Marc Benioff

A cloud computing pioneer, AI innovator and prolific philanthropist, Marc Benioff co-founded Salesforce in 1999 and has been its CEO and Chair since 2001

As Chair, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Marc is a pioneer of cloud computing who has now positioned his company at the forefront of the AI revolution.

Founded with a clear vision to be 'A World-Class Internet Company for Sales Force Automation', Salesforce is now a Fortune 500 company with more than 76,000 employees. 

It enables companies of every size and industry to digitally transform around their customers by harnessing the power of automation, AI and real-time data to make every customer experience more personal, valuable and memorable.

The company has been recognised as the Most Innovative Company by Forbes, as well as a Best Place to Work and the 10th Most Admired Company in the World by Fortune.

Today, under Marc's leadership, Salesforce is the #1 provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software globally and is leading the transition to autonomous AI systems in enterprise software.

Philanthropy and the 1-1-1 model

Central to Salesforce's identity is the mission to have a positive impact on the world. On day one, Marc created the 1-1-1 model of philanthropy, which leverages the resources of Salesforce to improve communities around the world. 

Today, more than 18,000 companies have adopted this model through the Pledge 1% movement. 

Since its founding, Salesforce has given more than US$650m in grants to nonprofits and NGOs, more than US$180m to education and more than US$100m to public children's hospitals, while employees have volunteered more than eight million hours.

Marc and his wife Lynne have focused their philanthropy on children's health, the environment, public education and homelessness. 

In 2016, they created the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to study and solve ocean issues around the world.

Leading the AI revolution

What began with Einstein AI in 2016 has evolved dramatically, with Salesforce introducing Einstein GPT in 2023 — the world's first generative AI for CRM — and now autonomous agents that are transforming workplace automation.

In December 2024, Salesforce launched Agentforce 2.0, enabling organisations to deploy autonomous artificial intelligence systems alongside human workers. 

The platform uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology — software that enables AI systems to access and analyse enterprise data.

"Agentforce 2.0 takes our revolutionary Salesforce digital labour platform to another level, with new reasoning, integration and customisation features that supercharge autonomous agents with unprecedented levels of intelligence, precision and accuracy," Marc says.

The system addresses growing resource constraints in enterprise teams, moving beyond "copilot" AI assistants to systems that can handle complex requests and take independent action.

"The demand for Agentforce has been amazing — no other company comes close to offering this complete AI solution for enterprises,” Marc adds. “We're seamlessly bringing together AI, data, apps and automation with humans to reshape how work gets done."

From disruption to transformation

Benioff's vision has consistently anticipated major technological shifts. 

When enterprise software required substantial infrastructure investment, he pioneered the delivery of software through web browsers — now known as cloud computing.

Through strategic product development and acquisitions, Salesforce expanded from sales tracking to a complete Customer 360 platform that unifies data across sales, marketing and customer service systems.

"When I look back at 2019, we had really gone through three huge waves of technology: cloud computing, mobile and social," Marc says. 

"And now we are going into the fourth wave, which is probably the most important one in AI, which is not just the most important technology of our lifetime, but probably the most important in any lifetime."

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