Marc Benioff sold the world on the cloud. Now he is selling AI agents
Salesforce’s co-founder spent 25 years moving business software online. His new bet is software that works on its own.
In 1999, business software came on discs and took months to install. Marc Benioff, then a fast-rising executive at Oracle, left to start Salesforce in a San Francisco apartment with Parker Harris and a small team. The idea: deliver customer-relationship software over the internet, as a subscription.
Salesforce marketed itself with a “No Software” campaign and became one of the companies that defined software as a service.
Growth by acquisition
Salesforce grew from sales tools into a broad suite for service, marketing and commerce, and bought companies including MuleSoft in 2018, Tableau in 2019 and Slack in 2021. Benioff also built philanthropy into the company from the start, committing 1% of equity, product and employee time to charity, a model that became the Pledge 1% movement.
In 2018, Benioff and his wife, Lynne, bought TIME magazine.
The agent bet
Since 2024, Benioff has reoriented Salesforce around Agentforce, its platform for AI agents that handle tasks such as customer service on their own. In December 2025, Salesforce said Agentforce and its data products had reached an annual run rate of about $1.4 billion, more than doubling in a year.
What to watch
Investors want proof that AI agents will add revenue rather than replace the per-seat licenses Salesforce has sold for 25 years. How Salesforce prices agents will answer that.
- Company
- Salesforce
- Role
- Chair & CEO
- HQ
- San Francisco, California
- Founded
- 1999
- Section
- Software
This profile draws on public reporting and company materials.
Sources: Digital Commerce 360: Salesforce Q3 FY26 · Salesforce Q4 FY26 earnings call transcript · Wikipedia: Marc Benioff
Photo: Salesforce, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
