Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session, Global Insights from the 2023 State of IT Report, and thank you all for joining us today. My name is Moya McKay, and I'm the webinar manager on the global field marketing team here at Salesforce. Before we begin, I would like to cover a few quick housekeeping notes about our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up and will be accessible through the URL you are on now. Please note, the slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation. If you need to enlarge the slides, please click the enlarge slides button located in the right-hand corner of your presentation window. If you need any technical assistance, please click on the help widget located on the bottom left corner of your console. We've also added some additional resources which are available through the resources window to the right of the slide. There, you can find additional related content, including additional webinars, white papers, demos, e-books and so much more. [Operator Instructions] But if we do not get to your question, we will be sure to follow up with you after the webinar ends. Last but not least, let us know what you think of today's presentation by sharing your excitement using the smiley face, thumbs up or the heart emoji reactions on your screen. So with that, I'll hand it over to Daniela to get us started.

Thank you, Moya. And thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today for this webinar, Global Insights from the 2023 State of IT Report. I'm Daniela Kirchhubel. I'm a director on the platform product marketing team here at Salesforce. And we're really excited today to be sharing with you our top findings from this report so you can learn how over 4,000 IT leaders are recalibrating for a new business and technology landscape. Before we dive into the report itself, I wanted to take a moment to share with you some background on how we conducted this research. So State of IT is our first-party research conducted by Salesforce research studios. The survey was fielded earlier this year and gathered answers from over -- from 4,325 IT professionals from across the globe. Respondents came from 28 different countries, ranging across 6 continents and represent 18 distinct industry sectors, which you can see here listed out on this slide. The seniority of our respondents range from director to C-level executives. And during this survey, we asked some questions to uncover how their priorities are shifting, how they're thinking about their success metrics in the midst of all this changing business and customer needs. We asked them questions to uncover how they're evaluating the role of AI in their business, how they're planning their implementation of both AI, automation, what the state of application development is and integration is within their organizations, the perspectives they're taking on security threats and how to combat them and which tactics they're using to address sustainability, ethics and diversity concerns. And joining me on this webinar to summarize what they had to say, I'm so pleased to welcome Vala Afshar, our Chief Digital Evangelist, here at Salesforce. Some of you may already know Vala from his ZDNET column, his podcast or even his Twitter/X profile @ValaAfshar with over 1 million followers. Vala is recognized as a top business and innovation influencer. And Vala, we're so pleased you are joining us on this webinar. Over to you to dig into the insights.

Thank you, Daniela, for that kind intro. I was looking for heart emojis as you were reading the bio. So I appreciate your kind words. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Again, my name is Vala Afshar. I'm the Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce. I look forward to connecting with all of you after the webinar. Again, you can find me on various social network platforms. Before we dive into the data -- oh, I love the heart emojis. Keep them coming, please -- I wanted to frame the conversation by taking a look at the amount of change IT leaders are facing right now and how they're responding. Again, as Daniela said, 4,300 IT decision-makers provided these insights for us. So it's an incredible amount of knowledge from IT leaders in terms of the landscape. And one real important takeaway, it's never been more interesting, I'll say, interesting or exciting time to be in IT as they lead the change of not only the data revolution, which we've been experiencing for a number of years, but data revolution that's led to a generative AI revolution. Certainly, the world woke up to this incredible capability late last year, and we're going to talk about that in our findings. Now standing at the intersection of digital, micro, macroeconomic conditions, societal transformation, future of work, whether it's hybrid, in-office, out-of-office, IT is on the front lines of helping their businesses manage a fairly turbulent macroeconomic environment. While the majority of the leaders who responded to the survey foresee an increase in resources, which is good news, you see the first data on the left, 7 out of 10 expect their budgets to increase in the next 18 months, such allocations are somewhat overshadowed by the expected increase in demand for their service. More than 7 out of 10 IT leaders in the survey foresee an increase in project demand. They have to do more with less. Evolving business and customer demands have long been a challenge for IT. But from the survey, my opinion is that the challenge is far greater today than ever before. IT teams