Latest news with #Salesforce
Fox News
an hour ago
- Automotive
- Fox News
Fox News AI Newsletter: ChatGPT rewiring your brain
IN TODAY'S NEWSLETTER: - ChatGPT could be silently rewiring your brain as experts urge caution for long-term use- Tesla's newly launched robotaxi service experiences driving issues, traffic problems: report- Salesforce boss reveals the stunning amount of work now handled by AI BRAIN DANGER: Using ChatGPT on a long-term basis could have negative effects on brain function. That's according to a study led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which found that using a large language model (LLM) to write multiple essays over a four-month period could hamper cognitive abilities. 'ERRATIC': Videos taken this week by passengers showed Tesla robotaxis – which are Model Y vehicles with advanced software – braking suddenly, speeding, conducting improper drop-offs, entering the wrong lane and driving over a curb, according to Reuters. 'DIGITAL LABOR REVOLUTION': Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed the software company uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to perform a good deal of its work. 'FAIR USE': Two artificial intelligence development companies won in court this week against book authors' copyright lawsuits. Two federal judges in San Francisco ruled that Anthropic and Meta may use books without permission to train its artificial intelligence systems. SMART SWING SIDEKICK: If you've ever found yourself juggling clubs, bags and gear while trying to keep your focus on your golf game, the Robera Neo might just be the solution you didn't know you needed. This AI-powered smart caddie is designed to follow you around the course, carrying your clubs effortlessly and freeing you up to concentrate on your swing. BALANCING ACT: Congressional lawmakers on Wednesday questioned the balance between speed and safety when discussing artificial intelligence (AI) regulations and the need for the U.S. to dominate China in the race to develop the emerging technology. TECH TAKEOVER THREAT: Buried in the budget reconciliation package recently passed by the House is a moratorium that would block every U.S. state from passing laws on artificial intelligence or automation for the next decade. ROBOT TAKEOVER: Artificial intelligence-powered self-driving trucks are no longer a distant concept. They are quickly becoming a real solution to some of the logistics industry's biggest challenges. As supply chains face growing pressure and the driver shortage deepens across the U.S. and Europe, Plus Automation is stepping up with bold ambitions and powerful AI. MONEY MOVES: Nvidia has boomed over the past few years amid the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), as the company designs cutting-edge AI chips. FOLLOW FOX NEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA FacebookInstagramYouTubeTwitterLinkedIn SIGN UP FOR OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS Fox News FirstFox News OpinionFox News LifestyleFox News Health DOWNLOAD OUR APPS Fox NewsFox BusinessFox WeatherFox SportsTubi WATCH FOX NEWS ONLINE STREAM FOX NATION Stay up to date on the latest AI technology advancements and learn about the challenges and opportunities AI presents now and for the future with Fox News here.
San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F.'s largest employer says bots do ‘50%' of the work. Employees should be worried
As one of San Francisco's more outspoken tech leaders, Marc Benioff is no stranger to media firestorms, provoked by his unflinching stances on homelessness or surprise cheerleading for President Donald Trump. The Salesforce CEO ignited a new controversy on Thursday, when he said during an episode of 'The Circuit with Emily Chang' that artificial intelligence does '30 to 50% of the work' at his cloud computing company. Long a happy warrior for AI, Benioff tried to put a positive spin on its encroachment into his company's workforce culture. With bots taking over labor once performed by humans, he said, the human employees can 'move on to do higher value work.' But given that Salesforce has cut 1,000 positions this year, Benioff's remark stung. Salesforce is extremely influential, both as the city's top employer and a proponent of returning to the office. Benioff is also a highly visible public figure. His championing of robot labor comes at a moment of eviscerating layoffs across the tech industry. Although most companies haven't blamed automation for these cuts, they coincide with a major industry push toward AI. After Thursday's segment aired, immediately drawing more than 100,000 views, people pushed back on social media. A few self-identified Salesforce employees insisted the CEO had exaggerated, and that the human workers at Salesforce are too valuable to be replaced by software. To industry observers, Benioff is just being realistic. 