Technology & Trust – Marc Benioff at the Singapore FinTech Festival

Marc Benioff, Salesforce Chair and CEO, spoke yesterday at the Singapore FinTech Festival. The event is running all this week, and this year’s festival is focused on Web 3.0 and its impact on financial services. Marc was talking with Mike Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, a crypto data company. 

The fireside conversation, ‘Trusted Enterprises in a Decentralised World,’ covered a range of topics, including trust, the future of work, and how technology will affect our future. Here are some highlights:

Marc Benioff on the Trusted Enterprise:

“What is really important to you? What is really important to you as a CEO? Ask yourself: is it trust, is it innovation, is it customer success, is it equality, is it sustainability?

“At Salesforce we believe that nothing is more important than trust — the trust we have with all of our stakeholders. That is our customers, our employees, our partners, and our public shareholders. There’s nothing more important than trust for us. And so we have chosen trust as our highest value.

“Our core values at Salesforce are trust, customer success, innovation, and the equality of every human being. Sustainability is also so important to us, so today we’re announcing a US$300 million fund that is a commitment to accelerate 1t.org, the trillion tree program.”

Marc Benioff on how Salesforce is going to work in the future:

“I think the future of work is really about five things:

“The first thing is, we’re all working at home. I like working at home, but I like working in the office. I want to work at home, but I’ve never worked at home more in my life! I like seeing people in-person too! 

“Number two is having a digital headquarters. When I started Salesforce, I had a physical headquarters and physical space; I wasn’t 100% virtual. But we will use our offices again, as I did last week, for example. That’s why we use Slack to work together. We make all of our products ‘Slack-first’ because digital is going to be really important going forward — this virus is not going to be completely going away.”

“Number three is, we will build a large corporate training facility. People can come in and learn the core Salesforce values and all about our products. 

“Fourth, we’ll do events and off-sites and programs. Last week, I held a dinner for 40 people at an incredible restaurant in New York. That was an event. And I’m going to have an off-site event soon where we all get together. 

“And the fifth thing is, a digital certificate that basically says, ‘I’ve been tested.’ It would tell us that we can get together safely. We have Health Cloud — we’ve modified it to include contact tracing, to include vaccine management. 

“Trust and safety are highly related values. So I would say it’s about physical, it’s about digital, it’s about giving people the ability to be enabled, it’s about events and off-sites, and it’s about safety. And that is, I think, the future of work.”

Marc Benioff on how technology and trust go together:

“We started with trust and we’re ending with trust. We’ve talked about new technologies. We could’ve talked about AI. We could’ve talked about the cloud. We could’ve talked about space. I think in all of these things, it’s going to come back to trust. Technology is never good or bad; it’s what you do with the technology that matters. And that’s true with business, too; it’s not that our businesses are good or bad businesses. Are we using our business as a platform for change? Are we using our business to actually improve the state of the world? Are we using these technologies to make things better, to repair the world? This is what it’s going to come back to — what are your values? What’s the most important thing to you?”