Marc Benioff unveils new version of Slackbot with AI capabilities, talks San Francisco's progress

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff appeared before clients, investors and media in San Francisco Tuesday to showcase the next generation of Slackbot with AI capabilities.

MrBeast, or Jimmy Donaldson, joined the presentation virtually and talked about the benefits for his company, Beast Industries.

"You have the feature where it just pulls up all my unread messages and then I just hit, 'mark as read, mark as read,'" MrBeast said.

Benioff said AI will mean more productivity for all workers.

He said Salesforce employees more than 83,000 people, with more than 9,000 in San Francisco.

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ABC7 Eyewitness News asked him what jobs will still be relevant as automation becomes more prevalent.

"I've been hiring a lot of salespeople because it turns out that large language models are fantastic to do kind of automated language and speaking but to actually have a human-to-human interaction and sell something and communicate, you still need a human being," Benioff said.

Benioff is a fourth generation San Franciscan, a major Bay Area philanthropist and even supported a homeless tax in the past. More recently last year, he suggested President Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco to improve safety.

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ABC7 Eyewitness News asked Benioff what he thought about San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie's progress so far during his time in office.

"I couldn't be more excited about how the Mayor has been doing," Benioff said. "We've been investing aggressively. As you saw, we've put almost $10 million into the city since the Mayor took office to help automate, hire more police officers, make for a safer San Francisco. For us, nothing is more important than that."

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The presentation showed how companies use Slackbot to help look at budgets, take notes and plan.

"This previously would have been days or even weeks' worth of work that happened in a matter of minutes," said Slack General Manager Rob Seaman.

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In addition, companies can use Slackbot to sign contracts and tie up loose ends using Slack Marketplace to plug apps into the slack workspace, such as Docusign.

Benioff was asked about Governor Gavin Newsom's executive order issued Monday requiring stronger privacy and security standards for artificial intelligence companies seeking to do business with the state. He said:

"We've seen these large language models do all kinds of things. They do great things for business. We also saw some very dark things last year where they became suicide coaches for kids and that's something we do not want to see. I think that for every one of these AI companies, they have to get to another level of safety and standards. Just in the same way that we've seen some very dark moments for social media, we're starting to see those moments for AI as well. And it's extremely important for every company to double down on their ability to make a safe environment, not just a great environment."