Marc Benioff: Well, I really would like to just directly address that, which is what you’re really speaking to is this incredible opportunity ahead, and generative AI is really that opportunity, but also many other opportunities, including data. I really think that there are some unbelievable opportunities ahead. It’s going to be incredible to see what we’re going to be able to do. And I think that the question is, exactly as you said it, how much are we going to really unleash — the fundamental growth of the company against commitments that we have made to our investors to continue to deliver profitable growth. I think that at the very fundamental level, starting with our Investor Day last Dreamforce, we told you that we are committed to profitable growth.
And now you can see that we were serious. It wasn’t a joke. We did a number of things. We curtailed things. We made changes structurally to the company, short-term and long-term issues. And we’re still doing things, by the way, to do that. At the same time, we see this incredible opportunity that’s out in the industry, new companies that are emerging as well as, of course, all kinds of unusual public company dislocation. So we’re watching all of those things. But number one is going to be our commitment to you. Nothing is more important than the trust that we have with our investors. Number two is, we are very thirsty to make sure that Salesforce is the number one AI CRM, and we have done a lot organically to do that in the last six months.
Of course, there’s things out there that we could do to help us with inorganic as well. We’re looking at those things. We’re looking at everything, but nothing is going to ever trump the trust that we have with all of you.
Amy Weaver: Keith, I would just add, when we did the restructuring, it was never just for the bottom line. We also made changes so that we were — we have the resources to invest in the areas that we believe are going to drive the highest growth for the company. And we’ve been very disciplined in our approach to spending this quarter, but we want to lean into these opportunities, especially around AI, around data and around their core. And as a result, you will see that our increase in guidance to 30% does imply slightly nonlinear progression this year. And in terms of the future, as we look forward, underscore everything Marc said about our commitments. And as I said last time, I really believe 30% annually is a floor, not a ceiling.
Mike Spencer: Thanks, Keith. Emma, we’ll take the next question, please.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Kirk Materne with Evercore. Your line is open.
Kirk Materne: Yeah, thanks very much. I guess, Amy, I’ve had a lot of questions just on the impact of the pricing actions that you all announced earlier this — over the summer. How that — if that had any impact on the quarter? And then how are you thinking about that in terms of the guidance for the back half of this year? Thanks.
Amy Weaver: Great. Thanks for the question. So on guidance for this year, I have taken into account the pricing uplift as well as any changes from our new or opportunities around AI. I will say that neither has a significant influence on our guidance for this year. I think that those opportunities really take a while to roll through our customer base, particularly on pricing as we look to renewal. Brian, anything else you would like to add?
Brian Millham: Exactly. We’re going to see the impact of our price increase really hit the customer base over the next one to two to three years. So no big material change in this fiscal year. Appreciate the question, Kirk.
Mike Spencer: Thanks, Kirk. Emma, next question please.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Karl Keirstead with UBS. Your line is open.
Karl Keirstead: Thanks. Maybe to Marc and/or Amy, with head count down 11% now, and as you talked about, Marc, welcoming back from our employees, do you feel like you’ve right-sized the head count now at the 70,000 level? Has it sort of bottomed? And if you feel like there’s an opportunity for it to stabilize or start growing again, is that a signal, Marc, that you feel like your growth rate here at 11% this year is at or near a bottom? Thanks so much.
Marc Benioff: Well, I think it’s such a great question. It’s something the management team is talking about every single day because we are continuing to grow and invest in our headcount, especially in AI. Also, I think I mentioned we are doing so much incredible innovation work on our core, and we’ve commanded our engineering teams to accelerate their work in moving all of our acquisitions into our core, especially our marketing products and commerce products and Data Cloud, all of which we plan to show you at Dreamforce and to accelerate that work, and that’s extremely important to us. And also Brian has a number of products and geographies that are growing and we’ve also committed him to invest in his growth. So we are continuing to grow our headcount, but we are also facing normalized attrition, of course, with headcount, that’s also part of it.
And so as those — both of those things get rebalanced, you’ll continue to see our head count adjust and move forward. I don’t know if we can call this as a bottom exactly yet or if it’s — but we’re not planning any other major restructuring efforts in the company today, like what we saw earlier this year, we hope that, that is one and done and behind us.
Mike Spencer: Thanks, Karl. Emma, we’ll take the next question.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brad Sills with Bank of America Securities. Your line is open.
Brad Sills: Wonderful. Thank you so much. I wanted to ask another question here on AI. The opportunities here are just so exciting across the stack. With Sales GPT, you’ve highlighted content automation, call summary, sales assistance, Service GPT, auto replies, summaries and scheduling. Just when you look across the Salesforce stack, where do you see the most opportunity here across sales, service, marketing, commerce in the core based on the activity that you’re seeing today from customers with the early release of the product?
Marc Benioff: Well, thank you so much for that. And let me just say, we’re at the beginning of quite a ballgame here and we’re really looking at the evolution of artificial intelligence in a broad way, and you’re really going to see it take place over four major zones. And the first major zone is what’s played out in the last decade, which has been predictive. That’s been amazing. That’s why Salesforce will deliver about a trillion transactions on Einstein this week. It’s incredible. These are mostly predictive transactions, but we’re moving rapidly into the second zone that we all know is generative AI and these GPT products, which we’ve now released to our customers. We’re very excited about the speed of our engineering organization and technology organization, our product organization and their ability to deliver customer value with generative AI.
We have tremendous AI expertise led by an incredible AI research team. And this idea that we’re kind of now in a generative zone means that’s zone number two. But as you’re going to see at Dreamforce, zone number three is opening up with autonomous and with agent-based systems as well. This will be another level of growth and another level of innovation that we haven’t really seen unfold yet from a lot of companies, and that’s an area that we are excited to do a lot of innovation and growth and to help our customers in all those areas. And then we’re eventually going to move into AGI and that will be the fourth area. And I think as we move through these four zones, CRM will become more important to our customers than ever before. Because you’re going to be able to get more automation, more intelligence, more productivity, more capabilities, more augmentation of your employees, as I mentioned.
And you’re right, we’re going to see a wide variety of capability is exactly like you said, whether it’s the call summaries and account overviews and deal insights and inside summaries and in-product assistance or mobile work briefings. I mean, when I look at things like service, when we see the amount of case deflection we can do and productivity enhancements with our service teams not just in replies and answers, but also in summaries and summarization. We’ve seen how that works with generative and how important that is in knowledge generation and auto-responding conversations and then we’re going to have the ability for our customers to — with our product. We have an open system. We’re not we’re not dictating that they have to use any one of these AI systems.
