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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Kicks Off Dreamforce With Keynote Presentation
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff delivering the keynote at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco (Jessica Christian/Getty Images)

The best quotes from Salesforce’s earnings call

CEO Marc Benioff doesn’t disappoint.

Rani Molla

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.)

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Jon Keegan

DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

$28.5T
Rani Molla

SpaceX thinks its total addressable market (TAM) is a whopping $28.5 trillion for its businesses, according to an S-1 filing for its upcoming IPO reviewed by Reuters. And most of that market isn’t rockets. The company says roughly 90% could come from AI — largely selling artificial intelligence tools to businesses.

“We believe that our enterprise strategy, which is focused on serving the digital needs of the world’s largest industries with Al solutions, positions us competitively to pursue this rapidly ⁠growing opportunity,” ​SpaceX said in the filing. “We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human ​history.”

TAM, of course, assumes capturing every possible customer. But even a small slice of a $28.5 trillion market would be enormous.

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Rani Molla

Tesla Cybercab production has begun

On Tesla’s earnings call earlier this week, CEO Elon Musk said production of the company’s steering-wheel-less Cybercab had begun. Since then, Musk and Tesla have posted videos showing the gold two-seater rolling off the line at its Texas Gigafactory and onto the road.

The Cybercab — meant both for consumers and Tesla’s Robotaxi network — is widely seen as central to the company’s future. “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large scale and large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots,” Musk said last year.

Whether these cars actually make it to consumers is another question. For now, regulations generally require steering wheels, and Tesla still has to prove the vehicles can reliably drive themselves.

On the earnings call, Musk said production would be “very slow” but would ramp up and go “kind of exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year.”

tech
Rani Molla

Meta signs deal to use Amazon Graviton chips

Meta said it will deploy “tens of millions” of Amazon Web Services Graviton CPU cores to power so-called “agentic” AI systems — tools that can reason, plan, and act on their own. The move makes Meta one of the largest customers of Amazon’s in-house chips.

The deal also underscores a broader shift in AI infrastructure, as companies move beyond Nvidia GPUs and use different chips for different tasks.

Meta, which is working on its own custom inference chips, also has chip deals with Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

Meta Partners With AWS on Graviton Chips to Power Agentic AI

Meta Partners With AWS on Graviton Chips to Power Agentic AI

The deal also underscores a broader shift in AI infrastructure, as companies move beyond Nvidia GPUs and use different chips for different tasks.

Meta, which is working on its own custom inference chips, also has chip deals with Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

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Rani Molla

Oracle rises after Wedbush’s Dan Ives calls the stock a buy with 25% upside

Oracle extended its premarket gains Friday after Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives initiated coverage with an “outperform” rating and a $225 price target — about 25% upside to its pre-initiation level — calling the enterprise software and cloud infrastructure company a “foundational infrastructure provider for the AI revolution.”

Ives argues investors are misreading Oracle’s heavy capital spending and negative free cash flow as risky, despite being backed by a massive $553 billion backlog of contracted demand. He says the company’s “secret sauce” is a two-part strategy: building high-performance cloud infrastructure for AI workloads while connecting those models directly to companies’ own data.

“We believe Oracle is in the early innings of a significant repositioning as it executes on this generational opportunity,” Ives wrote.

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