How Many Other CEOs Made AI Promises They Can't Keep?
Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff clearly did not understand that LLMs hallucinate
Last year Salesforce (ticker: CRM) CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce was laying off 4,000 employees and was replacing them with AI.
Benioff clearly did not understand that LLMs hallucinate. Back in December, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Salesforce Sanjna Parulekar walked Benioff’s comments back when she stated: “All of us were more confident about large language models a year ago.”
Admittedly this is old news, but as we enter Software earnings season, I am curious as to how many Software CEOs will have to pull back their ambitions for LLM-powered automation (AI agents in particular), because they did not take the time to understand LLMs back in 2022/2023. Had any CEO spent 20-30 hours behind the wheel of GPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok, he/she would have understand that the LLMs regularly hallucinate and get caught in reasoning loops, which can create havoc with workflows if they go unchecked.
Most software companies that offer AI automation products also sell access to AI gateways. AI gateways are a middleware layer that provides governance around LLM-driven processes. Blue Prism (SSNC), Databricks (private), Google (GOOGL), Kong (private), Microsoft (MSFT), UiPath (PATH) and Vercel (private) are but a few companies that offer AI gateways.