'There's no doubt that AI agents are replacing, and will replace, a substantial chunk of the workforce,' said Professor Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director of the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology Program at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Chaudhuri describes this moment as having a similar tectonic effect as the Internet Revolution, which caused pain for print media and brick-and-mortar stores, before opening a new world of possibilities. It became 'something that people had to acknowledge,' Chaudhuri said, making some jobs obsolete but creating new ones. He offered an example from the travel sector. In the old days, people made appointments with human travel agents to plan their vacations, find flights and handle other logistics. By today's standards, the agents were expensive and inefficient, and became anachronisms once online booking took hold. At that point, consumers could plan trips on their own, by doing Internet searches and entering their information into web pages that had to be built by human engineers. Looking ahead, the travel agent could be revived, but not in human form. The new iteration would be a concierge-style AI bot that listens to the consumer's requests and culls flight schedules instantaneously. With booking web pages no longer needed, the engineers are, theoretically, freed up for more creative pursuits. Data gathered by economists at Stanford University corroborates that view, suggesting that Benioff, while bullish on AI deployment, isn't necessarily an outlier. Rather, he's pulling back the curtain on what's actually a widespread practice. Usage spiked over the last two quarters, with 40% of firms across the country now saying they use generative AI at work — up from 30% last December, according to a survey called 'The Labor Market Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence.' 'It's increasing very rapidly, even surprisingly,' said Jon Hartley, a policy fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and lead author of the survey. Silicon Valley executives, in turn, have become more unapologetic about gambling in the technology. During a recent call with shareholders, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang envisioned a future society with 'billions of robots.' At some level, corporations have an incentive to put out these messages, said Jeffrey Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. Over the past few years many businesses have invested heavily in AI programs, and most are seeking some kind of return. They at least need to convey to shareholders that the bet was worthwhile. Zeal from the C-suite doesn't necessarily mean the employees are on board. Some might feel intimidated and reject the technology altogether. Others will simply program the software to do their jobs, viewing it as a substitute rather than a helper. Many will find this new phase of work to be discouraging and dehumanizing. Two schools of thought have emerged around artificial intelligence, Hancock said. The first is a 'pilot' mindset, which casts AI as a tool to augment performance and help people achieve their goals. Hancock describes the second mindset as that of a 'passenger,' or someone who feels a loss of power and control when interacting with AI. By many measures, Benioff seems to fit in the first camp. He embraced a concept called 'agentic AI,' which refers to technology so sophisticated, it can accomplish tasks without human supervision. At its best, this class of AI should broaden possibilities for workers and create an opening for projects that previously would have been too burdensome. This is the AI that reads and summarizes your emails, manages your calendar, handles the customer service call with that person who wants to return shoes. Benioff is so enamored of this model that he refers to Salesforce's AI bots as an army of digital 'agents.' According to Chang, he spent more than $20 million to license physicist Albert Einstein's likeness for Salesforce's AI branding. Salesforce seeks to have 1 billion active agents by the end of the year. Whether Salesforce workers accept this new 'AgentForce' depends largely on how they interpret Benioff's attitude toward AI. And his remarks this week could serve as an inflection point. Because the technology is so new and could so profoundly change labor, executives are uniquely positioned to shape the mentality at their companies, Hancock said. If Benioff portrays AI as productive and liberating, then his optimism will flow down from managers to lower-level employees. Hancock calls this a 'leadership cascade.' On the flip side, if Salesforce employees construe Benioff's comments as a warning that he plans to lay off half the staff, then people will feel degraded and overwhelmed, as though they're being whip-sawed by new machinery. 'It's easier to imagine what will go away,' he said. It's much harder, at this juncture, to conceive the future benefits.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Salesforce is using AI for up to 50% of its workload, and its AI product is 93% accurate, says CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff said the company now relies on artificial intelligence for 30% to 50% of its entire workload. Coco Gauff and Emma Grede team up to help small businesses I've become an AI vibe coding convert Tech layoffs June 2025: Microsoft, Google, Disney, ZoomInfo join the list of companies said to be shedding jobs The software giant, like many other tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Microsoft and Google, is going all in on the AI boom. 