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Parker Harris, a co-founder of Salesforce, speaks during a keynote at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 12, 2023.

Marlena Sloss | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Each year, Salesforce updates its V2MOM, a planning document laying out vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. CEO Marc Benioff has said it’s “been used to guide every decision at Salesforce” since the software company’s founding 25 years ago this week.

But in early 2023, there was a problem. ChatGPT was going viral, and Salesforce’s strategy didn’t account for it.

“The V2MOM had nothing about generative AI,” Parker Harris, who co-founded the company with Benioff, told CNBC in an interview.

It was a first for Salesforce, which had never been caught so off-guard about an emerging technology trend. If Salesforce was to become a leader in generative artificial intelligence, the company would need to quickly revise its guiding document to redirect the company — and its 73,000 employees — toward the technology that’s sweeping across Silicon Valley and making its way into every industry, from manufacturing to medicine.

Salesforce would have to go to battle with tech giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as red-hot and well-capitalized startups. But following a handful of hefty acquisitions and a run-in with activist investors that led Salesforce to disband its M&A committee, a splashy deal was likely off the table.

Salesforce would have to build. And that’s when Benioff turns to his longtime sidekick, Harris.

Well known in the software industry but largely unfamiliar outside of it, Harris has always been core to the fabric of Salesforce. In the past six years, Benioff has elevated two different top lieutenants to the role of co-CEO, but neither lasted in the job longer than 18 months. Harris, a Salesforce board member and now the technology chief of Slack, which Salesforce bought in 2021, said he’d rather avoid the limelight.

“I don’t like being front and center,” Harris said, in an interview tied to the company’s 25th anniversary, which was officially March 8. “I don’t like the articles necessarily to be written about me. I like being behind the scenes.”

Internally, Harris is in the thick of it. After generative AI made its way into the revised V2MOM last year, Harris supervised its brisk insertion into the company’s sales, customer service, marketing and commerce applications. He studied new techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation, which involves feeding information outside of an AI model’s training set to yield a better answer.

Questions swirled about whether Salesforce should spend billions of dollars to assemble its own general-purpose large language model for spitting out text in response to a few words of human input, Harris said. But the company started seeing clients use multiple LLMs.

Salesforce slashed its investment in some areas while doubling the size of its research group, which was fleshing out its own AI models. At the same time, it started drawing on models from AI startup Anthropic, as well as GPT-4, the model powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In September, Benioff brought OpenAI CEO Sam Altman onstage at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, which takes over a chunk of downtown San Francisco.

At past Dreamforce shows, Harris has appeared in superhero costumes, entertaining the audience of tens of thousands. But 2023 was not a time for jokes. Harris was busy repositioning the company. He chose a professional look: a checked blue suit that matched his glasses with thin blue frames.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, right, and Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, introduce Salesforce 1 Lightning during the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Oct. 14, 2014.

Noah Berger | Bloomberg | Getty Images

In his keynote, Harris talked about the Data Cloud, a product originally called Genie that surfaces real-time information. In about 2016 he had decided to push much of Salesforce’s IT infrastructure into the public cloud, enabling tighter integration of many assets the company had acquired over the years. That helped Salesforce launch the Data Cloud.

Without the Data Cloud, Harris told CNBC, “I think we would have been in a much worse place.” It’s such a critical part of the company that Benioff mentioned it 58 times on the company’s earnings call in February.

A Robin for Batman

Despite his status as the most decorated technical leader at one of the world’s largest software companies, Harris was an English major. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont.

His love of computers came early, though. He told Business Insider in 2015 that he started programming on an Apple II as a kid growing up in North Carolina.

In the early 1990s, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and took a software-engineering job at a company called Metropolis Software, where he got to know developers Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. The trio founded a Java consulting firm called Left Coast Software.

They were contracting at Saba Software, an online learning company co-founded by former Oracle executive Bobby Yazdani. Benioff, who was still working at Oracle under Larry Ellison at the time, told Yazdani that he had this idea to build web-based sales software. Yazdani told Benioff he needed to meet Harris, Dominguez and Moellenhoff.

“He was a very abstract thinker,” Yazdani said about Harris, in an interview with CNBC. “He had clarity around capability of what’s possible.”

In the fall of 1998, Benioff and Harris met for lunch at Kincaid’s, a seafood and steak restaurant in Burlingame overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It was an uneven match. Benioff is hard to miss at 6 feet, 5 inches tall. He’s loud and loves to talk.

Harris is scrawny and quieter. He said he’s averse to conflict. He defuses the drama, said Brett Queener, a former Salesforce executive who’s now a venture capitalist.

“Every Batman needs their Robin,” Queener said.