are being challenged to keep up with shifting KPIs. Certainly, as the world became more decentralized and digital-first from 2020 to present day, you see changing business models. You see technological evolutions and again, economic pressures. Again, this year, the rightsizing of companies across all sectors is incredible economic pressures, including IT. So the primary focus area for IT now is resilience and efficiency. So 6 out of 10 IT leaders have trouble keeping up with demand from business today. So resiliency is important. And demand for IT service is growing. Look at the last stack on the slide. More than 8 out of 10 IT leaders say their departments need to better address changing customer expectations. Today, 72% of customer contact is digital. It's across multiple channels. It's combined structured and unstructured data. So the line of business, sales, service, marketing, engineering, HR, commerce, everyone is demanding IT to create solutions that can help understand and balance the expectations -- the ever-growing expectations of stakeholders. That's employees, customers, partners. So we'll see as we move through the research results that navigating them remains top of mind. Yet while setting stakeholders up for success in the future, IT teams are also being challenged to drive efficiency, enable productivity and modernize their tech stack. So with that in mind, let's look at the trends we covered in this year's State of IT Report. So we've seen that IT leaders expect more but also have to do more. So there is a focus on building resiliency and efficiency across their departments. Now it's clear here that the vast majority, this is close to 90%, so this is 89% at the top bar on the left graph, you see IT organizations are increasingly focused on operational efficiency and productivity. Now connecting tools and systems is also a close and high priority at 87%, and that's because silos slowdown organization's ability to deliver value at the speed of need. So connecting tools and systems is how you silo bust in business, and IT is really tasked in making sure they harmonize data and deliver insights across the entire enterprise. According to IDC research, this year, only 12% of companies share customer data across different lines of business, so sales, service, marketing, commerce. Just 1 out of 10 companies are able to actually have a 360 view of customers. So again, connecting tools and systems is not a surprise to me that is IT leaders' priority. So this indicates IT departments are focused on extracting value from their current resources, making sure that we are removing silos and creating a single pane glass view of all our customers' touch points. Now understandably, IT KPIs are under spotlight as businesses take a closer look at ROI. I have the good fortune of working with incredible CIO trailblazers. And often, these CIO trailblazers remind me that there are no IT projects. They're business projects. So as you invest in modernizing your tech stack, as you invest in new software, hardware and new capabilities, it's all framed with the guiding principle of business benefits, ensuring your stakeholders have better experiences. So here, we see long-standing KPIs, for example, focused on keeping the lights on, are being joined by metrics that focus on improving the top and bottom lines, yet alignment with broader business objectives remains a challenge. You see the stat in the corner, 82% of IT leaders say their departments have to demonstrate better business value. Now again, I work with incredible CIO trailblazers. And in order to get departmental alignments, I see CIOs attending their peers, staff meetings and quarterly business reviews. Trailblazer CIOs are trading IT KPIs not in silos, but actually inviting chief revenue, chief marketing, chief customer, chief digital officers to help them prioritize the KPIs that matter. So IT performance metrics are focused on return on investment. So it's important for business leaders to understand the cost of delivering solutions and then compare those costs to perhaps increases in revenue, perhaps increases in EBITDA or gross margin and profitability goals. So it's a balancing act for IT leaders. And the IT leaders that actually earn a seat at the table, the proverbial table, making strategic decisions about the company, absolutely understand the impact of their technological investments in terms of improving business outcomes. Now in a report, only 35% of IT leaders say their performance metrics are completely aligned with those of other departments. So again, important takeaway, as IT leaders, we have to make sure that we're not defining IT success without collaboration with peers and other line of business leaders. The 5 IT metrics that are listed on the right, as you see, project ROI, project speed. I have to tell you -- and again, a hyperconnected knowledge-sharing economy, there are certain currencies that matter most in business, and speed is one of them: speed, personalization, scale, intelligence. So there is pressure for IT to deliver with speed in mind. With the CIOs that I engage with, and again, I have the fortune of engaging with CIOs across all industries, all company sizes, and I can say geographies as well, I no longer sit in meetings where we're discussing project end dates that are a year or 2 from now. Project delivery cycles are now measured in weeks, months, at most quarters. So there is a demand for agility, adaptability and speed. Customer satisfaction and experience and make it into the top 3. Employee experience, the