Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is drafting the company’s annual strategic plan, and he shared key parts of the vision for next year in an interview with Business Insider.
This annual document is called the V2MOM, which stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measurements. It’s shared internally at the start of each fiscal year, which begins in February. The document often contains important projections. For instance, Business Insider broke details of Salesforce’s 2023 plan to cut costs and boost profit margins, which fueled a massive rally in the stock that year.
More recently, Salesforce has made a huge bet on AI agents with a flagship offering known as Agentforce. Some investors, clients, and employees have cast doubt on the initiative, although the company’s earnings on Wednesday revealed some positive signs for the upcoming fiscal year.
The V2MOM document for this upcoming fiscal year will have four main components, Benioff said in an interview following the results.
“The first, most important thing is our data foundation,” Benioff said. “None of these agents work without data and context, or you just get all the hallucinations,” the term for inaccurate AI outputs.
Salesforce recently bought cloud data management company Informatica for $8 billion. This will be combined with existing Salesforce data platforms, Mulesoft and Data 360, to make customer data “harmonized, federated, and integrated,” he said. “That is critical for every customer.”
A strong data foundation is even more important for the generative AI era that’s sweeping over the software industry right now. To get the most out of this new technology, companies are weaving their internal data with the intelligence of AI models to create new services and explore efficiencies.
Salesforce handles a massive amount of corporate customer data already. Strengthening this part of its business could help the company build more power AI services, including bolstering its Agentforce efforts.
Benioff said the second component of the strategy for next year sits on top of this data foundation. These are applications such as its popular CRM software, along with Slack, and Tableau data-visualization tools.
The third piece is Agentforce itself, Benioff said, though he provided few details about his vision for this in the V2MOM document, beyond saying the AI service has dramatically evolved over the last year.
The fourth piece is the “evolution” of bespoke AI agents that are curated for specific corporate customers such as Williams-Sonoma. This also includes AI agents for employees, such as Salesforce’s own Slackbot, which Benioff used liberally to answer questions during the interview with Business Insider.
Salesforce aims to deliver these services by industry, creating versions for automakers, drug companies, and governments, for instance, Benioff explained.
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