Marc Benioff, Agents vs. CRM, and Augmented Humans

Welcome to wake up with AI, the podcast where human powered meets AI assisted. Join your hosts, Chris Carillon, Niko Lofakas, and George b Thomas as we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence. From the latest AI news to cutting edge tools and skill sets, we are here to help business owners, marketers, and everyday individuals unlock their full potential with the power of AI. Let's get started.

Good morning, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever you might be listening or watching. It is Friday, November 15, 2024, and we are here to wake up with AI. George Nikko, how are you fellas doing today?

I'm doing great, but we gotta stop with that date thing, man. It's getting too close to Thanksgiving and Christmas way too fast. It's a constant morning reminder that time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future. But I'm doing great, brother. I'm doing great.

Doing good as per usual. Lot of lot of news, lot of cool stuff. Been playing around with Replit a lot. So, yeah, good times.

I will say that I did just order a new audiobook that I'm excited to listen to over the weekend. I I have to throw that in.

What you got?

I'm gonna the you know, you sent that Moe video over. So he mentioned, first of all, he mentioned pocket Moe, which I think is hilarious where you could have, like, Moe in your pocket, and he would answer things, which I think, at some level, all of us humans will probably have, like, a pocket not all. Not all. Never mind. Not all.

Some of us will have a pocket version of ourselves that people will pull out and be able to, like, interact with. But he mentioned his book, Scary Smart, and so I was like, oh, okay. I just wrecked my entire weekend because I'm gonna go see what that book's all about.

Or you made your weekend that much better. Yeah.

Right. Well, yes. Just trying to keep up.

Well, that's sweet.

Yeah. And on the date thing, I mean, if if we can help people wake up to the fact that it is moving forward every day, that might be step 1 for for some people. Also, in the back of my mind, we're gonna put all this into AI at some point. It's gonna come off with these cool trend lines and, like, here's how accurate all the things that, you talked about were, and here's the exact future. There's always something It's just never documented for anybody.

What are we talking about today, Nico?

I know you guys saw a lot of the the stuff that I put in chat, and I was going to be talking about that. But I will mention a couple things.

I always get nervous when he does a but. Because I think I'm prepared, and then I know I'm just not prepared.

Gotcha.

I caught wind of a interesting story. And what I thought was so interesting about it was the reaction and who who was being asked this question, basically. If you've been paying attention, we've talked about before the fact that one of the companies, in question that I think is the best example is, Klarna. Klarna walked away from a lot of major providers, Salesforce being one of them, and that's because they realized the value of things like generative coding and things like replit where you could just build the applications generatively. You could even though it would take a little bit of time, it would take far less time than, like, years, right, to build it out.

So there is a trend where companies may be moving away from this. Now we're talking about and and I don't know. I I haven't shown, George yet. I think your your mind will maybe explode.

Oh, god. Here we go.

Like, so when we were using Replit yesterday, you could see agentic type action. You could see that it was going building packages. It was going in installing stuff. It was going in building out files. It was going in building out TS files.

Yesterday, I was working with it last night and was building an application that would incorporate GPT. Right away, it's like, hey, give me your API key. I'll store it as a secret, and I'll I'll even keep that stored in the background so you can use that secret and invoke it anytime you need to. Right? So like it's already like all of these things that you would think that you would have to do.

Right? And what you were talking about, George, the other day, that's what Replit has. It comes back, you know, every, I don't know, maybe 2 minutes and it says, hey, check out the interface. I did this thing. Is it working?

Let me know. And he said, yeah. It's working or no. It's not working or whatever. Okay.

Well, I'll go take a I'll I'll go work on it and I'll come back. So they asked, the king of them all, I suppose, what he thought about the fact that he may be building the very technology that will undo his company. Who? Marc Benioff.

Oh, is that who? Is that the he? Okay.

Alright. Yeah. TechCrunch put out a story about Marc Benioff and is basically asked, what if your workforce had no limits? Now that's a question that we could not ask in the last 25 years that I've been doing Salesforce, but the 45 that I've been doing software business. He said 100 he said that 100 of customers are already using the ai agent platform, Agent Force, in their business, and he said that our goal is to have a 1,000,000,000 agents deployed within 1 year.

So the flip side of that was that if you have all of these agents that are deployed, keeping in mind that they all auto task, essentially, Well, what is necessarily right? Like, what happens to these platforms? Why do they become so useful? Why do the the extras and the add ons and all that become so useful as opposed to just having an agent that does that for you? So as opposed to, let's say, having, a system that would be your you know, that would handle your CRM or whatever, you just have an agent that does that.

You don't even deal with the CRM. You just deal with the agent. The agent sends you the leads. The agent gets your sign off on stuff. The agent builds all your collateral for you, and then just gives it to you, and you just all you're doing is approving stuff all day long, basically, making changes, making edits, and updates.

