Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff has released his 2024 Letter to Stakeholders, discussing the company’s focus on responsible and ethical AI.
Benioff starts off highlighting the company’s 25-year anniversary, before noting the sweeping transformation of the past year. Benioff also points out that Salesforce is now “the world’s #1 AI CRM, the third-largest enterprise software company and the largest enterprise applications company in the world.”
At the same time, fiscal year 2024 was an extraordinary year of transformation, thanks to the next generation of artificial intelligence. This could be the single most important moment in the history of our industry, and customers are turning to us to help them navigate this AI revolution and connect with their customers in a whole new way.
Benioff goes on to highlight the company’s goal of developing “the most trusted” AI products in the industry.
In fiscal year 2024, we set out to make our AI products the most trusted in the industry. Led by the Office of Ethical and Humane Use, we focused on creating guidelines and acceptable use policies to ensure responsible development and deployment of AI products in the enterprise. We introduced the Einstein Trust Layer, which lets customers benefit from generative AI without compromising their data security and privacy controls.
Salesforce is also proactively engaging with governments, industry, academia, and civil society to advance responsible, risk-based, and globally applicable AI norms. This includes advising the White House on responsible AI policies and signing the Voluntary Commitments to help advance the development of safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.
The letter also highlights the company’s philanthropic work.
I’m especially proud that we’re achieving this incredible success by staying true to our values: trust, customer success, innovation, equality and sustainability. Our values have remained our North Star, creating shared success with all of our stakeholders and multiplying the impact of our 1-1-1 philanthropic model beyond what we could’ve ever envisioned.
To date, we’ve given more than $700 million in grants and performed over 8.7 million hours of volunteer service by our employees. We’re honored to help more than 56,000 nonprofits and higher-ed institutions power their missions with our technology, and inspired that nearly 20,000 companies have adopted our 1-1-1 model to make their own impact.
Benioff’s focus on AI is another indication of just how pervasive AI is and the degree to which it is permeating the tech industry and beyond.
