theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series | Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce

Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce

In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante sits down with Jim McNiel, Chief Growth Officer at TAE Technologies, to demystify fusion vs. fission and explore how proton–boron fusion could reshape energy economics for enterprise and Wall Street alike. McNiel explains why TAE targets abundant, low-cost boron fuel and how its approach avoids long-lived radioactive waste, requires only light shielding and eliminates meltdown risk. He breaks down siting and regulation – fusion treated more like medical isotopes than fission – and outlines first-gen levelized energy costs in the 7–9¢ range with a path to sub-5¢ as the technology matures. The conversation ties these fundamentals to market dynamics: dispatchable, carbon-free baseload power for data centers, safer urban siting and a financing narrative that aligns with investor expectations and hyperscaler demand. Listeners also get a clear milestone roadmap: Copernicus (commissioned to operate in 2028) targeting net energy out; Da Vinci as a 50-MW commercial prototype; and TAE Fusion 1 designed for 350 MW—scalable units that could colocate with gigawatt-scale AI facilities. McNiel details how AI already governs plasma stability via TAE’s “Optometrist Algorithm” developed with Google and notes strategic investors (e.g., Chevron, Sumitomo) plus near-term revenue from TAE Power Solutions and TAE Life Sciences. The discussion frames emerging trends in enterprise strategy – from energy as a core input to AI-driven productivity gains – and why the go-to-market has shifted from utility-first to hyperscaler-led demand for dispatchable, clean power.

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Muddu Sudhakar

SVP & GM, IT & HR Service

Salesforce

play_circle_outline Introduction of Muddu Sudhakar, SVP at Salesforce, discussing his experience on theCUBE.

play_circle_outline Importance of AI and infrastructure growth in Salesforce's cloud services.

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Service Management: Salesforce's Agentforce, AI Agents, and the Shift from Traditional IT to Proactive Solutions

play_circle_outline Data Cloud (Agentforce 360) enables seamless data management and access for AI applications.

play_circle_outline Importance of ecosystem partnerships, integrating with AWS, Google, and IBM.

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Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce

Muddu Sudhakar

SVP & GM, IT & HR Service Salesforce

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host here at our NYSE CUBE Studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studios connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street, tech and money. This is part of our NYSE Wired program and community we're building together with the NYSE. We have a CUBE alumni here, part of our mixture of experts. He's an expert in cloud native, entrepreneurship, and now of course Serviceforce, part of Agentforce. Muddu Sudhakar, who's SVP, GM, of IT HR service, that's Salesforce. Muddu, it's great to see you. You've watched theCUBE grow over the years. Now you're SVP leading at Salesforce in one of the most progressive areas of value creation and extraction, which is the service side of the ticket side of it, the AI side, all that domain data. Welcome back to theCUBE. Welcome to our New York Stock Exchange studio.

>> Welcome, John. Thank you for having me.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

>> You and me did almost 15 years now. We've been doing this and I really, first time being on your show at NYSE, it's awesome. Congratulations to you.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, thank you.

>> Awesome. Are you here?

John Furrier

>> It's just the beginning. We're opening up the aperture and there's a real mainstreaming of tech, tech TV here in New York with theCUBE, of course, anchoring it. The startup coverage, obviously the 16 years in Silicon Valley with theCUBE.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> We are pretty wired in Silicon Valley and now we're wired up in New York. Brian Bauman and I put this together. What's fascinating though, is that tech has gone mainstream. I'm looking at the board on the options, Nvidia, Tesla, Palantir, Oracle. You're going to have Broadcom's earnings after the bell today. Semiconductors is booming where it's just at GSA. All the world is moving at rapid scale with AI infrastructure, which is a buildup on top of cloud, which you're an expert in. So as you look at your new role at Salesforce, you got to be pretty pumped.

>> I am. I am. Look, when Mark Benioff asked me to join and I have Jujar and Kishan, they are inviting me to part of Salesforce, it's been awesome for me. So I think the key, as you said, look, we all went to the cloud journey through VMware, Amazon, the whole Azure, the Google. So I think the AI layer is also becoming with agents. It's almost like in the new layer on top in the stack. And what's pumping is, as I said, infrastructure is going well, data centers and chips. Within agent layer right now, the killer app, whether believe it or not, SaaS is the killer app right now. When they talk about what's the killer app for AI and agent, it's the SaaS. It's like when people say, some people say SaaS is that. I say long live SaaS. SaaS is not dead. .

John Furrier

>> AI native application, some call it, is basically a SaaS app.

>> It is.

John Furrier

>> With data that's intelligent, it's tokenized.

