The best quotes from Salesforce’s earnings call

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is known for his sweeping proclamations and fun storytelling. And on last night’s earnings call, after the company reported earnings and guidance that beat expectations, he was in top form.

Investors came to the call for updates on the company’s AI progress but stayed for Benioff’s wild ride. Here are some of our favorite quotes from the call:

Tech CEO using any opportunity to mention J.R.R. Tolkien:

“We saw that in OpenAI’s recent announcement that we were in their trillion-token club. And of course, we use all of the large language models. They’re all great. We love all of them. We love all of our children. But they’re also all just commodities, and we can have the choice of choosing whatever one we want, whether it’s OpenAI or Gemini or Anthropic or what — there’s other open-source ones. They’re all very good at this point, so we can swap them in and out. The lowest-cost one is the best one for us, making us basically the top user of these foundation models.

And that point that we did 3.2 trillion tokens — let Bilbo Baggins know that we’ve got adoption and usage happening here with this large language model gateway.”

The company made a police bot named Bobbi:

“This week, we launched the UK’s first AI police officer. We work with multiple police departments to roll out Bobbi. Everybody loves Bobbi. It’s the Agentforce service agent that is the public’s first point of contact for nonemergency calls, and Bobbi autonomously provides instant responses on more than 90 topics, and the police departments have already seen a 20% reduction in nonemergency demand.”

Digging at Microsoft:

“This isn’t your Clippy. This is not your kind of a good AI demo. This is real enterprise adoption of agentic AI and capability at scale globally.”

He’s very excited about Agentforce:

“This is our fastest-growing product ever.”

No, seriously, Agentforce is really a big deal!

“It’s happening around the world. I just got back from Japan and I saw it there. I was in the UK, I saw it there. I’ve seen obviously throughout the whole United States. It’s really a global phenomenon.”

Being totally normal about a customer:

“We love Costco. We love all of our retailer friends equally. They are all of our children.

But we do love that Costco warehouse experience, and it’s a great expansion for us in the quarter. We’re driving AI and digitization across everything they do for their members.”

Slackbot is family now, too:

“I’ll just tell you that for me, Slackbot is like chatting with just one of our Ohana that knows everything about Salesforce, so it’s pretty awesome.” (Benioff sometimes refers to employees as Ohana, a Hawaiian term for extended family.)

Seemingly being off by a pretty big amount when guessing Walmart’s operating cash flow:

“In the third quarter, operating cash flow was a whopping $2.3 billion, up 17% year over year. Free cash flow was $2.2 billion, up 22% year over year, and we expect to finish the year with nearly $15 billion in operating cash flow. That was pretty awesome, I think. I think it’s more operating cash flow at $15 billion than even Walmart.” (Walmart’s operating cash flow through the first nine months of this year was $27.5 billion, and last year it was $36 billion. It did $9.1 billion of cash flow just in the third quarter. We reached out to Salesforce for some clarity.)