AI Winners Don't Predict the Future

In the race to predict the future of AI, most of us are asking the wrong question.

Salesforce’s earnings release yesterday (February 25) offers a useful example. Despite beating expectations, the market response was slightly negative. On the investor call, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, said, “You know, this is not our first SaaS apocalypse,” acknowledging the growing concern that AI agents and the falling cost of software development could undermine the traditional Software-as-a-Service model. Salesforce isn’t alone as all big name software stocks have been sharply underperforming this year. For Salesforce specifically, the fear is that the revenue it earns from licensing software to individual users could decline sharply if AI reduces the number of human “seats” needed inside organizations.

But that framing misses the deeper strategy at play. Salesforce’s long-term success has less to do with building the best standalone software and more to do with positioning itself as the best collaborator in an evolving ecosystem. We tend to romanticize companies that appear visionary: OpenAI for putting AI in a chat window or Apple for inventing the iPhone. We assume that technology winners are those that make bold, singular predictions on the future. Salesforce is not trying to predict how AI will unfold. That is precisely why it has a chance to win. It isn’t trying to be prophetic. It’s behaving entrepreneurially.

While investors are evaluating software stocks through the lens of “who wins AI,” they may be missing Salesforce’s structural advantage: it doesn’t need to pick a winner. On the investor call, Benioff was unusually direct about the uncertainty of the moment. He acknowledged that the models we rely on today will change, and that Salesforce’s relationship to them will continue to evolve. “Could those models themselves become platforms? Could OpenAI then also be a platform? Could Anthropic be a platform? Can Gemini be a platform?” The subtext of this point is that the future of AI is still unclear.

Instead of pretending otherwise, he shifted the focus. The value Salesforce creates is not in predicting which model dominates. It is in sitting one layer above that volatility. As he put it, “our job as a software company is to help our customers create success… So we’ll deliver our products, our capabilities, our value proposition through our customer relationships.” That line is easy to throw away as sales talk, but it is the strategy. The advantage is not the software alone. but the service wrapped around it, the integration into workflows, and the long-standing relationships that allow Salesforce to embed whatever models win into real enterprise work.

“Most companies treat service as a cost center. For us, it’s about lifetime value of the consumer. We view service as a growth engine for the business.” - Marc Benioff

Last year, I had the chance to sit with Pallavi Sebastian, now SVP of Talent and Learning at Salesforce. What stood out in our conversation was her emphasis on co-creation. She didn’t describe innovation as something developed in isolation and revealed to customers at Dreamforce, their annual conference in San Francisco. She described it as something built alongside and with customers. Salesforce, she said, stays entrepreneurial by leveraging the trust it has built over decades and by “bringing customers in early to innovate with us… it’s critical to making sure we’re innovating in a way that’s relevant and resonates with our customers, and they can provide us feedback on the areas we may not have thought about.” I think this idea stands out because so often, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, or an intrapreneur it can feel like you need to own all of the creativity and innovation. Yet, the secret to getting it right is often co-creation.

Benioff echoed that logic on yesterday’s earnings call. He described their partnership with SharkNinja, where they co-created a guided shopping agent in just eight weeks, right before the holiday season. They deployed their solution into real workflows under real commercial pressure, when their customer needed it most. The CIO of SharkNinja later explained that what made it powerful was not just the AI layer, but how it connected back into the history of their customer data that they trust Salesforce to manage. As Benioff put it on the call,

“The token (AI compute) on its own doesn’t know your customers, your pipeline, your org chart, but Salesforce does. The value isn’t in the token. The value is what our platform does with it—the work.”

What Benioff outlines in this comment is something more consistent and deliberate that just sales talk. It feels like a strategy focused on gaining advantage not by predicting the future, but by leveraging an earned asset, customer trust, and using that as a resource to build and co-create from.

No one will predict the pathway of AI correctly. That’s precisely why behaving entrepreneurially—leveraging the resources you already control and co-creating with those you trust is such a powerful strategy. For companies like Salesforce, this moment is not a crisis of prediction. It is a masterclass in building a future you can’t yet see.