So why do I need Salesforce? What's the point? I thought this was a pretty interesting story.

Yeah. It's it's interesting what it's doing to my brain right now because there's a couple different layers. The first one is my immediate knee jerk response is like, uh-oh, and let me explain why. I once worked at an organization where the owner of the organization decided to kinda just check out and let it run on autopilot, and the organization quite quickly went out of business. And so there's this layer of disconnect that all of a sudden happens.

Right? And so, as you're telling the story, I'm like, oh, like, I see this layer of human disconnect happening. And, historically, when there's been a layer of human disconnect for instance, just go out into your car and drive to Walmart and take your hands off the wheels if you're not driving a Tesla and see how long that that works out for you. Not very long. There's a disconnect.

Right?

For now.

For now. I understand. Everything that we're talking about is, like, now versus future, and and I get it. But, like, I'm I'm like, uh-oh. Like, how do we pay attention to the human disconnect that could potentially happen based on people doing their knee jerk response to using these things that we're talking about.

Now the second thing, though, excites me because my brain also went in another direction of, like, well, sure, the CRM of today, But what if your CRM is your agent? Like so then I start to think about Copilot and Breeze and Intelligence and, like, what are they doing? Are they actually building a CRM anymore? Are they actually building a sales marketing and service tool anymore? Or is HubSpot actually on a mission quietly building the most massive business agent possibly known to man in the next 2 to 5 years?

Which, again, I go, oh, yes. I backed the right pony. Like, let's go. Because if that's where we're headed, then I get excited. Because I also realized that everything in the fundamental core of the culture of inbound and HubSpot is literally about making life better for the humans by the technology that they've created from the beginning.

And so I'm like, alright. Maybe we can have the agent and the CRM without the disconnect. Anyway, that's like, literally, I'm just, like, at the end of the day, everything's changing. That's all. Nothing big.

You know?

I I I gotta I have have to jump in for for 2 things. 1, I'll take my hands off the wheel anytime I'm in Texas or California since Waymo is currently operating in both places and they seem to be doing just fine. And 2, there is already growing disconnect. You send me nurtures. You put me in your sequence.

None of that is human, but I'm still interacting with you. It's still personalized content for me. Right? That's we talk about personalization with content, so that we can make our content more, what, human sounding, personalized. Right?

So we wouldn't be putting a focus on that if we weren't doing that in the effort to distance ourselves from having to handle that content.

See, I guess I get to

look at it that way. Go ahead, Chris.

Yeah. I I was gonna say, like, it's a strategic disconnect. It's not a, like, a task disconnect in terms of, like, okay. I don't need to drive the car anymore. So I'm not gonna focus on where I need to go or how we're gonna get there, and I'm just gonna, you know, do whatever.

And that's where just like anything, it's so easy to think about this stuff as, like, new decisions that have to be made. But in reality, it's still roles and responsibilities. Right? So what does the human have to be doing in that situation if they no longer have to manage, maintain, do anything in a CRM? Be humans with other humans.

Right? So if I'm the salesperson, then now all of my time can be spent interacting with other humans in the way I know I need to to sell stuff. And the AI is there to help me do that to the best of my ability, which for me means I'm either creating content or I'm on a conversation with somebody. Like, those are the 2 modes all day.

Can I add something too? Because I think there's maybe the mindset that with some organizations when they think about nurtures or sequences. But I wanna be honest, and I'm gonna give you a real use case, this morning that happened. And I kind of wondered why my brain went in that direction, and then I get on this show and I'm like, oh, I know why my brain went in that direction because now I get to use it as a use case. I never create a nurture or a sequence to escape, meaning to escape the human or to escape the time to add value.

I'm usually creating a nurture or a sequence because I'm trying to augment and amplify. Let let me explain. This morning, I had a email in my inbox. A customer was asking me, hey. I used to use Clearbit.

I can't even log anymore. Like, what happened? I know that HubSpot acquired Clearbit. And so I went down this road of, like, well, Clearbit, you know, they got acquired by HubSpot. It's now Breeze Intelligence.

That means that, you know, this informs, this in enrichment, this in buyer intent. And what I started to do is I literally was giving him links. Like, here's 3 or 4 videos. Here's 2 knowledge articles. Here's, and I got to this, like, list of things that I'm about to hand them.

I'm about to hit send, and I go, wow. This is shitty because I'm giving this person probably about 2 hours of research to do today. So I said, why would I do that to this person? I love this human. If they wanna dive in, I wanna give them the resources.

I wanna give them the links, but I then took all the information from all the links, and I put it into my assistant. I said, assistant, I want a summary overview email of all of these links and information that I'm gonna give to this human so they can immediately just understand what it is and why it might be impactful to their business. By the way, this is their business. This is who I'm writing the email to. This is the question that they asked me.