level of attrition, the great resignation, the quiet quitting, we've been talking a lot about the turbulence in terms of talent management. I have to say, CIOs, again, that I have the privilege of working with are challenged with not only attracting talent across an incredibly fast-growing space, for example, generative AI or mixed/extended reality, augmented and variety of emerging technologies. So your culture is how you pull talent, and IT leaders understand the importance of employee experience and satisfaction at a whole new level compared to prior research that I have had the privilege of reviewing and being a part of. And lastly, sustainability and obviously, the time to recovery and failure. So these are important KPIs. Now the survey did reveal some of the IT challenges that exist. Sadly, data integrity and data quality continues to be high in terms of challenges. It was #2 in the survey this year. Mismatch of IT and business expectations was number three. And number five was changing business requirements. Security threats was number one. And of course, budget constraints were also referenced. So again, there are challenges that continue to pop up in our annual survey. Now let's move to an incredibly important topic that dominated a significant chapter of our third State of the IT Report, and that was importance of AI and automation. To achieve their goals, we saw that AI and automation are key tools in IT's pursuit of efficiency and innovation. Again, remember the productivity and efficiency was a high priority with the IT leaders -- the 4,300 IT leaders that responded to the survey. Now AI is rapidly evolving technology, but it's no longer novel. As such -- I mean, Salesforce, as you may know, launched our AI practice nearly 10 years ago. And we've acquired dozens of companies to enhance our organic engineering investments in the field of AI. So as such, majority of IT leaders can now articulate how AI can play a role in their organization, even if they haven't implemented yet. So there's plenty of research, plenty of innovation labs. So even if it's not generally available capabilities, it -- we felt that the IT leaders today are well suited to understand the impact of AI. Independent to this research, there many trusted bodies that speak to mainstream adoption of AI growing at unprecedented rates. This year, McKinsey published their 2023 research, and they stated artificial intelligence has become mainstream. So according to their research, which I believe was only published a few months ago, 50% of organizations used AI in 2022, last year. At the same time, IDC is forecasting global AI spend to increase a staggering 27% this year alone. Now the McKinsey study believes that we're looking at a $4 trillion GDP impact by 2030 with AI. A recent survey of customer service professionals found adoption of AI had risen to 80% from just 2020 to last year, 2022. So again, the IT leaders told us that, in this survey as compared to last year and the year before, that AI is a priority and top of mind. Now while AI use cases are diverse, organizations are currently most likely to put it to work in customer service settings. The survey definitely pointed to customer service and chatbots as, for example, the prevailing example of how machine learning algorithms coupled with natural language processing, NLP technologies, are enabling customer service to increase chatbot usage. Now you can see on the chart on the left, customer service leads AI use cases with organizations using AI in service operation optimization. They even have AI-based products customer service analytics. We'll see next week at Dreamforce how Tableau powered by Einstein is now enabling IT to provide lines of business not only advanced use of analytics graduating from describing the past, descriptive use of analytics, to diagnosing why things happen, diagnostic use of analytics, to then using algorithms to not only understand the past and why things happen, but predictive use of analytics and then ultimately, leveraging Einstein technology, prescriptive use of analytics where the system, the AI-powered CRM solution, is prescribing to sales, service, marketing, commerce professionals in near real time what they should do to create better outcomes. You'll see lead generation and segmentation for marketing use. You see sales performance enhancements with use of generative AI. It's really hard for us to talk about AI this year without spotlighting generative AI. In our survey, as you see on the right upper left stat, nearly 9 out of 10 IT leaders believe generative AI will have a prominent role at their organization in the near future. The McKinsey research that I referenced and a whole slew of third-party research speak to incredible potential productivity gains with use of generative AI. Independent research by Salesforce show that in marketing, marketing professionals can save up to 5 hours a week using generative AI solutions. That's one month annually savings, and we'll share how IT professionals point to time savings using generative AI solutions. However, despite all this enthusiasm, and there is a lot of enthusiasm, IT leaders in the survey did show reservation about generative AI. As you see on the slide, 64% are concerned about the ethics. Again, most research today point to humans involved in vetting, in analyzing and continuing their prompting logic to ensure that they reach the highest level of accuracy. And 62% of IT leaders are concerned about the impact on their careers. Again, all of the forecast in terms of impact