After the lunch meeting, Benioff had Harris, Dominguez and Moellenhoff over to his home in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood. They were all in.

Salesforce.com was born on March 8, 1999. Harris was 32. His parents, wife and young daughter came by corporate headquarters — a one-bedroom apartment next to Benioff’s home — to commemorate the moment, which Harris posted to YouTube eight years later.

“We are going to probably work here for six months to a year, and we’re going to just really enjoy it,” he told his father, who was behind the camera. Salesforce played the clip for employees this week during a celebration.

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While Harris shared the title of co-founder with Benioff, his partner held much more of the equity. That’s why Benioff is now worth around $11 billion, with a current stake in Salesforce that exceeds $7 billion, while Harris’ holdings are worth nearly $600 million.

Though he’s relatively soft spoken, Harris has his indulgences. He’s spent money on red wine from France and Italy, works of art by Ruth Asawa and Josef Albers, a home in Nantucket and a renovation of the family home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.

“We really shifted it to a focus on sunlight,” Harris said.

In his office at the top of the house, he likes to put on headphones and crank up the music. He listens to the Avett Brothers, Radiohead and Miles Davis. He plays golf and surfs. A coworker said Harris is an “enthusiastic” dancer. He belongs to Middlebury’s board of trustees.

At Salesforce, Harris led the development of the platform that enables companies to build on top of its software, along with an initiative to make Salesforce work well on mobile devices. There was also the push to build the next-generation Salesforce Lightning, as well as Chatter, an enterprise social network.

He talked about AI way back at Dreamforce 2009, suggesting that the technology might one day help Chatter identify in-house experts on different topics. He admitted to his shortcomings.

“I don’t understand that area,” Harris told a group of journalists, regarding AI. “I understand we have to solve it. I have hired some people in that area that do understand it.”

Tough time in social

At the time, social was the big buzzword. Facebook was still private but taking off.

A startup called Yammer was being described as the Facebook for the workplace. A few Salesforce employees started discussing the potential for information to go viral among salespeople and customer-service agents. Benioff was intrigued. He insisted that it become the top priority.

After Harris allocated eight engineers to the new project, Benioff demanded he go bigger. Harris checked in with engineering leaders and secured a headcount of 75.

That wasn’t enough. At a briefing on the updated status, Benioff was dissatisfied, according to a meeting attendee who asked not to be named to speak candidly about the matter. Harris was silent. His face went pale. He told Benioff he’d redo the plan, the person said.

Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, sits in the audience ahead of the special address by U.S. President Donald Trump on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2020.

Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Harris eventually got 80% of Salesforce’s engineers to start working on Chatter. But the product never took off.

“We didn’t take it far enough,” Harris said. Microsoft was also hot to get into the market, snapping up Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion, a huge multiple for a company with a small revenue base.

Salesforce wound up buying the big prize in the space, purchasing Slack in 2021 for $27.1 billion, by far the company’s priciest deal.

But perhaps Harris’ biggest swing in his decades at Salesforce was the push to the public cloud. It wasn’t an easy choice.

“Half the engineers, the brightest people, were like, ‘We’re going to run the company if we do this,'” Harris recalled. “The great fear was that we would ruin our cost model because the cost would be much more expensive on public cloud, and then we would be able to hire less salespeople or less engineers or whatever.”

The other half of the engineering staff, Harris said, was petrified that if Salesforce didn’t move to the cloud, everyone else will “innovate faster than us.'”

Benioff didn’t have much to contribute for a change.

“Marc was like, ‘This is crazy, that these are some of the smartest people I know, and you guys can’t agree,'” Harris said.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, left, speaks as Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, center, and Kara Swisher, executive editor of Re/Code, listen during a keynote address at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2015. Salesforce.com Inc. aims to cut the time its customers spend plugging data into its systems by weaving machine-learning technology from acquisition RelateIQ into its software for managing sales accounts.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Harris saw the advantage that startups gained by outsourcing data center needs to Amazon Web Services. And he knew Salesforce had failed to build a viable platform for easily developing apps while partnering with VMware. Harris concluded that not pushing Salesforce to public cloud services like AWS would be an existential threat.

“That was a very lonely decision,” he said. But as it became a part of the V2MOM, it rippled out to thousands.

While Salesforce might have saved money when it ditched its Equinix colocation facilities, leaning more on the cloud hasn’t been cheap. Last year, after activist investors called for more profitability from Salesforce, the company signed up for longer-term cloud commitments. It agreed to spend at least $16.8 billion on infrastructure service providers as of January, up from $6.5 billion in January 2023, according to regulatory filings.

The biggest beneficiary of that spending is AWS, which is run by former Salesforce executive Adam Selipsky. Harris said Salesforce is looking at other providers as additional partners.