>> That's right. And within the SaaS app, if you look at Salesforce, our Service Cloud, we call it agent for service. We have 65,000 customers. It's close to $10 billion. It's like by far the number one killer app at Salesforce driving this. And now with Mark and team now asking us to do IT service and HR service, we are onto a new challenge. This will be a new tier one cloud for Salesforce to drive building all the IT services that you and me used to talk about, whether it's a password research, network issues, onboarding it. Anything to do with IT, I want to become a proactive, not a reactive.

John Furrier

>> Well, Salesforce, obviously an NYSE listed company just had their earnings. And I saw Jim Cramer's last earnings report with Mark Benioff and kind of took him to task. And Mark was like, no, no, no, we're good. This earnings was phenomenal. Agentforce is booming. Dreamforce is a great event. We saw the future there. You start to see Salesforce kind of show the world that there's a lot more revenue upside. And if you look at the free cash flow from Salesforce right now, or maybe soon to be called Agentforce as a company, there's lift there.

>> It is. It is. If you see what Mark announced at the earnings call, platform is doing really well. There's Agentforce platform, Data360. All of that is doing very well. And then individual apps like the sales service, IT service. I think now we have Agentforce, he announced 18,000 customers or 20,000 customers. That's huge. If we are like a number one top one or two platform where you can build agents and orchestrate. So that is what, I mean, it's a new game right now for us.

John Furrier

>> It's a new game. A lot of co-design going on. I want to get your thoughts around IT, service management. We've talked about that over the years. That's changed. HR services, which under your purview. The Service Cloud, the Agentforce for service. I call it the service force. If you look at the leaders out there, the former leaders, ServiceNow, ServiceNow seems like Service Yesterday. And because they're a little bit behind compared to Salesforce, what's your take on the competitive opportunity you have? How do you view the competition? Can you share your thoughts on what's happening right now in service?

>> Absolutely. Look, the reason, first of all, how my team started doing is look, our own Salesforce, remember we have million customers for Slack. We have 200,000 customers for Salesforce. The Service Cloud customer with Agentforce, 65,000 customers. These customers are asking us to build IT service and HR service. Even though there's a competition out there, my focus is, what can I do to customers like you. If you're my customer, John, you and Brian are like, I want to go to my existing Salesforce customers who are Service Cloud customers, keep serving them with IT service. Now, as you said, the existing legacy ITSM systems are stuck in portal era. I mean, I can't even spell portal. I want to be 25, or I'm 25 in my mind.

John Furrier

>> Portal is like the old school click, get a dashboard. Integrate slower.

>> And they have to fill a form to open up a ticket. All those steps, I want to change that to be a proactive. When you have an issue with anything within your IT service management, I want to get to be proactive. I should come to you and John and say, "John, you have this audio problem," or, "You have this app that's not working well. You have your browser problem." I want to be solving that for you, so that humans should focus on more important items, more complex items. But IT and agentic enterprise will happen only if we do proactive and 80% of those requests should be handled by agents. But I have a slogan there. I don't want any human to be looking at logs. Logs are generated by machines. Why are humans like DevOps, Asari people, in service are looking at logs. I don't want, no human should ever look at a log. That's my mantra in '26.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And the thing too, that we lived through the chatbot era. Now we're in the agent era. We're seeing end to end workflows. I'm seeing at AWS Reinvent just recently, you guys had a great announcement there with Agentforce 360 on AWS Marketplace, which isn't just procurement. You can actually develop in Amazon's cloud and integrate into Agentforce immediately. Again, game changer for Salesforce, props to the team. But the low hanging fruit in all these areas is, okay, I want to know my team. I want to know my environment. I want to know the domain intelligence of the data. We saw that with the Nova announcements that are half-baked in the frontier agents. As clients get that kind of capability, service is the number one use case.

>> It is.

John Furrier

>> By far, I mean, even search and retrieval augmentation generation is still kind of get an answer to something. Customer support, services, service capabilities is the number one use case with agents right now.

>> You're absolutely... John, you nailed it. If you look at it for AI and agents, what's the killer app that's driving? Doesn't matter for whoever is AI agents out there. It is service. Within the service, customer service, IT service, HR service. It is the number one killer app for Gen AI and enterprise or agent platforms out there. Agentforce, we are the number one app that's driving Agentforce adoption. So people love implementing anything to with service with us.

John Furrier

>> All right. So answer the question because this comes up a lot. I want you to answer directly. Why is Salesforce positioned for the enterprise with service Agentforce? What's the main reason that positions you well? What's the differentiator? Share the pitch.