of generative AI point to fairly significant productivity and efficiency gains with AI. Now as far as ethics and generative AI, focus on accuracy, [ biases, authenticity ], safety and privacy, those are the top concerns. In survey of IT leaders' concern around generative AI included security risk, again, at about 8 out of 10; biases at 73%. And even carbon footprint, so even the impact of using large computing to create foundational models and treat those models, has impact on your carbon footprint. So at this point, maybe it would be great to take a pause and hear from you on this call. Is the role of AI in your organization well defined? So if it's okay with you, we'd love to hear from you. Is the role of AI in your organization well defined? And I'm going to wait about 20 to 30 seconds so you all have an opportunity to respond to this live poll. After your response, I'll share with you what the 4,300 survey respondents, what do these 4,300 directors and vice presidents and CIOs said in terms of the role of AI in your organization being well defined. I can tell you, again, in the last decade, I've been with Salesforce 8 years. And we have hundreds focused on AI research, thousands of engineers. And so I can say with a certain level of authority and confidence that the role of AI is very well defined at my company. So let's take a look at your response, I think I'm going to wait another 10 seconds if it's okay with you, in terms of the role of AI well defined in your organization. And let's see what the response is to this. Okay. Okay. So as you can see the -- hopefully, you can see the outcome. The folks in the audience, 17.5% said yes. So less than 2 in 10. 76% said no. And a few, 6%, said not applicable. So I can tell you that the 4,300 respondents in the current State of IT Report 2023, 78% said that AI is well defined, the role of AI is well defined in their organization. So there's quite a bit of contrast, 17.4% versus 78%. I don't know what to say about that. It's just -- for those -- for the 76% that said no, my biggest advice that I can think of is this is a wonderful opportunity to partner with us. We have amazing architects. We have amazing experts. We have futurists. We have individuals that write weekly on the latest best practice in whether it's a small business or a large enterprise or in between, how -- from where to start with data to cultural requirements to talent and skill sets that are required, a lot of the expertise we can bring to the table go beyond features and functions across our platform. I believe we have the #1 AI-powered CRM in the world. But to get started in your organization or at least the role of the AI, my advice would be partner with us and lean into our expertise. I would certainly be delighted to have the opportunity to connect with any of you given if opportunity is afforded to us. So let's go back to the -- thank you for the live survey results. So we talked about automation and AI, again, propelling this efficiency, doing more with less, meeting or building your anticipatory muscle. We want to be able to build our anticipatory muscle in IT to understand what the business needs are of stakeholders. So automation is a focus in the pursuit of efficiency. 87% of the IT leaders expect more investment in automation at their organization in the next 18 months. So again, majority of the IT leaders are looking to invest more in automation. If you follow on Gartner, Forrester, IDC, for several years, hyperautomation has been a key strategic trend. Gartner, for the last 2 years, I believe, it's been in the top 10. So it's not surprising that the IT leaders are leaning into automation. Now the key focus areas for automation include things like order management, IT operations management, IT service management, asset management, customer service. We have DevOps and release management, customer onboarding, employee onboarding and HR processes. So there is no single pocket where IT leaders are looking to apply automation. This is a broad implementation of automation in order to meet the needs of all line of business needs as well as external customers and partners. Now we've heard how organizations are focused on extracting value from the current resources, and workflows and process automation is [ providing ] to be an important tool in that pursuit. So this isn't necessarily investing time and energy with additive new solutions and platforms, but also taking a look at current investments and making sure that they're extracting ROIs from their previous investments. Now the results show that automation ROI is broad. IT departments that pursue automation initiatives report a multitude of benefits. I think that's great, led by increased operational efficiency. So again, if you recall, that's the #1 priority for IT leaders, and then employee productivity. Now again, the macro, microeconomic conditions and uncertainty means that they may be smaller IT teams. Therefore, employee productivity is top of mind. Now IT departments using automation -- this is an interesting [ find ] I found. IT departments using automation report on an average about 2 hours saved per week per employee. So extract that to 50 weeks, that's 100 hours, roughly 100 hours. So that's 2.5 weeks per year per employee. Now this is lower than what marketing leaders shared with Salesforce in the state of marketing report. Marketing leaders are showing 5 -- sorry, 5 hours of productivity. That's about a month a year per employee. So it's twice as much -- more than twice as much. Now the top benefits of automation are, again, operational efficiency. You see that on the left. We saw 56% report operational efficiency. We saw employee productivity at 52%. We saw customer satisfaction at 49%, decreased costs at 39%. We saw fewer support tickets. We saw even competitive differentiation, more than 1/3. 