These are the links that I provide. Can you just give me this boom. It gives me this dope email. And I'm like, alright. So that's the email, and then the resource links are gonna be below that because it was to augment and to amplify and to save that human hours in their day for immediate understanding insights to take action in something that they might wanna do with their business or not.

It I wasn't nurturing to escape. I wasn't, you know, using AI to, like, let me get over. Let me let me cheat. Like, that's that's the thing. When you wake up with AI, you realize you're waking up to augment and amplify who you are as a freaking good human being.

And if you're not a good human being, then Wow. Come on. Become a good human being.

It's easier than ever.

I love it. I I love the energy behind it. To me, it's I I don't know. I'd like, I know that we see things differently for sure. I love playing digital intelligence advocate.

And I I see what you're talking about. I really do. But then I I wonder, to your point, if that were the case, it's like, okay, then why customer service agent? Why prospecting agent? Right?

So, like, okay. That's why I was saying it's like we started with baby steps, workflows, then we went to sequences. We're taking, you know, large steps. Now we're leaping, and pretty soon we're gonna be running. Not sprinting, but running.

Right? I don't even know what running looks like in in the sense of agent enabled CRM. I'll put my vision out there. You're on a desktop version of HubSpot that just looks like your workspace, and that's all it is. It's not even the rest of the CRM.

It's just your workspace, but you can do everything from it, and it augments on mobile.

I do wanna hit on something, though. You said why prospecting agent? Why these agents that feel like they could take jobs, which, by the way, they they could. I mean, literally, in Moe's thing, it was like, this is a reality that we run into. I think of it in this way, though, too.

Like, as somebody who is trying to help the most humans possible, am I really helping them in the sales process? No. All the value I give is after the sales process. So if there's a way that I could be spending less time selling because I could spend more time helping, then the prospecting agent for me is a dope assistant because it's taking not somebody else's job, but time that I don't need to spend in a low value activity of the steps that they have to go through to be able to book a meeting with me because I'm already building trust before that. So, like, it's fundamentally a piece that could just, like, yeah.

I I don't really add a ton of value in that section, so you help me do that so we can get more humans to the place of value, which is meeting with me and talking about strategy and us building great stuff together. Like, that's social media agent. Right? I'm not replacing somebody with that, but I'm augmenting that person so we can know the right things to be talking about at the right times and, like, again, augmenting these humans. Now, Niko, I know.

Will some people lose their jobs to social media? Probably. But that's because of the humans at the helm and the way that they're looking at the bottom line and the way they're looking at the processes and the platforms before they look at the peep

Trust me. I think you're right because, to be honest with you, something I hadn't really taken into account, right, is that and and here's this is a very easy way to look at, like, what's going to happen. I know there's a fair amount of people. My brother is one of them that that I talk to who's, like, you know, basically on the other side of the spectrum, very, very non tech, very, very outside of this stuff, and has that, you know, person, like, nor you know, regular street person perspective on it. And, you know, he talks about how, like, you know, failing economy and the way things are going and, like, how stuff is so bad.

But then I look at GDP growth, and it's up. So it's this very odd thing of, like, okay, but if we are if supposedly we're economically doing bad as a country, why is GDP growth up? It would have to be up because of efficiency within business. Right? So people who are talking about, like, oh, I might lose my job or I think I'm gonna lose my job, just try to envision this.

Right? Essentially, what was happening was human led job growth for a long, long, long period of time. Now we have this AI like, then we had computers, and human led job growth paused for a little bit, not very long, but for a little bit because it took time. Right? It didn't take time at all to learn how, you know, typewriting.

That was not that big a deal. He was just in and out with that. With computers, a little bit more difficult. Gotta learn this user interface. There's, you know, even back in the sick in the, forties, fifties with the punch cards, you know, stuff was ridiculous.

Right? Now we have this AI, and the AI is doing the capability of someone else's work, but you have to understand that basically what's happening is just a plateau of the s curve that will eventually take off again. Because as these businesses basically expand to their maximum of their current employment force using these AI tools, Once they get to that maximum, they'll start hiring again. Even though one person will equal 4 at that point, it doesn't matter. It's just you'll you're still gonna need to increase body count because you you still need somebody to run the agent at the end of the day.

Right? So, yeah, I I see it that way. And at the same time, I didn't get a chance to yesterday, but I think I sent you guys this video and I wanted to play this clip because I know that we were talking about scaling laws and we've been talking about, Liquid AI and that, you know, we've been putting in the horsepower or, like, building the the cylinders, but not really tuning anything. And I thought that this clip was so perfect to help explain, like, that whole process, but let me make sure I'm also sharing the sound because that turns

That would be good.

Issue. Yep.

Yeah. I mean, it already looks exciting. Now I wanna hear it.