>> Very good. See, the top three differential for me is North Star for Salesforce is all about experience. There's nobody in the enterprise will do care as much as we as Salesforce care. Mark Benioff is all about experience. So when it comes to experience, we are the number one to meet. And we want to meet users where they are, whether they're in Microsoft Teams, Slack, web interface, WhatsApp. I want to meet users where you hang around. That's number one is our differentiator. Number two is, to your point, we are creating IT domain for my area. IT and HR, I'm creating domain specific agents. I don't want to have a hallucination. LLMs give you too much hallucination. I want to create a domain specific agents, domain intelligence, ontology, taxonomy. I'll be so accurate. My resolution should be north of 90, 95%. That's what I'm going after. That's our differentiator. Number three is, as Mark Benioff talked about, it's humans and AI agents working together. In enterprise, as you know, it's all about guardrails, security, authentication, permission. I don't want John's document given to Dave or Dave's document to Brian. How do I make sure that I take your permission, your authentication, your access controls and implement that? That is Salesforce difference. So top three differential, if you want an editorial for me is, it's intelligence, it's the security, it's enterprise skill. That is Salesforce and nobody else can deliver that other than us at that.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the data foundation, because one of the things that's changed within Salesforce, couple things. The data cloud's now called Agentforce 360.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> You have done a ton of work around harmonizing the data on the platform. You have your own data. Data becomes the key for this. What's your vision on service, IT and HR, when it comes to data? What's going to happen next? What are some of the things that are possible? Just share...

>> Very good question. So if you look at it before data cloud, what happened is people used to make copies. See, one thing that Salesforce has done a good job and is making a data cloud with zero copy. You can have a data cloud without a zero copy. What'll happen is, you still have to copy. So we integrate with Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric. We don't mind where your data is. Your data could be in SharePoint, Google Drive, Box. The data cloud gives me the data is the new age for AI. If I want to make sure that data is a single unified access, unified management, that is what data cloud is giving me. The reason we do so well is, making sure the data is fully orchestrated properly. And that Salesforce is doing a fantastic job with our Data360 and Data Cloud.

John Furrier

>> What's beyond chatbots? This is another question I get. Share your thoughts on what people can expect today. In 2026, we're going to see a lot more value in the enterprise with agents. The question always comes up, Muddu, what's the difference between a chatbot and an agent?

>> Very good. I think the difference is chatbots when it originally came, remember when I was at ISR2, it's all about trying to do semantic analysis. It's all about knowledge articles, it's KB articles. What agents can do is they can orchestrate. They can take actions. They can do complex workflows. The reason MIT report you saw 95% fail, because they're all trying to build yourself. You don't wake up and say, "I want to build a Tesla car." You want to buy that car. Same thing is, once you build these agents with Salesforce agency platform, these agents should deflect 80, 90% of your requests. That is a reason. And IT should now cut their cost. So what I tell the CIOs this week when I was there at CFO Cab, every CIO wants me to cut costs. The only way to cut costs is not with chatbots. Through agents. Agents will cut down the costs, whether license costs or your operational costs. I think that's a big difference. And also keeping your operations running 24 by seven.

John Furrier

>> Man, we had a lot of conversations around day two operations and cloud native. AI automates this autonomous agent capability with frontier capabilities, with the ability to have frontier agents now, a term that Amazon just popularized with their event. It's a reasoning. It's beyond just jack of all trades. Specialized agents. What should people think about when they look at now what's possible? What should every CIO, CISO, AI person, who's re-architecting the platforms, what should they be thinking about when they're designing or funding projects?

>> So my advice to the CIOs is actually don't do simple stuff anymore. That's already done. Focus on the complex stuff that you can automate. When we were at AWS even last week, you and me talked. There's a DevOps agent today. There's an Asari agent. Remember we used to hire site reliable engineers to do it. I think each of their functions, they're the complex workflows. We want to see how we can help them. Idea of building this agent is not to replace them. I want to use those Asari people. They're the rockstar. They're the unsung heroes. How can I do a better job so that they can do. I want them to make the superheroes. So I think every leader out there should look at the complex workflows, complex projects. Give that to agents so that your humans can think and do even more better. That's what I want them to do.

John Furrier

>> As people start seeing teammates emerge, the word teammates has come up a lot. That agents can get to know your nuances. How code's written. How process is. Every team has a unique culture.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> And of course, you guys got Slack, so I think that's going to be a major advantage. How do you guys view this whole team's approach? By having agents being part of the team, is that something you're focused on and how does that relate to some of the service agents that you're building?

>> No, that's exactly what I'm saying. My vision is when I talk about the subject matter agents, I want every team to have agents to help them, whether it's AI assistant to do mundane task, whether it's a root cause analysis, incident problem, collaboration agent, agent which is trying to do your network management. Every function should have one or two agents or multiple agents available to your teams, to your collab teammates. Each teammate should rely on for complex work, go to the agent. That should be their avatar. They should go to them to get their information, make them work for them. AI is here to help us better, not the other way around.

