Marc Benioff

It’s been a quarter-century since Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff cofounded the cloud computing pioneer, a company that famously declared it represented “the end of software.” But Benioff is clearly not finished taking big swings in the generative-AI era: This year, he steered his company through a “hard pivot” to Agentforce—a new AI agent platform that made a splashy debut at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in September. AI, he told Fortune, is the “big transformation,” and Salesforce intends to shape-shift with it. So far, Wall Street is pleased: After a tough fiscal first quarter, Salesforce roared back in the second quarter, with revenue of $9.33 billion, up 8% year over year. Investors liked what they saw at Dreamforce, too, with Salesforce’s stock enjoying a fairly steady rise after the announcement of Agentforce.