Marc Benioff says AI's future is all about agents, not chatbots
Despite the popularity of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, one tech leader says the future of AI advancement is in agents that can work autonomously.
Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff told the Wall Street Journal’s “The Future of Everything” podcast that he thinks “we all got drunk on the ChatGPT Kool-Aid.”
“It’s a tool,” Benioff said about AI, “and I hope that we’re using it to improve humanity and making things better.”
Unlike AI chatbots, which work alongside users, AI agents can complete complex tasks autonomously. With AI agents, users can delegate work to the tool, then check to see if it needs assistance or if it has finished, instead of repeatedly prompting it.
In September, Salesforce launched its Agentforce suite of AI agents that can handle service, sales, marketing, and commerce tasks. Meanwhile, Microsoft released its purpose-built AI agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot earlier this month, that it said can work on simple or complex, multi-step tasks with or on behalf of a team or organization.
Still, Benioff was adament about AI’s current limitations. “There is a huge demand for AI products in the enterprise,” he told the Wall Street Journal, “but this idea that Microsoft has hypnotized the industry, that this is the panacea, this is the Messiah of AI for the enterprise, is a false prophecy.”
He added that he’s talked to “a lot of people,” including Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, about “this idea that these AI priests and priestesses are out there telling the world things about AI that are not true is a huge disservice to these enterprise customers who can, number one, increase their margins, increase their revenues, augment their employees, improve their customer relationships.”
While AI can improve work, Benioff said “we’re not there” — with “there” being the dystopian future in which AI surpasses the abilities of humans.
But Benioff said he thinks “we’re hitting the upper limits of the LLMs [large language models]” that currently power AI chatbots and some AI agents, and that new models with other abilities may replace them in the future.
“We just have to be careful how we think about these things,” Benioff said. “So we have to get back to reality.”