'All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work,' Benioff told Bloomberg, including positions like software engineering and customer service. 'It's these agents, these digital laborers, digital employees who are out there doing this work servicing the customers, selling to the customer, marketing to the customer, partnering with me to do the analytics, the marketing, the branding.' Benioff said he even writes his yearly business plan with an AI partner, along with a 'human' Salesforce executive, adding that the company was on track to have one billion of these 'agents' before the end of the year. (Sixty-five percent of companies are now experimenting with AI agents, according to an April KPMG survey.) Benioff also estimated that Salesforce has reached 93% accuracy with the AI product it's selling to customers, including Walt Disney Co., which was developed to carry out tasks such as customer service without human supervision, according to Bloomberg. Benioff added that it's not 'realistic' to reach 100% accuracy, and that other companies are at 'much lower levels because they don't have as much data and metadata.' The software giant was ranked the No. 1 customer relationship management (CRM) software provider in 2025 for the 12th consecutive year by the global market intelligence firm IDC. Salesforce's clients include Apple, Boeing, Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald's, to name a few. According to Bloomberg, AI is ushering in a new era of 'the tiny team.' Gone are the days when Silicon Valley companies rapidly hire as they scale; now tech companies are in a race to the bottom, competing to see who can manage the lowest head count in an effort to cut costs and increase efficiencies. The AI boom comes at a time when many tech companies are slashing jobs, in part to keep up with inflation and increased economic uncertainty, spurred on by the Trump administration's tariffs and conflict with Iran. Salesforce Inc. (NYSE: CRM) was trading up less than 1% on Thursday in midday trading, at the time of this writing. In the company's latest round of earnings for the first quarter, which ended April 30, the company reported revenue of $9.8 billion, up nearly 8% year over year, beating analyst expectations, and it raised guidance 'by $400 million, to $41.3 billion, at the high end of the range.' Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $2.58, topping estimates of $2.55. Benioff said Salesforce has 'built a deeply unified enterprise AI platform—with agents, data, apps, and a metadata platform . . . with Agentforce, Data Cloud, our Customer 360 apps, Tableau, and Slack all built on one trusted, unified foundation, [so] companies of every size can build a digital labor force—boosting productivity, reducing costs, and accelerating growth.' The company had a market capitalization of $257 billion at the time of this writing. Its next earnings report is scheduled for late August. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
New York Post
15 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Warning to NY: Don't make the mistake we did in San Francisco by electing Zohran Mamdani
Take heed, New Yorkers, and learn from San Francisco's mistakes: The City by the Bay has discovered to its sorrow that charismatic leaders like Zohran Mamdani can dazzle — but their decisions can be disastrous. Just a few years ago San Franciscans, too, supported magnetic populists, then watched as their neighborhoods fell off a livability cliff. Advertisement Regrets, we have more than a few — and many we want to mention. In 2017 London Breed, a brash and captivating city supervisor from the projects, became acting mayor when the mild-mannered Mayor Ed Lee died. With big promises of housing creation, downtown revitalization and racial equity — as well as her hard-partying charm — she whipped up the crowds, winning the mayoralty outright in a special election. Advertisement But during her tenure, San Francisco went from thriving to diving. Massive tent encampments took over large swaths of the city thanks to her lax policies, and the financial district and retail centers hollowed out. 'I am the mayor, but I'm a black woman first,' she shouted in a 2020 speech, as violence spiraled nationwide after the death of George Floyd. 