36% said competitive differentiation comes from use of automation. Now again, automation is perceived as invaluable in today's business climate, but it does have some challenges and pitfalls. The IT department leaders reported an array of challenges to consider when determining how or when and to what extent to embed automation. The CIOs that I work with are constantly looking to remove -- deliberately remove friction. Again, for you to just be relevant as an IT organization, you have to deliver value at the speed of need. Sadly, IT doesn't define the speed. It's your internal and external stakeholders. So delivering speed -- delivering value at the speed of need means you have to find points of friction and remove the friction. You have to create lean processes. You have to take the mundane, repetitive tasks away so that your talent can focus on more complex, more creative work. So CIOs are really looking to optimize flow of value, and this is why automation comes into play. Now we see when -- on the right, topping the list of challenges, security and privacy concerns are there. As you lean into algorithms to make decisions, as there's a cognitive download from humans to software to decide next best action, there are privacy concerns that companies need to -- could be concerned. Salesforce was one of the first companies in Silicon Valley to hire an executive responsible for ethical and humane use of software. I believe this was 6 or 7 years ago. So as a company, when we recognize our customers are adopting hyperautomation and scaling capabilities to almost what may be an autonomous enterprise 5 to 10 years from now, clearly, the role of automation has to be coupled with understanding the security and privacy implications. Compatibility with legacy systems is a big issue. It's very hard to connect leading-edge, cloud-based solutions to on-premise legacy solutions. So if you're not taking advantage of APIs, it's difficult to balance this on-premise legacy versus, for example, cloud-based modern technology. And a lot of customizations create additional silos that CIOs have referenced in the report. IT departments, when it comes to these challenges, talked about the fact that they're not completely satisfied with their organization's process automation. 4 out of 10 of these business leaders said they're not satisfied with their process automation. So again, there's design thinking principles that needs to be in play. This is -- I also think this is why it's advantageous for customers to engage with Salesforce with our design architect, with our solutions engineers. Have us connect you with other trailblazers so you can see how they're removing silos and minimizing friction. It's an incredible community that shares knowledge, unlike any other company that I've ever been a part of. Now the top IT challenges, again, as you see on the right, include all of these. Again, as mentioned, it's important to also -- even though a fair amount of the leaders thought their budgets would increase in the next 18 months, inadequate budget was #3 as far as challenges. So today, there may be constraints -- financial constraints in order for IT to secure funding, especially if it's headcount related. We saw in the report that growing headcount is not at a pace that we had experienced in the last few years. We also saw IT departments are struggling to keep up with the soaring demand for application development with only about 26% of them, them being IT organizations, able to support all requests from the business for sales, for service, for marketing and commerce. So in pursuit of more efficient development, we saw low-code and no-code tools are now more commonplace. About 77% of the IT departments are using low-code/no-code. And of course, if there are any customers listening and using Salesforce platform, obviously, you have an opportunity to use low-code/no-code solutions to delight your stakeholders. That said, 46% of IT departments have composable design strategies now. Composability has been a Gartner strategic differentiator for IT for several years. So again, creating -- this is not microservices. It's composable design in software so you can plug and play functionality and capabilities across multiple set of solutions. And an additional 43% of the IT leaders have plans to implement composable design in the next 18 months. Composable design in Salesforce is really a guiding principle in terms of how we design our software as well. So if there are IT leaders listening and you're interested in learning more about microservices, composable software design and how modern tech stack is used at Salesforce, work with your sales leaders and we can certainly show Salesforce on Salesforce capabilities when we talk about these new ways IT leaders are tackling building solutions to meet the ever-growing demand of business. A key chapter in the survey was also integration being top of mind in terms of mission critical for apps and data, the massive vast growth of data. We see that -- again, I had mentioned, 26% of IT departments can support all app development requests. That's a low number, and it's the same number from the last date of -- it was within the 20 percentile. So apps enable the modern business and customer. So world's IT