John Furrier

>> All right. So now you're in charge. What's the size of the business you're running? You have a preexisting competition. Okay? ServiceNow and others are doing things. We're in a multivendor world of data. A lot of co-designing going on. What's your strategy? How big is the business? What are some of your goals?

>> So look, we just launched our product last month right at Dreamforce. We closed a lot of customers already. One of the customers we announced is UNESCO. Omar is a CIO there. We are implementing them. And we also close a company called EPB Energy Company. We closed Osprey. So look, people are buying. We have closed so many new customers in 20 days since the product being launched. The business is going really well. People are coming to us out of the woodwork saying, "Look, I want this to be in Salesforce arc. I want a service like Salesforce, sales or Service Cloud. I want an IT service. I want HR service." We still want to work with the existing system. So I can do repair and replace, or I can coexist with legacy ITSM. So I'm giving them the optionality. If you're a customer, I want to figure out a way to work with you, John. Either I'll replace your legacy or coexist with you, but I want to make you better. But business is doing well.

John Furrier

>> Well, I do like what you guys do on the user experience side. The old cliche on our business in tech is meet the customers where they are. And I say that in a kind of very over the top way, but look at Slack. People are engaging workflows in Slack.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> User experience, another big part of the develop property. You got MCP, AWA, you got multiple frameworks. You got a developer environment that's robust. So the new Salesforce, or AgentForce, has now abstracted away a lot of those silos. So as someone who's looking at service group, what's your message to them? We're yesterday's Salesforce, we're yesterday plus today. How would you describe the value proposition for a customer who's thinking, "Wow, there's more here."

>> I think the value prop to customers, I always say, look, look, first decide, do you have a problem? What's your business outcome? What do you want to solve? Every customer has some problem. Decide where the problem. If there's a pain point today, in the service side, in Service Cloud or IT service, I'm here to solve it. But first understand where you are. Not everybody will be my customer on day one. I want to talk to the people who have a main pain point. The pain point could be cost reduction. As you said, experience. It should be productivity. It is all about putting a unified arc. You need to have a single pain point or multiple pain points. Then I will solve it for anything at any cost. I'm going after customers who have a pain point and I want them to focus 2026, more our making agentic enterprise. Mark announced the Dreamforce is agenting enterprise. It won't happen without IT service, Service Cloud, HR service, all of them being deployed in agentic manner.

John Furrier

>> And the big takeaway from Dreamforce for me was context. The context of the data. And you get now new partnerships, AWS, IBM, a huge ecosystem developing. Within Salesforce, like I said, you don't have to leave Amazon. If you're developing your stack on AWS, you just go to Agentforce 360 and you can tap all the benefits of Salesforce.

>> You're right.

John Furrier

>> Data.

>> So to your point, ecosystem is very important. I also announced for my IT service, 100 partners at the Dreamforce. I'll probably allow 200 partners by end of this quarter. So look, I think ecosystem is very important. Amazon, Google, Gemini, IBM. Look, everybody's a partner for us, including we are looking at customers, even the small to medium Box, Dropbox, whoever it is. We want to work with every customer anywhere out there. The key though is, in the partner and ecosystem is, unless your core is good, John. So what I tell the ecosystem is the core cannot be legacy. If the core is legacy, how much of partnership you do, like you put a shrinker app in Largo there. The great thing is, the product that we built is AI NATO. How many companies can they save your product is , after 2022 when ChatGPT came to exist. And so, I think that is the key advantage that I got, is I'm an AI native for IT service and HR service. With my ecosystem, sky is the limit right now.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And agents can do many things. It can do front end things and backend things. You mentioned some of the SRE type things that Amazon announced. So there's a lot of agents that are back office or back system, backend agents. Billions of agents will be out there. They will be talking to each other.

>> There has to be. That's a multi-agent orchestration. Some customers will want a single agent which will talk to other things. Other customers want a subject matter, but all these agents should talk. There's an agent, as we said, A2A protocol, MCP. But you need to have multiple agents, single agent to multi-agent orchestration. Multi-agent to build, multi-agent to orchestrate is very important.

John Furrier

>> Well, dude, I'm really excited to have you on. Great to see you at Dreamforce. Great job you have at Salesforce. Mark's smart to hire you in there to run the service piece of it. This year, we're going to have a very big focus intentionally in getting stories on agents in the real world. This is the year for practical value.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> Knockdown wins, show revenue, show task completions, scaling laws around reasoning and thinking is happening. Frontier agents that Amazon announces, also a tell sign for where agents are going to get smarter as tokens learn the business, not just become a generic large language model. More customization.