“Oracle has done a great job around their platform, so technically, it’s actually quite good,” he said.

‘Try to build something great’

Harris recently gave up the CTO title at Salesforce that he’d held for seven years. The company hasn’t yet named a successor.

Now he’s onto Slack.

In 2022, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield left the company he founded in 2009. He was replaced by Lidiane Jones. She departed a year later to run dating app developer Bumble. And in January of this year, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson said he was stepping down.

“I thought, ‘I can have an impact there,'” Harris said. ‘But I can also — I would love to do that job, I would love to go back and run some engineering teams and really try to build something great.'”

Harris visited Benioff’s home in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco, and the two co-founders were in agreement that it was the right call.

“I’m excited for this next chapter with Parker as Slack’s CTO, continuing his legacy as one of our industry’s greats,” Benioff said in an email.

Harris flew to New York to hang out with Noah Weiss, Slack’s product chief. Harris moved his desk to the Slack floor in San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, where he’s near new unit CEO Denise Dresser. He comes in two to four days a week, and attends Monday meetings to review Slack metrics.

“People, probably fairly, had a lot of apprehension,” Weiss said.

Some of Slack’s employees suspected Harris would try to apply the Salesforce approach to Slack. But instead, Harris sought to understand how Slack had become successful.

Weiss said that at Salesforce’s new fiscal year kickoff in Las Vegas last month, Harris talked at an executive meeting about one of Slack’s product principles called prototype the path. And Harris has started writing documents in Slack’s collaborative Canvas tool.

“He’s been showing up extremely well, definitely winning hearts and minds, for sure, including mine,” Weiss said.

Employees sometimes add flair to Slack chats with a Parker Harris emoji, he said.

When it comes to keeping up with Benioff, who spends a healthy amount of time at his palatial estate in Hawaii, Harris uses other services.

“Marc is all mobile and all text and FaceTime,” Harris said.

The men talk once every few weeks. They’ll be talking more frequently, as Harris said they’re about to kick off weekly meetings on Slack and Salesforce integrations.

Harris hopes that his presence can convince Slack employees to stay after the executive exodus.

“I don’t want to talk too much about myself, but I think it is helping,” Harris said.

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Europe unveils plan to become ‘AI continent’ with simpler rules, more infrastructure

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Europe unveils plan to become 'AI continent' with simpler rules, more infrastructure

The European Union is so far the only jurisdiction globally to drive forward comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence with its AI Act.

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The European Union on Wednesday presented a plan to boost its artificial intelligence industry and help it compete more aggressively with the U.S. and China, following criticisms from technology firms that its regulations are too cumbersome.

In a press release, the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, outlined its so-called “AI Continent Action Plan,” which aims to “transform Europe’s strong traditional industries and its exceptional talent pool into powerful engines of AI innovation and acceleration.”

Among the ways Europe plans to bolster regional AI developments are a commitment to build a network of AI factories and “gigafactories” and create specialized labs designed to improve the access of startups to high-quality training data.

The EU defines these “factories” as large facilities that house state-of-the-art chips needed to train and develop the most advanced AI models.

The bloc will also create a new AI Act Service Desk to help regional firms comply with its landmark AI law.

“The AI Act raises citizens’ trust in technology and provides investors and entrepreneurs with the legal certainty they need to scale up and deploy AI throughout Europe,” the Commission said, adding the AI Act Service Desk will “serve as the central point of contact and hub for information and guidance” on the rules.

The plan bears similarities to the U.K.’s AI Action Plan announced earlier this year. Like the EU, Britain committed to expand domestic AI infrastructure to aid developers.

Hindering innovation?

The launch of the EU’s AI plan arrives as the bloc is facing criticisms from tech leaders that its rules on everything from AI to taxation hinder innovation and make it harder for startups to operate across the region.

The bloc’s landmark legislation known as the AI Act has proven particularly thorny for companies in the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry.

The law regulates applications of AI based on the level of risk they pose to society — and in recent years it has been adapted to cover so-called “foundational” model makers such as OpenAI and French startup Mistral, much to the ire of some of the buzziest businesses in that space.

At a global AI summit in Paris earlier this year, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane told CNBC that European political and business leaders increasingly fear missing out on AI’s potential and want regulators to focus less on tackling risks associated with the technology.

“There’s almost this fork in the road, maybe even a tension right now between Europe at the EU level … and then some of the countries,” Lehane told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal in February. “They’re looking to maybe go in a little bit of a different direction that actually wants to embrace the innovation.”

The U.S. administration has also been critical of Europe over its treatment of American tech giants and fast-growing AI startups.

At the Paris AI summit in February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance took aim at Europe’s regulatory approach to AI, stressing that “we need our European friends in particular to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.”