departments are struggling to keep up with this soaring demand. But as demand for external- and internal-facing app surge, we saw IT teams are looking for new ways to maximize business value, and they're doing this by managing the demand on their teams. Developers are turning into tactics like composability and low-code, as I mentioned. Again, almost 8 out of 10 in the survey are using low-code or no-code tools to develop apps. And it's interesting to note that it's not just the demand for apps that's growing, but the actual number of apps are growing. The last stat on the slide on the left speaks to less than 30%, 29% of apps in the enterprise or business is actually integrated. What's important to understand is the trajectory of apps in business. The estimated number of applications across a typical enterprise 2 years ago, in 2021, was 843. So a typical enterprise had 843 apps. Last year, that number grew to 976, in 2022. And this year, based on the State of IT Report, IT leaders spoke to 1,061 apps in the enterprise. So this has soared by 26% in 2 years, going from 843 to 1,061. So imagine you have 1,061 on average. This is an average number. Less than 1/3 are connected. How much data silos exist? How can you deliver value at the speed of need when your customer information is sitting across multiple systems and different lines of business have different access to these systems? This is why the IDC research for this year stating that only 12% of companies share customer data across the entire business. This is the biggest threat in my opinion, silos in terms of companies competing and winning. So considering -- and then, of course, on top of this, considering that 72% of customer interactions are now digital. So they're mostly unstructured. They're coming across multiple channels. When I think about the state of marketing report we published this year, average CMO, chief marketing officer, and her team are using 18 different data sources to create marketing campaigns, 18 different data sources. Two years ago, that number was 10. So we're seeing almost 100% increase in terms of data sources for marketing. So if you're a CIO listening to this webinar or an IT leader and one of your major external -- internal stakeholders is marketing, believe you me, integration and silos is perhaps the biggest obstacle for you to deliver what your marketing leader needs. So again, the experience customers and employees are expecting depend on reconciling, connecting and harmonizing data from all these various sources. And again, 88% of IT leaders view system application integration as critical for both customers and employee experiences. Now you see the stat in the lower right. 8 out of 10 leaders say integration challenges slow down digital transformation. It's not just slow down. It impacts your ability to compete and win and gain market share. So again, integration became a real big chapter in this study. I hope you'll get -- at the end, we'll talk about how you can download the study and learn more about it. I'll end with the impact of silo structures and poor integration is costing an average enterprise millions of dollars per year. The impact can vary and are drastic, with increased cost being the #1 consequence reported by the survey respondents. We saw enterprise IT leaders estimate spending on average, this is an average number, $4.7 million per year on custom integration efforts. Now that number is 31% higher than the $3.6 million the report said last year. So the state of IT last year was $3.6 million on integration efforts -- customer [indiscernible]. This year, it was $4.7 million. So I'm afraid to see next year because if it has a 31% increase, we're looking at $6 million on average of customer integration. This is how silos are created. This is how you can stifle innovation. And again, lean into Salesforce colleagues -- or Salesforce community to help identify best practice in terms of how you can mitigate integration. So let's move on to the next finding, and this is a finding that's specific to security as a top priority. As we saw -- as we showed in the first few slides, security continues to be a top priority. 89% of IT leaders see security as a high priority. Again, as the services are more decentralized, as the data source channels increase, as more new solutions and platforms are added to the tech stack, security continues. And the threat vector in terms of security also has to think about how security threats can also be bad characters using technologies like AI. We often have an asymmetric view of AI in terms of the benefits in business, benefits to customers and employees and that -- but the other side of the equation is how can these technologies be used to increase the threat vector. So it's no surprise that security is the top priority for IT teams, most of whom continue to make key investments even amid economic headwinds. So there's an array of tactics to fight against bad actors. And again, 9 out of 10 IT leaders continue to view security as a top priorities. The lower stats shares, equally, almost 9 out of 10 IT leaders expect increased security investments. We saw in the report malware, phishing, legacy infrastructure, I think those are the top 3 concerns that IT leaders have. So employee training coupled with policies and investments in increased security is how IT leaders are combating this growing threat vector. More likely than not, security teams are likely to take an all-of-the-above approach to security precautions. But we saw like data encryption and backup as our especially