>> I think you nailed it. All my customers are the same thing. In 2026, this year is all going to be show me the money. Show me the value. Show me the ROI. Show me that you reduce your cost, not just ROI. Can I cut down? How soon? Can I show in three months, six months? Where is my savings going to be? Absolutely. Now this is where the enterprise AI really going to happen at a level where people like Salesforce with its platform with 20,000 customers for AgentForce and 65,000. That's important.

John Furrier

>> Show me the money. That's the model. Again, not the old classic total cost of ownership. Sure, there's justifications for that. But this is real revenue. This isn't, hey, justify the purchase. No, we did this in four months. We produced X revenue, increased revenue lift, net new revenue.

>> Yes. That's right.

John Furrier

>> Everything popping.

>> You nailed it. That's exactly it.

John Furrier

>> Thank you so much for coming on. I'm John Furrier. Show me the money is the market. It's a show me market. Show the value. We're doing our part here in theCUBE to bring that value to you. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at the NYSE CUBE Studios. Thanks for watching.

>> Thank you.

Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host here at our NYSE CUBE Studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studios connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street, tech and money. This is part of our NYSE Wired program and community we're building together with the NYSE. We have a CUBE alumni here, part of our mixture of experts. He's an expert in cloud native, entrepreneurship, and now of course Serviceforce, part of Agentforce. Muddu Sudhakar, who's SVP, GM, of IT HR service, that's Salesforce. Muddu, it's great to see you. You've watched theCUBE grow over the years. Now you're SVP leading at Salesforce in one of the most progressive areas of value creation and extraction, which is the service side of the ticket side of it, the AI side, all that domain data. Welcome back to theCUBE. Welcome to our New York Stock Exchange studio.

>> Welcome, John. Thank you for having me.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

>> You and me did almost 15 years now. We've been doing this and I really, first time being on your show at NYSE, it's awesome. Congratulations to you.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, thank you.

>> Awesome. Are you here?

John Furrier

>> It's just the beginning. We're opening up the aperture and there's a real mainstreaming of tech, tech TV here in New York with theCUBE, of course, anchoring it. The startup coverage, obviously the 16 years in Silicon Valley with theCUBE.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> We are pretty wired in Silicon Valley and now we're wired up in New York. Brian Bauman and I put this together. What's fascinating though, is that tech has gone mainstream. I'm looking at the board on the options, Nvidia, Tesla, Palantir, Oracle. You're going to have Broadcom's earnings after the bell today. Semiconductors is booming where it's just at GSA. All the world is moving at rapid scale with AI infrastructure, which is a buildup on top of cloud, which you're an expert in. So as you look at your new role at Salesforce, you got to be pretty pumped.

>> I am. I am. Look, when Mark Benioff asked me to join and I have Jujar and Kishan, they are inviting me to part of Salesforce, it's been awesome for me. So I think the key, as you said, look, we all went to the cloud journey through VMware, Amazon, the whole Azure, the Google. So I think the AI layer is also becoming with agents. It's almost like in the new layer on top in the stack. And what's pumping is, as I said, infrastructure is going well, data centers and chips. Within agent layer right now, the killer app, whether believe it or not, SaaS is the killer app right now. When they talk about what's the killer app for AI and agent, it's the SaaS. It's like when people say, some people say SaaS is that. I say long live SaaS. SaaS is not dead. .

John Furrier

>> AI native application, some call it, is basically a SaaS app.

>> It is.

John Furrier

>> With data that's intelligent, it's tokenized.

>> That's right. And within the SaaS app, if you look at Salesforce, our Service Cloud, we call it agent for service. We have 65,000 customers. It's close to $10 billion. It's like by far the number one killer app at Salesforce driving this. And now with Mark and team now asking us to do IT service and HR service, we are onto a new challenge. This will be a new tier one cloud for Salesforce to drive building all the IT services that you and me used to talk about, whether it's a password research, network issues, onboarding it. Anything to do with IT, I want to become a proactive, not a reactive.

John Furrier

>> Well, Salesforce, obviously an NYSE listed company just had their earnings. And I saw Jim Cramer's last earnings report with Mark Benioff and kind of took him to task. And Mark was like, no, no, no, we're good. This earnings was phenomenal. Agentforce is booming. Dreamforce is a great event. We saw the future there. You start to see Salesforce kind of show the world that there's a lot more revenue upside. And if you look at the free cash flow from Salesforce right now, or maybe soon to be called Agentforce as a company, there's lift there.