'I am angry.' Advertisement That same day, looters and vandals were running roughshod over Union Square stores and small businesses in Chinatown. Far-left public defender Chesa Boudin one-upped Breed's progressive leanings when he joined her in city government. Boudin thrilled local social-justice activists when he ran for district attorney in 2019, as opposition to President Donald Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam. He quickly eliminated cash bail, reduced incarceration and put pressure on law enforcement instead of on criminals. Advertisement Soon Honduran cartels and dealers flooded Fog City with fentanyl, and drug tourists arrived from all over the country to overstay their welcome on our permissive streets. Overdoses spiked, and property crimes like shoplifting, looting and car smash-and-grabs became the norm. Jennifer Friedenbach, the firebrand executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, spearheaded the push to pass a 2018 'tax-the-rich' ballot proposition that promised to raise hundreds of millions for affordable housing. Her influence was enough to persuade Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to back the measure. Prop C passed but did nothing to solve the exploding homelessness problem. Instead, high net-worth companies like Stripe and PayPal, which contributed heavily to the city's tax revenues and provided vital jobs, simply packed up and left. Life in San Francisco got ugly, fast. The police force shrank from nearly 2,000 officers in 2020 to under 1,500 in 2024. Businesses fled and tourism dwindled. Advertisement An online 'poop map' made our filthy streets a national punch line. A city that was once so vibrant and full of civic pride became an embarrassing warning to the rest of the country: Do not do what we they are doing. Now, San Francisco is in intense repair mode. Voters ousted Boudin in 2022, and his replacement, Brooke Jenkins, has focused on increasing arrests and convictions. Advertisement In 2024, the calm and measured political outsider Daniel Lurie defeated the bombastic Breed in her bid for a second term. His 100-day progress report heralded a drop in crime, the removal of tent cities and an uptick in visitors. As for Friedenbach, her coalition's sway is sagging. Calls for her dismissal from the oversight committee that controls the Prop C funds are intensifying. San Franciscans are allowing themselves to feel cautious optimism about their future: 43% of residents now believe the city is on the right track, nearly double what it was a year ago. Advertisement Pessimism persists, and it's warranted, but green shoots of hope are taking root. That's why so many San Franciscans watched New York City's Democratic primary election with both fascination and despair. They know too well that electing compelling characters like Mamdani can have dire consequences. Our merry band of socialists here are celebrating Mamdani's win, but the majority of San Francisco residents, workers and business owners send this warning: The politics and policies he espouses can turn a flawed but marvelous city into one that is unrecognizably horrifying. Advertisement So be careful, New York. It's easy to fall for simple-sounding solutions delivered by a smooth talker in seductive speeches. But once that person takes the reins, and the pie-in-the-sky promises become dangerous reality, the process to remove him is long and arduous — and fixing the wreckage is even harder. Erica Sandberg is a freelance journalist and host of the San Francisco Beat.
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Salesforce.com (CRM) Up 1.4% Since Last Earnings Report: Can It Continue?
A month has gone by since the last earnings report for (CRM). Shares have added about 1.4% in that time frame, underperforming the S&P 500. Will the recent positive trend continue leading up to its next earnings release, or is due for a pullback? Before we dive into how investors and analysts have reacted as of late, let's take a quick look at its most recent earnings report in order to get a better handle on the important drivers. It turns out, estimates review have trended upward during the past month. Currently, has a strong Growth Score of A, though it is lagging a bit on the Momentum Score front with a B. However, the stock was allocated a grade of D on the value side, putting it in the bottom 40% for this investment strategy. Overall, the stock has an aggregate VGM Score of B. If you aren't focused on one strategy, this score is the one you should be interested in. Estimates have been broadly trending upward for the stock, and the magnitude of these revisions looks promising. Notably, has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). We expect an in-line return from the stock in the next few months. belongs to the Zacks Computer - Software industry. Another stock from the same industry, Intuit (INTU), has gained 2.1% over the past month. More than a month has passed since the company reported results for the quarter ended April 2025. Intuit reported revenues of $7.75 billion in the last reported quarter, representing a year-over-year change of +15.1%. EPS of $11.65 for the same period compares with $9.88 a year ago. For the current quarter, Intuit is expected to post earnings of $2.65 per share, indicating a change of +33.2% from the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Estimate has changed +0.1% over the last 30 days. Intuit has a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) based on the overall direction and magnitude of estimate revisions. Additionally, the stock has a VGM Score of D. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Salesforce Inc. (CRM) : Free Stock Analysis Report Intuit Inc. (INTU) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
