Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Kicks Off Dreamforce With Keynote Presentation

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff delivering the keynote at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco (Jessica Christian/Getty Images)

Salesforce gets more direct about rivals and more vocal about customers

CEO Marc Benioff likened competitors ServiceNow and Veeva to “purgatory” and named specific customers Salesforce says it’s taken from them.

Rani Molla

Even for a company known for taking digs at competitors and name-dropping clients, Salesforce’s latest earnings call was a standout.

A review of the past 10 years of the workplace software company’s earnings transcripts suggests a shift from indirectly knocking old, siloed “legacy” competitors like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle to directly attacking newer, more niche upstarts.

Here’s CEO Marc Benioff:

“I especially loved five customers who get to leave the purgatory of ServiceNow. Like Sunrun, Cornerstone, CoolSys, and there’s others too that we’re not allowed to mention, but I might mention them anyway, who are leaving ServiceNow now for the new Salesforce IT service product, which is about apps and agents, helping you manage all your ITSM.

But don’t just think it’s just that. We built an amazing new life sciences product this year: Agentforce for Life Sciences. And since we launched so many of the global pharma companies, and I’ve met with so many of the CEOs myself, they’re leaving Veeva — the purgatory of Veeva — including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Takeda, and, of course, Albert [Bourla] at Pfizer. They’re all saying that they are going to Salesforce Life Sciences, which is a product that has apps and agents. And this is amazing. They are the most regulated businesses in the world. And they’re choosing Salesforce.”

So not only did he criticize competitors ServiceNow and Veeva as “purgatory,” but he also named specific customers Salesforce claims to have taken from them.

That’s far more direct than many of Salesforce’s historical digs, which involved highlighting competitors as “old,” “legacy,” “siloed,” and structurally non-cloud-native.

“If you go look at some of these legacy companies that are trying to get in the game of the front office and say that they’re now CRM companies, it’s not in their DNA,” Benioff’s then co-CEO Keith Block said in 2017.

The latest earnings call also marks a departure from simply listing all its happy customers, which Benioff did in spades, per usual.

This time Salesforce invited three of them — the CEOs of Wyndham Hotels and SharkNinja, as well as the founder of SaaStr — on the call itself, in what looked like a cross between a YouTube podcast and an infomercial.

Benioff didn’t have to say how great he thinks his products were. His guests delivered testimonials for him.

What should we make of these earnings call changes? Certainly one could argue they’re a sign of either strength or weakness, which likely depends on whether you interpreted the company’s earnings as positive (revenue beat expectations and is growing faster than it had been!) or negative (part of that growth came from the acquisition of Informatica!).

Investors themselves seem unsure: the stock was down 5% after the market closed yesterday but is currently up around 3% as traders continue to digest the earnings.

But perhaps the biggest beneficiaries are ServiceNow and Veeva. By naming them directly, Salesforce elevated them — and signaled that it considers them serious competition.

Jon Keegan35m

Delays in permitting, power, and zoning cause first drop in data center construction since 2020

Despite incredible demand, the number of data centers under construction in North America fell for the first time since 2020, according to new research from CBRE.

Total data center capacity under construction dropped about 5.6% year on year from 6.35 megawatts in 2024 to 5.99 megawatts by the end of 2025.

What’s causing the delay? Slow permitting, constrained supply chains, and growing public engagement with how deals are approved at the local level. Labor constraints also were cited in the report; a tight supply of skilled workers will increase costs.

US Data Center Construction Fell Amid Permit and Power Delays

-13%📱

Rani Molla2h

Smartphone shipments are expected to decline 13% — the biggest drop ever — to 1.12 billion in 2026, according to new data from IDC, as the memory shortage drives up costs and prices for phones. The firm expects the average smartphone selling price to jump 14% to a record $523 this year.

The shortfall will mostly affect makers of lower-end smartphones, whose customers are more cost-conscious, while higher-end manufacturers like Samsung and Apple are likely to be more insulated from the pressure.

“The memory crisis will cause more than a temporary decline; it marks a structural reset of the entire market, fundamentally reshaping long‑term TAM (Total Addressable Market), the vendor landscape, and the product mix,” said Nabila Popal, senior research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. “We expect consolidation as smaller players exit, and low-end vendors to face sharp shipment declines amid supply constraints and lower demand at higher price points.”

Jon Keegan5h

Google drops new Nano Banana

Google is hoping to recapture the viral boost it received when it released its Nano Banana image generation model. Nano Banana 2 arrives today, which Google has rolled into its Gemini app.

The new model promises more accurate text rendering and translation and “advanced world knowledge,” which “pulls from Gemini’s real-world knowledge base, and is powered by real-time information and images from web search to more accurately render specific subjects,” according to the company’s press release.

New creative controls let users keep groups of characters consistent across scenes, render images with higher resolution, and parse complex prompts.

The first version of Nano Banana became popular for making action figures out of users, and helped catapult the Gemini AI app to the top of the charts, bumping ChatGPT from its perch.

Nano Banana 2: Combining Pro capabilities with lightning-fast speed

New creative controls let users keep groups of characters consistent across scenes, render images with higher resolution, and parse complex prompts.

The first version of Nano Banana became popular for making action figures out of users, and helped catapult the Gemini AI app to the top of the charts, bumping ChatGPT from its perch.

Rani Molla6h

Tesla’s ride-hailing service is looking a lot more like Uber’s than Waymo’s

Despite numerous promises about amassing a giant network of driverless cars, so far it seems like Tesla’s Robotaxis are a lot more similar to Uber’s plain old ride-hailing service than Waymo’s expanding autonomous fleet.

In California, where Tesla has its largest ride-hailing service, the company has taken no formal steps to gain approval for a truly driverless car service, according to Reuters. Throughout 2025, Tesla failed to log a single mile of autonomous test driving on state roads, and has not applied for the necessary permits to test or deploy vehicles without a human present. Currently, Tesla holds only a basic permit that requires a human safety monitor to remain in the driver’s seat at all times.

Currently, Tesla’s California Robotaxi service consists of roughly 300 Teslas operated by human drivers using the company’s supervised Full Self-Driving tech. In Austin, where the company has about 45 vehicles, Tesla made a big show earlier this year of announcing it was removing the safety monitors sitting in the front seats during rides. However, to date, only a handful of those vehicles have been reported to be actually operating without a safety monitor onboard.

In other words, it’s performing a service more akin to a tech-heavy Uber ride than the one operated by Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, which earlier this week announced it now has driverless rides available to the public in 10 markets. Even Uber is trying to put space between itself and the old driver-having Ubers of yore: this week its autonomous software partner said the company plans to launch a driverless service in London this year, with plans for 10 markets.

During its earnings report last month, Tesla said it planned to offer Robotaxi service in a half dozen new cities in the first half of this year, including Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas. Judging by Tesla’s progress so far, it’s likely those services will also feature a human in the front seat.