>> It is. It is. If you see what Mark announced at the earnings call, platform is doing really well. There's Agentforce platform, Data360. All of that is doing very well. And then individual apps like the sales service, IT service. I think now we have Agentforce, he announced 18,000 customers or 20,000 customers. That's huge. If we are like a number one top one or two platform where you can build agents and orchestrate. So that is what, I mean, it's a new game right now for us.

John Furrier

>> It's a new game. A lot of co-design going on. I want to get your thoughts around IT, service management. We've talked about that over the years. That's changed. HR services, which under your purview. The Service Cloud, the Agentforce for service. I call it the service force. If you look at the leaders out there, the former leaders, ServiceNow, ServiceNow seems like Service Yesterday. And because they're a little bit behind compared to Salesforce, what's your take on the competitive opportunity you have? How do you view the competition? Can you share your thoughts on what's happening right now in service?

>> Absolutely. Look, the reason, first of all, how my team started doing is look, our own Salesforce, remember we have million customers for Slack. We have 200,000 customers for Salesforce. The Service Cloud customer with Agentforce, 65,000 customers. These customers are asking us to build IT service and HR service. Even though there's a competition out there, my focus is, what can I do to customers like you. If you're my customer, John, you and Brian are like, I want to go to my existing Salesforce customers who are Service Cloud customers, keep serving them with IT service. Now, as you said, the existing legacy ITSM systems are stuck in portal era. I mean, I can't even spell portal. I want to be 25, or I'm 25 in my mind.

John Furrier

>> Portal is like the old school click, get a dashboard. Integrate slower.

>> And they have to fill a form to open up a ticket. All those steps, I want to change that to be a proactive. When you have an issue with anything within your IT service management, I want to get to be proactive. I should come to you and John and say, "John, you have this audio problem," or, "You have this app that's not working well. You have your browser problem." I want to be solving that for you, so that humans should focus on more important items, more complex items. But IT and agentic enterprise will happen only if we do proactive and 80% of those requests should be handled by agents. But I have a slogan there. I don't want any human to be looking at logs. Logs are generated by machines. Why are humans like DevOps, Asari people, in service are looking at logs. I don't want, no human should ever look at a log. That's my mantra in '26.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And the thing too, that we lived through the chatbot era. Now we're in the agent era. We're seeing end to end workflows. I'm seeing at AWS Reinvent just recently, you guys had a great announcement there with Agentforce 360 on AWS Marketplace, which isn't just procurement. You can actually develop in Amazon's cloud and integrate into Agentforce immediately. Again, game changer for Salesforce, props to the team. But the low hanging fruit in all these areas is, okay, I want to know my team. I want to know my environment. I want to know the domain intelligence of the data. We saw that with the Nova announcements that are half-baked in the frontier agents. As clients get that kind of capability, service is the number one use case.

>> It is.

John Furrier

>> By far, I mean, even search and retrieval augmentation generation is still kind of get an answer to something. Customer support, services, service capabilities is the number one use case with agents right now.

>> You're absolutely... John, you nailed it. If you look at it for AI and agents, what's the killer app that's driving? Doesn't matter for whoever is AI agents out there. It is service. Within the service, customer service, IT service, HR service. It is the number one killer app for Gen AI and enterprise or agent platforms out there. Agentforce, we are the number one app that's driving Agentforce adoption. So people love implementing anything to with service with us.

John Furrier

>> All right. So answer the question because this comes up a lot. I want you to answer directly. Why is Salesforce positioned for the enterprise with service Agentforce? What's the main reason that positions you well? What's the differentiator? Share the pitch.

>> Very good. See, the top three differential for me is North Star for Salesforce is all about experience. There's nobody in the enterprise will do care as much as we as Salesforce care. Mark Benioff is all about experience. So when it comes to experience, we are the number one to meet. And we want to meet users where they are, whether they're in Microsoft Teams, Slack, web interface, WhatsApp. I want to meet users where you hang around. That's number one is our differentiator. Number two is, to your point, we are creating IT domain for my area. IT and HR, I'm creating domain specific agents. I don't want to have a hallucination. LLMs give you too much hallucination. I want to create a domain specific agents, domain intelligence, ontology, taxonomy. I'll be so accurate. My resolution should be north of 90, 95%. That's what I'm going after. That's our differentiator. Number three is, as Mark Benioff talked about, it's humans and AI agents working together. In enterprise, as you know, it's all about guardrails, security, authentication, permission. I don't want John's document given to Dave or Dave's document to Brian. How do I make sure that I take your permission, your authentication, your access controls and implement that? That is Salesforce difference. So top three differential, if you want an editorial for me is, it's intelligence, it's the security, it's enterprise skill. That is Salesforce and nobody else can deliver that other than us at that.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the data foundation, because one of the things that's changed within Salesforce, couple things. The data cloud's now called Agentforce 360.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> You have done a ton of work around harmonizing the data on the platform. You have your own data. Data becomes the key for this. What's your vision on service, IT and HR, when it comes to data? What's going to happen next? What are some of the things that are possible? Just share...

