SAN FRANCISCO — What if Silicon Valley’s self-anointed (and generally acknowledged) master of marketing held a citywide party to celebrate his company’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions — and ended up sullying his reputation?
It happened to Salesforce Inc. CEO Marc Benioff this week at Dreamforce, the annual bacchanal that typically genuflects in all things technology (AI agents like its Agentforce offering), celebrity sightings (company pitchman Matthew McConaughey), and blowout concert (Metallica this year).
Shortly before the annual bash, Benioff stuck his foot in it, when he told The New York Times he “fully” supported President Trump and believes the National Guard could help with policing the city.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if [the National Guard] can be cops, I’m all for it,” said Benioff, who noted he must pay for additional off-duty police officers to provide security during his annual Dreamforce conference.
The comments from the billionaire San Francisco native, who has donated millions of dollars to liberal causes in the city, sparked significant backlash. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie joined city law enforcement leaders to push back against the idea of National Guard troops patrolling city streets. (Crime in San Francisco is down 30% in 2025 compared to last year, and the number of homicides is on track to be the lowest in 70 years.)
Though Benioff walked back his position, and announced Salesforce would donate $1 million to the San Francisco Police Department to fund hiring bonuses for new officers as well as invest $15 billion in San Francisco over the next five years, venture capitalist and philanthropist Ron Conway resigned from the Salesforce Foundation Board, telling Benioff in an email that their values were no longer aligned. At the same time, a group of Salesforce employees and alumni issued an open letter to Benioff demanding he rescind his support of bringing the National Guard to San Francisco.
Could things get worse? Probably. Just as the show was wrapping up, came this bombshell from the New York Times: It obtained screenshots of internal documents in which Salesforce pitched ICE on rapidly hiring 10,000 new agents and enhancing deportation operations using Agentforce.
The materials included a five-page memo, a spreadsheet of potential “opportunities” to work with ICE, and slides brainstorming how AI could help ICE process tip-line data and investigations.
While Salesforce has worked with ICE in the past under the Obama and Biden administrations, this proposal to help ICE expand its enforcement capacity represents a new development as several tech giants (OpenAI, Oracle Corp., Intel Corp., SoftBank Group) benefit from business partnerships with the Trump Admininstration. Benioff subsequently issued a public apology on Friday.
The evolving mess couldn’t come at a worse time for Salesforce, which is scrambling to play catch up in the AI race with rivals Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and IBM Corp. Deepening the angst, its fiercest nemesis, Oracle, drew plaudits for its AI play at a dueling show in Las Vegas. Oracle launched its AI Data Platform, marking its latest effort to help enterprises integrate generative AI with its existing data infrastructure and business operations.
As a few analysts explained in interviews in Las Vegas, Salesforce was caught flat-footed in the AI race — an ironic turn of events after it upended the software industry a quarter century ago with its software-as-a-service approach.
Benioff has been playing with fire before.
In September 2023, ahead of Dreamforce that year, Benioff made a fuss that he might pull the conference out of San Francisco over concerns about homelessness and drug use in the city. He had specifically threatened to move future Dreamforces from the city over his concerns about homelessness and drug use affecting the conference.
His threat had some effect then. City Hall ramped up the cleanups and cop presence around the Moscone Center for the conference, and Dreamforce 2023 went largely without incident. As a result, Benioff announced that Dreamforce 2024 would remain in San Francisco.
The pattern continued into 2024, where Benioff noted that San Francisco has “never looked better” on the first day of Dreamforce 2024 and touted the benefits to the city, including “$100 million in economic activity.” When asked if he planned to keep the conference in the city next year as well, he said, “I’d like to as long as everything goes well. If it all goes well, why not?”
Notably, Conway pointed out in his recent resignation email that Benioff’s “constant annual threats to move Dreamforce to Las Vegas” is ironic, since Las Vegas has a higher rate of violent crime than San Francisco.
