“It’s an Indian era”: Marc Benioff says short-term tariff tensions demand smarter immigrants and praises the AI built in India, Marc Benioff says
He also praised the contribution of the Indian-Royal Nationals to the United States and called for “thinking” the assessment of legal immigration in a virtual interview with ET’s Surabhi Agarwal.
Benioff, who is also the issuer of Time Magazine, said it was the “Indian era” and he said many of his company’s artificial intelligence tools were built in India.
The tech tycoon said the San Francisco company currently has a market capitalization of $248 billion, which began when he traveled to India in 1996-97, and he continued to get advice from his masters here.
Editing excerpt:
Q) What does the current tariff system mean for the world economy and technology companies?
a) I don’t think this is the first time we’ve seen these types of political situations. I hope a lot of these will be addressed in the near term because we have a lot of opportunities to operate on the global stage and move forward quickly. I hope India will be a huge beneficiary of many changes and transformations in the world. We do enter the Indian era and we can see the huge growth that has happened in India in just a few years.
Q) You’ve talked about the next big thing about digital workforce and agency, what does this mean for engineering talent in India?
a) We are all trying to understand every country. We’ve seen the movie – her minority report, there’s a lot of AI out there. It hasn’t, but we’re entering that world. Then there is the robot, and we see BMW adding some robots.
I just talked to the person in charge of a robotics company. Instead of sorting packages on the assembly line, or even on the UPS, they use some robots.
So, should we all pay attention to this? Absolutely, because this is a critical moment in the world history of AI maturity, we can see that it has a huge impact on every company and everyone.
Q) You mentioned that so many leaders are of Indian origin. Which side of the immigration debate are you?
a) Well, you’ll see what I’m talking about improving these policies and expanding these H-1Bs on Twitter. To my disappointment, we did not make any greater progress. Of course, we benefit from many great Indian nationals who have come to America. Sometimes we ignore everything that happens and I hope we will have a better, more thoughtful assessment of the appearance of legal immigration, not only in our country, but in every country.
Q) How do you view the ongoing AI race, the United States is leading?
a) I think it’s really a fantasy because we all see DeepSeek moments, some of which are the best, lowest cost, and easiest moments to use AI come from China. But, of course, a lot of Salesforce AI is built in India, with some of our top AI experts in India. Of course, we have a lot of things in the United States, but in reality in every country. It’s hard to say that Salesforce has 75,000 people in a country or a person or a field.
When I look at what they do with our products, we look at some of the big customers in India like the hero Fincorp or India Air India. In many cases, they themselves are absolute leaders in artificial intelligence and I am learning from them. Open source makes this correct. India has become an important part of Salesforce, and we do a lot of things there.
Q) Technology used to be borderless, but with war and tariffs, we are talking about export controls like chips and even AI models.
a) There is always a risk of using technology. We moved from the open internet to various countries and said, now you have to have data centers in our country, which is our own data residence law.
This is a natural evolution that we should not be afraid of.
Q) Acting as the publisher of Time magazine. Are some copyright issues about AI bothering you?
a) Well, as far as Openai is concerned, they paid us a very good license fee. But some of these (AI) companies still haven’t done so. However, you won’t be able to get any data you need and say it’s yours. This is not how the world works. We believe in intellectual property rights, and ultimately everyone will have to accept it.
Q) When you start Salesforce, you said that this is the end of the software. Now everyone says this is the end of SaaS. This is the end of encoding. What are the predictions you want to make?
a) Well, I would say this is the beginning of the digital workforce, and it has been fun in the software industry. Enterprise software may now be $100 billion or a total addressable market. It’s a $3-12 trillion digital workforce, agents and robots – yes, applications and data will still be a key part of it. Yes, this will be an extension of what we do and we want to be leaders. We are 26 years old, but we still have vision for the future.