>> Very good question. So if you look at it before data cloud, what happened is people used to make copies. See, one thing that Salesforce has done a good job and is making a data cloud with zero copy. You can have a data cloud without a zero copy. What'll happen is, you still have to copy. So we integrate with Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric. We don't mind where your data is. Your data could be in SharePoint, Google Drive, Box. The data cloud gives me the data is the new age for AI. If I want to make sure that data is a single unified access, unified management, that is what data cloud is giving me. The reason we do so well is, making sure the data is fully orchestrated properly. And that Salesforce is doing a fantastic job with our Data360 and Data Cloud.

John Furrier

>> What's beyond chatbots? This is another question I get. Share your thoughts on what people can expect today. In 2026, we're going to see a lot more value in the enterprise with agents. The question always comes up, Muddu, what's the difference between a chatbot and an agent?

>> Very good. I think the difference is chatbots when it originally came, remember when I was at ISR2, it's all about trying to do semantic analysis. It's all about knowledge articles, it's KB articles. What agents can do is they can orchestrate. They can take actions. They can do complex workflows. The reason MIT report you saw 95% fail, because they're all trying to build yourself. You don't wake up and say, "I want to build a Tesla car." You want to buy that car. Same thing is, once you build these agents with Salesforce agency platform, these agents should deflect 80, 90% of your requests. That is a reason. And IT should now cut their cost. So what I tell the CIOs this week when I was there at CFO Cab, every CIO wants me to cut costs. The only way to cut costs is not with chatbots. Through agents. Agents will cut down the costs, whether license costs or your operational costs. I think that's a big difference. And also keeping your operations running 24 by seven.

John Furrier

>> Man, we had a lot of conversations around day two operations and cloud native. AI automates this autonomous agent capability with frontier capabilities, with the ability to have frontier agents now, a term that Amazon just popularized with their event. It's a reasoning. It's beyond just jack of all trades. Specialized agents. What should people think about when they look at now what's possible? What should every CIO, CISO, AI person, who's re-architecting the platforms, what should they be thinking about when they're designing or funding projects?

>> So my advice to the CIOs is actually don't do simple stuff anymore. That's already done. Focus on the complex stuff that you can automate. When we were at AWS even last week, you and me talked. There's a DevOps agent today. There's an Asari agent. Remember we used to hire site reliable engineers to do it. I think each of their functions, they're the complex workflows. We want to see how we can help them. Idea of building this agent is not to replace them. I want to use those Asari people. They're the rockstar. They're the unsung heroes. How can I do a better job so that they can do. I want them to make the superheroes. So I think every leader out there should look at the complex workflows, complex projects. Give that to agents so that your humans can think and do even more better. That's what I want them to do.

John Furrier

>> As people start seeing teammates emerge, the word teammates has come up a lot. That agents can get to know your nuances. How code's written. How process is. Every team has a unique culture.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> And of course, you guys got Slack, so I think that's going to be a major advantage. How do you guys view this whole team's approach? By having agents being part of the team, is that something you're focused on and how does that relate to some of the service agents that you're building?

>> No, that's exactly what I'm saying. My vision is when I talk about the subject matter agents, I want every team to have agents to help them, whether it's AI assistant to do mundane task, whether it's a root cause analysis, incident problem, collaboration agent, agent which is trying to do your network management. Every function should have one or two agents or multiple agents available to your teams, to your collab teammates. Each teammate should rely on for complex work, go to the agent. That should be their avatar. They should go to them to get their information, make them work for them. AI is here to help us better, not the other way around.

John Furrier

>> All right. So now you're in charge. What's the size of the business you're running? You have a preexisting competition. Okay? ServiceNow and others are doing things. We're in a multivendor world of data. A lot of co-designing going on. What's your strategy? How big is the business? What are some of your goals?

>> So look, we just launched our product last month right at Dreamforce. We closed a lot of customers already. One of the customers we announced is UNESCO. Omar is a CIO there. We are implementing them. And we also close a company called EPB Energy Company. We closed Osprey. So look, people are buying. We have closed so many new customers in 20 days since the product being launched. The business is going really well. People are coming to us out of the woodwork saying, "Look, I want this to be in Salesforce arc. I want a service like Salesforce, sales or Service Cloud. I want an IT service. I want HR service." We still want to work with the existing system. So I can do repair and replace, or I can coexist with legacy ITSM. So I'm giving them the optionality. If you're a customer, I want to figure out a way to work with you, John. Either I'll replace your legacy or coexist with you, but I want to make you better. But business is doing well.

