Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor speaking at the Viva Technology Conference in Paris on June 15, 2022.
Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Ten months after being promoted to co-CEO of Salesforce alongside celebrated founder Marc Benioff, Bret Taylor is preparing to make his first appearance under his new title at the annual Dreamforce conference.
Taylor, a career technologist with a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford, admitted to CNBC that Salesforce’s big product reveal for this year’s event was “unabashedly geeky.” It’s called Genie, and it’s designed to update Salesforce’s predominant sales database software with modern technology that makes real-time information available to sales reps.
“We’re really adding a new technology capability to our platform,” Taylor said in an interview. Taylor and Benioff will deliver their keynote speech in San Francisco on Tuesday, beginning at 10 a.m. Pacific Time.
To a certain extent, Salesforce acknowledges that its existing systems are a bit outdated. The 23-year-old company’s original data storage software works with a transactional database from Oracle, where Benioff spent 13 years before founding Salesforce. The world has become much more complex over the past few decades, and companies are flocking to databases that process data from many more sources and enable faster decisions.
Salesforce’s transition to Genie began in 2019 when the company launched a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that allows marketers to collect data about customers before sending them ads. Genie gives marketers the latest information about Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.
Taylor said that over time, Genie will be integrated with Salesforce’s other key products — its sales, service, and commerce clouds. Businesses can pay to add Genie features to their existing Salesforce installations, a spokesman said.
Taylor, a Google Maps co-creator who also ran Facebook’s tech group before joining Salesforce in 2016 when he acquired his startup Quip, is under pressure from Wall Street as rising interest rates and the looming recession drive investors away from growth stocks. Salesforce shares are down 40% this year, more than twice the S&P 500, and are trading near their lowest levels since April 2020.
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In its earnings report last month, Salesforce lowered its full-year expectations for earnings and revenue. The company now expects revenue to grow about 17% for the year, up from 25% last fiscal year, which would represent by far the slowest pace of expansion since the company went public in 2004.
Taylor also keeps busy outside of Salesforce. He is the chairman of Twitter, which is embroiled in a heated and very public legal battle with Elon Musk that will determine the social media company’s future. Twitter is suing Musk to try to enforce the Tesla CEO’s acquisition agreement, which he later tried to cancel.
Taylor declined to speak about the ordeal itself, saying it “doesn’t happen often” when he meets with Salesforce customers. And that’s how he spends most of his time.
With the addition of Genie, Salesforce will strengthen the capabilities of Einstein, the company’s AI engine, which runs on Sales Cloud and other applications. Einstein can recommend which opportunities are most likely to convert to sales, and Genie pulls in the latest information, pulling suggestions from the data in seconds, and soon milliseconds.
Genie will also work in Tableau, the data analysis tool Salesforce acquired in 2019 to make charts as up-to-date as possible.
Salesforce’s marketing software competitors, including Adobe and Oracle, have touted the importance of real-time content data platforms that can draw on a variety of data and respond to the latest impetus from current and potential customers. Salesforce tries to make these skills available to other departments like customer service as well.
Sheryl Kingstone, vice president of customer service and trading at S&P Global’s research unit 451 research for the technology industry, said she’s not surprised that Salesforce has been working to bring real-time data to its entire product line.
“I was rather shocked that it took so long,” she said.
Since at least 2017, Salesforce executives have been promoting a concept called Customer 360, which provides a patchwork of information about each customer to enable better treatment. The problem was that event data was not fed into the system as it happened. Taylor is familiar with this criticism.
“I’ve heard this feedback before,” he said. Taylor added that with Genie’s “technological breakthrough” this shouldn’t be an issue going forward.
First Horizon Bank in Memphis, Tennessee implemented Salesforce’s CDP platform earlier this year. The software helps the bank direct new customers and offer them mortgages, and it’s more responsive to behavior than the manual and batch-processed system that First Horizon has relied on in the past, said Erin Pryor, the bank’s chief marketing officer. Unlike online ads, which can make some people feel like they’re being followed a little too closely, Pryor says this level of product targeting is welcomed by consumers.
“I don’t think there will ever be a complaint that your institution knows you and can really give you content and advice on things that are important to you,” Pryor said.
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