Salesforce CEO calls AI a ‘commodity feature’

While Wall Street worries that advances in artificial intelligence will hurt enterprise software companies sales force CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the large language model is “just a business feature” that strengthens his company’s products.

“All these major language models are the same. We just want the lowest cost one, then we plug it in,” Benioff told Cramer. “We have all the customers’ data. We have great applications. These are not commodities.”

Large language models, or LLMs, are artificial intelligence models trained on data that can have a variety of functions, including data analysis, summarization, and chatbot services. The leading hyperscalers, namely Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have poured billions of dollars into the development of the technology.

Salesforce shares have had a rough year, even as the tech sector has been on the rise overall. Shares have tumbled on Wall Street’s fears that artificial intelligence could make some enterprise software products redundant. Salesforce shares are down more than 25% since the beginning of the year, while tech-heavy stocks Nasdaq Composite It increased by over 21 percent.

Benioff did not address his company’s falling stock price in 2025 in his interview with Cramer. But he suggested investors who “walked away” from the company last year “somehow thought software companies were under pressure from AI, but the opposite was true.”

“Software companies are driven by and powered by AI,” Benioff continued.

Salesforce shares rose on Thursday after the company sent The stock made a big gain, rising 3.66%. Although revenues were a bit weak, Salesforce raised its revenue forecast for this quarter.

Benioff boasted about the performance of Agentforce, his company’s product that automates sales and customer service workflows, last quarter. Agentforce’s annual revenue was over $500 million, up 330% from the previous year, it said in the earnings release. Benioff also said Salesforce has closed more than 18,500 Agentforce deals in the year since the product’s launch, with 9,500 of those being paid transactions.

“This is the fastest growing product I have ever seen in the history of Salesforce,” Benioff told Cramer.

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Disclaimer CNBC Investment Club owns shares of Salesforce and Microsoft.