But we think we build, more solidly faster execute better. So an example was I talked about how 01.ai now has is the 3rd best model modeling company in the world, ranking number 6 in models measured by LMSIS and UC Berkeley. But the most amazing thing, I think, the thing that shocks my friends in Silicon Valley is not just our performance, but that we train the model with only $3,000,000 And GPT 4 was trained by 80 to a 100,000,000. And, GPT 5 is rumored to be trained by about $1,000,000,000. So it is not the case.

We believe in scaling law, but when you do excellent detailed engineering, it is not the case you have to spend $1,000,000,000 to train it.

That's just

That changes everything.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. George was talking about, Mo Gadot earlier. Him and Dennis Asaba's, they're so good at just essentially red pilling people on on AI and, like, where things are at and what the capabilities are. That you could watch a Dennis Asaba's video from, like, 6 to 8 months ago, and he's talking about stuff that still hasn't happened yet, but it looks like it's about to. Right?

So, like, in terms of how far the guys inside are versus where we are on the outside using stuff, they're months ahead, but their months ahead may as well be years ahead.

And anybody, like, that starts to like, the quicker you catch on, the more that you are years ahead, like, of everybody else. And, like, when George as George described the prospecting agent, like, George is a special case in that he has been building doing any of that that we've been talking about for years, decades sometimes, this stuff is not just gonna fix that part for you, and it's just gonna get you more unqualified leads and all these other things. And, like, as we're talking about it, like, think about these shifts. Because even as you showed that clip, it's like, for me, it's one minute of planning saves 10 minutes of execution at scale. Like, the the the great engineering and the great design leads to doing things better.

And in 2022, when the study came out about how price is no longer the guaranteed number one thing that people care about, They care about speed. That represents a shift for businesses where if it's price, I can bring it down to $0 like anytime I want as a salesperson just to get the business. Right? Just to start that business, sell that box, do whatever. I don't need any systems in that moment to be able to trick to target that number one concern of the customer.

As soon as the number one concern becomes speed, I very much cannot do that because speed requires the system, the processes, all of that stuff be working. Now, in the same vein, if you wanna start taking advantage of AI and agents. Like, if you don't have all this other stuff going on, including building trust before the process, but also trust from content that is then teaching those agents what they need to be doing to support this activity that you think they're just gonna come in and do, you're you're not ready. You can you can press play and you can implement, but how good is that gonna be? Right?

And that's where the people doing that will be completely disconnected. They will not see results. And I would argue, be completely disconnected. They will not see results. And I would argue, if that's the case you're in, if that's the situation you're in, that prospect, that first connection, if that's the first time they're hearing of you, that could be the most important part that a human needs to be involved in the process.

And if you're leaving that up to agents, I don't know, man.

It it's funny, Chris, because when I hear you talking, like, my brain again, it it always goes in different directions at about the same time. What I hear us dancing around a little bit, I think, is is around mindset. So, like, for instance, if you were to go out on the street, you know, those, like, man on the street interviews where they ask him, like, 5 dumb questions, and then you just question, like, our own humanity of, like, really? These are, like, the people on the you've seen those. If you if you did a man on the street interview and you just went out and you asked, like, what does AI stand for?

I mean, obviously, people are gonna be like, oh, artificial intelligence. I don't even think about it in that way anymore, to be honest with you. When I think of AI and artificial intelligence or even the letters AI as we kinda move forward, I think of, like, advanced individuals or accelerated industries. You see what I'm saying? Like, there is just this level of, like, quit thinking of it as, like, a separate thing, you know, and start, like, incorporation.

Right? It's funny because, again, Nico, you sent over that video, and and there was a part, which I should probably try to put that in the show notes. But there was a part where it actually I'm not even gonna lie. I rewound it 7 times to listen to it again and again and again because when you're trying to bring something in, you have to understand what's potentially happening around you and and this word around the polarity, the polarity of enabling innovation and growth, and how do we do that and keep our citizens secure and safe. I rewound that part of the video 7 times.

If you know something, if you use something, if you become a master at something, it's very easy to actually stay safe. I can use a kitchen knife all day long. Why? Because I've used a kitchen knife for years. I can drive a car most days without getting in an accident.

Why? Because I've driven a car for years of my life. Stop thinking of it as artificial intelligence and incorporate it into your day, into your process. Use it like your car or your kitchen knife. What I'm telling you is that become an advanced individual, become an accelerated industry, and freaking wake up with AI.

That's a wrap for this episode of wake up with AI. We hope that you feel a little more inspired, a little more inspired, a little more informed, and a whole lot more excited about how AI can augment your life and business. Always remember that this journey is just the beginning and that we are right here with you every step of the way. If you love today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. You can also connect with us on social media to stay updated with all things AI.

Until next time. Stay curious, stay empowered, and wake up with AI.