“There is a real emphasis on easing the burden of regulation and removing barriers to innovation, which in part is likely to reflect some of the concerns that have been raised by the US government,” John Buyers, global head of AI at law firm Osborne Clarke, told CNBC over email.

“This isn’t only about the EU: If they are serious about eliminating legal uncertainties caused by interpretation of the EU’s AI Act, then this would be a real boost for AI developers and users in the UK and the US, as the AI Act applies to all AI used in the EU, regardless of where sourced.”

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Elon Musk ratchets up attacks on Navarro as Tesla shares slump for fourth day

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Elon Musk ratchets up attacks on Navarro as Tesla shares slump for fourth day

Elon Musk (L), and Peter Navarro (R).

Reuters

As Tesla shares plummeted for a fourth straight day, CEO Elon Musk let loose on President Donald Trump’s top trade advisor Peter Navarro.

Musk, the world’s richest person, started going after Navarro over the weekend, posting on X that a “PhD in econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing,” a reference to Navarro’s degree. Whatever subtlety remained at the beginning of the week has since vanished.

On Tuesday, Musk wrote that “Navarro is truly a moron,” noting that his comments about Tesla being a “car assembler,” as much are “demonstrably false.” Musk called Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks,” before later apologizing to bricks. Musk also called Navarro “dangerously dumb.”

Musk’s attacks on Navarro represent the most public spat between members of President Trump’s inner circle since the term began in January, and show that the steep tariffs announced last week on more than 180 countries and territories don’t have universal approval in the administration.

When asked about the feud in a briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Look, these are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs.”

“Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue,” she said.

For Musk, whose younger brother Kimbal — a restaurant owner, entrepreneur and Tesla board member — has joined in on the action, the name-calling appears to be tied to business conditions.

Tesla’s stock is down 22% in the past four trading sessions and 45% for the year. Tesla has lost more tha $585 billion in value since the calendar turned, equaling tens of billions of dollars in paper losses for Musk, who is also CEO of SpaceX and the owner of xAI and social network X.

Even before President Trump detailed his plan for widespread tariffs, he’d already placed a 25% tariff on vehicles not assembled in the U.S. Many analysts said Tesla could withstand those tariffs better than competitors because its vehicles sold in the U.S. are assembled domestically.

But the company’s production costs are poised to increase because of the tariffs on materials and parts from foreign suppliers. Canada and Mexico are among the leading sources of U.S. steel imports, and Canada is the nation’s largest supplier of aluminum, while China and Mexico are home to major suppliers of printed circuit boards to the automotive industry.

At a recent an event hosted by right-wing Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, Musk said, “Both Europe and the United States should move, ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America.”

Musk, whose view on trade relations with Europe stands in stark contrast to the policies implemented by the president, has a vested interest in the region. Tesla has a large car factory outside of Berlin, and the European Commission previously turned to SpaceX for launches.

Even before the tariffs, Tesla’s business was faltering. Last week, the company reported a 13% year-over-year decline in first-quarter deliveries, missing analysts’ estimates. That report that landed days after Tesla’s stock price wrapped up its worst quarter since 2022.

Musk, who spent roughly $290 billion to help return Trump to the White House, is now leading the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has slashed costs, eliminated regulations and cut tens of thousands of federal jobs. In the first quarter, Tesla was hit with waves of protests, boycotts and some criminal activity that targeted vehicles and facilities in response to Musk’s political rhetoric and his work in the White House.

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Apple’s 4-day slide puts Microsoft back on top as most valuable company

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Apple's 4-day slide puts Microsoft back on top as most valuable company

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, laughs as he attends a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 23, 2020.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

Apple‘s 23% plunge over the past four trading sessions has again turned Microsoft into the world’s most valuable public company.

As of Tuesday’s close, Microsoft is worth $2.64 trillion, while Apple’s market cap stands at $2.59 trillion.

While the market broadly is getting hammered by President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan, Apple is getting hit the hardest among tech’s megacap companies due to the iPhone maker’s reliance on China.

The Nasdaq is down 13% over the past four trading days, as President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports from more than 100 countries has sparked fears of a recession brought on by rising prices. UBS analysts on Monday predicted that the price of the iPhone 16 Pro Max could jump as much as $350 in the U.S.

Both Apple and Microsoft, along with chipmaker Nvidia, were previously valued at upward of $3 trillion before the recent sell-off.

In January, Microsoft issued disappointing revenue guidance. Nevertheless, last week, as Jefferies analysts reduced their price targets on many software stocks, they wrote Microsoft was among the “companies who we view as more insulated” from tariff uncertainty.

Microsoft also had the highest market capitalization of any public company in early 2024, but Apple soon reclaimed the title.

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