John Furrier

>> Well, I do like what you guys do on the user experience side. The old cliche on our business in tech is meet the customers where they are. And I say that in a kind of very over the top way, but look at Slack. People are engaging workflows in Slack.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> User experience, another big part of the develop property. You got MCP, AWA, you got multiple frameworks. You got a developer environment that's robust. So the new Salesforce, or AgentForce, has now abstracted away a lot of those silos. So as someone who's looking at service group, what's your message to them? We're yesterday's Salesforce, we're yesterday plus today. How would you describe the value proposition for a customer who's thinking, "Wow, there's more here."

>> I think the value prop to customers, I always say, look, look, first decide, do you have a problem? What's your business outcome? What do you want to solve? Every customer has some problem. Decide where the problem. If there's a pain point today, in the service side, in Service Cloud or IT service, I'm here to solve it. But first understand where you are. Not everybody will be my customer on day one. I want to talk to the people who have a main pain point. The pain point could be cost reduction. As you said, experience. It should be productivity. It is all about putting a unified arc. You need to have a single pain point or multiple pain points. Then I will solve it for anything at any cost. I'm going after customers who have a pain point and I want them to focus 2026, more our making agentic enterprise. Mark announced the Dreamforce is agenting enterprise. It won't happen without IT service, Service Cloud, HR service, all of them being deployed in agentic manner.

John Furrier

>> And the big takeaway from Dreamforce for me was context. The context of the data. And you get now new partnerships, AWS, IBM, a huge ecosystem developing. Within Salesforce, like I said, you don't have to leave Amazon. If you're developing your stack on AWS, you just go to Agentforce 360 and you can tap all the benefits of Salesforce.

>> You're right.

John Furrier

>> Data.

>> So to your point, ecosystem is very important. I also announced for my IT service, 100 partners at the Dreamforce. I'll probably allow 200 partners by end of this quarter. So look, I think ecosystem is very important. Amazon, Google, Gemini, IBM. Look, everybody's a partner for us, including we are looking at customers, even the small to medium Box, Dropbox, whoever it is. We want to work with every customer anywhere out there. The key though is, in the partner and ecosystem is, unless your core is good, John. So what I tell the ecosystem is the core cannot be legacy. If the core is legacy, how much of partnership you do, like you put a shrinker app in Largo there. The great thing is, the product that we built is AI NATO. How many companies can they save your product is , after 2022 when ChatGPT came to exist. And so, I think that is the key advantage that I got, is I'm an AI native for IT service and HR service. With my ecosystem, sky is the limit right now.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And agents can do many things. It can do front end things and backend things. You mentioned some of the SRE type things that Amazon announced. So there's a lot of agents that are back office or back system, backend agents. Billions of agents will be out there. They will be talking to each other.

>> There has to be. That's a multi-agent orchestration. Some customers will want a single agent which will talk to other things. Other customers want a subject matter, but all these agents should talk. There's an agent, as we said, A2A protocol, MCP. But you need to have multiple agents, single agent to multi-agent orchestration. Multi-agent to build, multi-agent to orchestrate is very important.

John Furrier

>> Well, dude, I'm really excited to have you on. Great to see you at Dreamforce. Great job you have at Salesforce. Mark's smart to hire you in there to run the service piece of it. This year, we're going to have a very big focus intentionally in getting stories on agents in the real world. This is the year for practical value.

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> Knockdown wins, show revenue, show task completions, scaling laws around reasoning and thinking is happening. Frontier agents that Amazon announces, also a tell sign for where agents are going to get smarter as tokens learn the business, not just become a generic large language model. More customization.

>> I think you nailed it. All my customers are the same thing. In 2026, this year is all going to be show me the money. Show me the value. Show me the ROI. Show me that you reduce your cost, not just ROI. Can I cut down? How soon? Can I show in three months, six months? Where is my savings going to be? Absolutely. Now this is where the enterprise AI really going to happen at a level where people like Salesforce with its platform with 20,000 customers for AgentForce and 65,000. That's important.

John Furrier

>> Show me the money. That's the model. Again, not the old classic total cost of ownership. Sure, there's justifications for that. But this is real revenue. This isn't, hey, justify the purchase. No, we did this in four months. We produced X revenue, increased revenue lift, net new revenue.

>> Yes. That's right.

John Furrier

>> Everything popping.

>> You nailed it. That's exactly it.

John Furrier

>> Thank you so much for coming on. I'm John Furrier. Show me the money is the market. It's a show me market. Show the value. We're doing our part here in theCUBE to bring that value to you. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at the NYSE CUBE Studios. Thanks for watching.

>> Thank you.