforce and what we’re going to see for Data Cloud and some of these amazing clouds and why everyone should get excited about what’s about to happen over the next couple of weeks when everyone gets here into San Francisco on September 12?

Kendall Collins: Yes, Marc, it’s great to be back. It’s been about four months and just amazing to see the energy of Salesforce, a company with the right values and I think the right people and really at the right time to generative. What you said about AI is so compelling because it’s not just about one cloud. It’s about making every cloud better. We’re seeing that Sales GPT, Marketing GPT, Commerce GPT went live last week. And Dreamforce is going to be exciting.

Marc Benioff: Well, I’m really excited as well. And I’ll tell you, you’re sitting next to Sabastian Niles, our new Chief Legal Officer, just joined us from Wachtell. Sabastian, we’re happy to have you here live for the first earnings call and welcome to Salesforce. And I know this is going to be your first Dreamforce and give us a vision of what you’re excited about for the future.

Sabastian Niles: I’d say whether it’s Dreamforce or sort of looking ahead, what I’ve been most excited about is how our values, trust, customer success, innovation, equality, sustainability are truly infused within our culture. And that these values, they’re powering our customer journeys, they’re powering our commitment to our investors, they’re powering our commitment to all stakeholders. I think certainly, as we look ahead, whether it’s in the next several months, the next several years, the next 10 years and beyond, it’s these values that are going to underlie how AI evolves. And how at least for sophisticated enterprises, and I think for all enterprises and even individual human beings, they will choose to partner with the companies and organizations who are putting trust first and are deploying and incorporating trust throughout the technology life cycle, whether that’s design of technology, deployment of technology, development, service and monitoring, and I could not be more excited by what I see ahead.