popular tactics. Again, I encourage you to look at the report to see various tactics that are taken here. A signal to us is that teams anticipate breaches that are taking proactive stances to minimize damage and ensure business continuity in such events. At my company, there's a number of annual mandatory training. We have Trailhead modules available for our employees. There's incredible in-depth courses that employees are encouraged and in some cases, mandatory, so you have that awareness of this increasing threat when it comes to security. So even [ amid ] cautious business environments, like I said, security isn't being deprioritized. In fact, most IT leaders, as mentioned, are looking to increase their investments. This may be a good time for us to take a poll. Again, it would be great to get a pulse check from you, those of you who are online, when it comes to security. Despite challenging macro, micro conditions, are you expecting increased security investments over the next 18 months? So do you expect increased security investments over the next 18 months? And again, I'll wait about half a minute to see the results. The CIOs that, again, I have the privilege to work, it's -- this is a foundational responsibility of IT. You can't ask for innovation velocity to increase in new emerging technologies unless you show incredible business continuity, unless you demonstrate that you're delivering on your promise of making sure you're available and delivering to your stakeholder needs: employees, customers and partners. So you cannot be a successful IT department, organization or an IT leader without these foundational elements in terms of business continuity. So security will always be, always be one of the key legs of the table that IT stands on. So let's look at the results of what you responded in terms of expected increase. Great. So this is very much in line with our survey. Almost 3/4 of the respondents believe security investments will increase, as they should, again, given the complexity in the threat vector. I recently spoke to a CIO who is -- who not only has red teams that are incentivized to attack and find vulnerabilities in their business, they also have blue teams that find -- review the outcome of the red team list of vulnerabilities and they're responsible for finding remedies. Now there are purple teams. So these purple teams are responsible for prioritizing what the red teams find because the findings are so vast, so large with red teams that the blue teams have difficult time understanding the impact of these vulnerabilities on business. So they now have folks with large -- with significant business acumen and technology and security called purple teams that are now responsible for stack ranking and prioritizing the vulnerability. So that's the -- this is the world we're in. It's not just finding the vulnerabilities. It's prioritizing and then one by one, making sure you can address all of the mission-critical ones. So just an interesting emphasis on the top priority. Now we're all happy to see that the report this year also had a strong emphasis on IT, making sure that it's not just delighting stakeholders with leveraging technology but making the world a better place. We've always said at Salesforce, values create value. We also believe business can be the greatest platform for change. My personal belief is every company is a technology company, every company, at least companies that want to grow and be relevant. So this means that this is the most important time for IT leaders. Because if every company is a technology company and companies are the greatest platform for change, I believe the quarterback of digital transformation to societal good is the leader of IT. So she has the opportunity to not only help his or her company grow and be successful, but ensure our communities and our platform are part of the stakeholder equation. So the final section of the report which we'll cover were tactics IT departments are using to address sustainability, address ethics and diversity concerns beyond the obvious priorities and challenges IT leaders confront every day, which we talked about. And believe you me, I don't -- I believe this is the most difficult time for IT. So even though I'm excited to partner with CIOs personally, and my company loves creating trailblazer IT organizations, these are difficult times. So IT leaders are confronting incredible levels of uncertainty, but more consequential issues have to be factored into operations now and in the years ahead. So our report asked questions about how IT leaders are approaching climate change, for example, or equality initiatives. Salesforce is very clear about our goals when it comes to sustainability and our equality initiatives. Now a majority of the respondents, 87%, said their organizations have set of greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. They have effective track and reporting on their emissions. Certainly, Salesforce, for about a decade, we've been using our own platform to help IT leaders measure their carbon footprint using our sustainability cloud and solutions. Like nearly all high-paying careers, IT has historically and ongoing diversity and inclusion problems and challenges. And this was not lost on the IT leaders that fill out the survey, the bulk of whom have launched diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, initiatives in the interest of increasing access to IT career paths. It's heartening to see that 87%, nearly 9 out of the 10 IT business leaders have launched recruitment