Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff is chair and CEO of Salesforce and a pioneer of cloud computing and enterprise innovation. As agent-based AI is projected to automate tasks worth more than $6 trillion by 2030, Benioff continues to shape how enterprises realize value from emerging technologies, including through Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, which helps organizations achieve rapid, affordable return on investment from agentic AI. He founded Salesforce in 1999 with a vision for a new kind of enterprise software company built on cloud-based technology, a pay-as-you-go business model and integrated corporate philanthropy.

Under his leadership, Salesforce has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a Fortune 500 company, the world’s largest CRM provider and one of the fastest-growing top software companies globally. A veteran of the software industry, Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle before launching Salesforce. He founded his first company, Liberty Software, at age 15 and later worked as an assembly language programmer in Apple’s Macintosh Division. He is widely recognized for visionary leadership and innovation and serves on the World Economic Forum Board of Trustees.

Benioff created Salesforce’s 1-1-1 philanthropic model, dedicating 1% of the company’s product, equity and employee time to community impact. The model has since been adopted by more than 3,000 companies through the Pledge 1% movement. Along with his wife, Lynne, Benioff focuses his philanthropy on children’s health, public education and homelessness, including support for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland.