Salesforce CEO calls Nvidia ‘exquisite’ as AI race heats up

What does it take for a software CEO to call a chipmaker "exquisite"? According to Salesforce's Marc Benioff, it's having a product so uniquely positioned that nothing else in the industry compares to it right now.

Speaking on Yahoo Finance's opening bid from inside Dreamforce this week, Benioff explained why he thinks Nvidia remains untouchable. He pointed to Jensen Huang's narrow customer base of companies building enormous, business-critical data centres, calling it a situation the industry has genuinely never seen before.

The headline announcement from Dreamforce was Koa, a domain-specific reasoning model built jointly by Salesforce and Nvidia for Salesforce's Agentforce ecosystem.

By hosting Koa on Salesforce's own private infrastructure, enterprise clients keep full control over model weights and sensitive data, while also cutting token inference costs compared to relying on third-party models.

According to John Difucci, an analyst at Guggenheim, it is rare for many application vendors not to develop proprietary models of their own over the years.

However, he thinks that it is a reflection of a trend where developers are coming up with task-specific and cost-effective models of enterprises and using proprietary data of companies to gain a competitive advantage, especially in the case of Salesforce's customer relationship data.

In addition, the event provided an opportunity to increase Salesforce's status in the discussion regarding AI technology. With the keynotes by Benioff and the demonstration of products such as AIforce, the company responded to the fear that model builders of AI would make software firms like Salesforce obsolete in the future.