Dive Brief:
- Salesforce wants to link enterprise data and AI-driven insights through its Data Cloud and Einstein 1 services, CEO Marc Benioff said Wednesday, speaking during the company's Q4 2024 earnings call.
- Salesforce Data Cloud was included in one-quarter of the company's deals of $1 million or more, said Benioff, who referred to the platform as the company's "total focus" for the 2025 fiscal year.
- "So many of our customers have islands of trapped data in all of these systems," said Marc Benioff. "But the AI is not going to work because it needs to have this seamless, amalgamated data experience."
Dive Insight:
In the push toward enterprise generative AI adoption, Salesforce is serving up tools on multiple fronts. Data Cloud centralizes enterprise data, and the Einstein 1 CRM delivers generative AI solutions.
Salesforce, the leading provider of CRM solutions, is also hitting the market with an incumbent advantage. Most enterprise leaders are looking to the feature set of their current software and cloud providers to deploy generative AI.
Earlier this week the company launched the Einstein Copilot generative AI CRM assistant in public beta. The tool can create new content, automate tasks or summarize text, the company said.
Amid enterprise concerns over AI outputs, risk and data, Salesforce put forth a trust layer solution last year to help businesses place guardrails around customer data.
"It's all running inside our Einstein trust layer, and we've deployed it to all of our customers," Benioff said.
Adoption of Salesforce's solutions aimed at AI will depend on the context for those applications, according to Liz Herbert, VP and principal analyst at Forrester.
"If the AI is operating primarily around the applications running in Salesforce, that's where their solutions will tend to play a role," Herbert said. "The more someone's very centric on Salesforce, the more their AI will be a natural fit. The more somebody has a very diverse, heterogeneous environment, obviously then it's just not as natural of a fit."
So far, the set of strategies are supporting revenue growth for the software provider. The company reported $34.9 billion in revenue during the fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31. Year over year revenue grew 11%, the company said.
Deals of $10 million and above grew 78% during the company's 2024 fiscal year, closing 86,000 multicloud deals in the same period, according to Brian Millham, Salesforce's president and COO, during the earnings call.
"Our pricing and packaging strategy is driving higher sales and delivering more value for companies of all sizes in the industries," Millham said.