and retention efforts. And of those, 64% are reporting effective results. Again, Salesforce is in the same category, a company that continues to strive to meet DEI goals and initiatives. As you recall, 6, 7 years ago, we realized at Salesforce that we were not paying women equal pay for equal work. And it was IT using internal data that demonstrated to our executives that, look, look at salaries of men and women in our company, and there was a disparity. Now fast forward, I think we've invested over $20 million to course correct. And this is a journey. It's not a destination because with every acquisition, with every partnership, we have to continue to adjust. So DEI is a journey. It's -- there is no finish line. You have to continue to make it a deliberate part of your culture and how you not only recruit but retain talent. And the survey results for this year said IT leaders are taking a leadership role in terms of achieving these goals. So I'm glad we're ending with this because I am an immigrant refugee. So I love when I see results where business leaders are improving the soul, the culture and frankly, their brand in a hyperconnected, knowledge-sharing economy. Your brand -- your culture is your brand. So if you have a culture that cares about planet Earth, if you have a culture that has DEI initiatives, I think you're only bolstering your brand. So anyway, sorry, enough with my commentary, but I love that part of the report. So this concludes our summary of the key findings from our 2023 State of IT Report. Daniela and I encourage you to download the report and deep dive like I did. I wrote a pretty long form ZDNET article summary of this, so you can find that as well. But it's a great report for IT leaders. And there'll be links shared after the webinar. So you can also go on -- and we'll share that on the next slide. With that, I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to hand the platform to Daniela. Hopefully, we have some questions from you we may be able to answer. Daniela, back to you.

Amazing summary. Thanks so much, Vala. That was great. So many insights for us to kind of chew over and reiterate that please, download the report. It should be available to you in the resources in your ON24 view.

And we've got a huge amount of questions coming in. Vala, if you want to take a look at the team chat for a second. I think one of the earliest ones that came in is one that I can answer because I was part of the research team that put together the survey. Someone's asking, out of everyone that was surveyed, who has the decision-making capabilities to initiate new projects or disruption in their organization? And the answer to that is while we didn't necessarily explicitly ask that question as part of our demographic fielding, it was implicit in the job title seniority of the demographic we surveyed. So our survey went out to director level or above IT professionals, and that gives us the -- an indication that they would have the ability to initiate new projects and to create disruption and transformation within their organization. Thank you for that question. Vala, there's a great one for you and maybe not just based on the research but potentially on all the conversations you have with CIOs, too. What areas or use cases do you see AI having the greatest impact for CIOs?

That's a great -- this is AI in general or generative AI? I'll respond with AI as inclusive of all the derivative capabilities, whether it's NLP, machine learning, generative, smart robotics, computer visioning. There's a number of, I think 13 or 14, different categories under the AI umbrella. I can tell you, independent research, again, we referenced McKinsey research, McKinsey a month or so ago published an extensive report across 63 use cases of AI across all industries in sectors and lines of business, so 63 use cases of AI across all industries. And they reported that about 75% of the value that, for example, generative AI use cases could deliver across the enterprise come from 4 areas: customer operations, so customer service; marketing; sales; and software engineering. For corporate IT software engineering, the impact of generative AI was very high. It was amongst the top most impacted line of business within the enterprise. They also referenced, for example, generative AI having significant impacts across all industries. But they emphasized like banking and high tech and life sciences, for example, I think were like the top 3, a lot of software development impact with use of generative AI where IT could significantly play a role. So all of these forecasts are really looking broadly across the enterprise. I believe services, because there's so much deterministic and high-volume processes like for case management, product returns, pricing inquiries, so service departments have, again, lots of automated workflows and very much deterministic in nature. So they're a perfect candidate for hyperautomation. Sales and marketing and of course, commerce, we see adaptive commerce design with recommendations done in near real time. Again, speed, personalization and intelligence, those are 3 important currencies that IT must deliver to the business and all of its stakeholders.

Very clear. I love that answer. Thank you, Vala. We have so many questions and unfortunately, we won't have time to address all of them. So if you've asked a question today, rest assured that we've got a record of them, and someone from Salesforce, whether it's a member of your account team or someone else, will reach out to you with the answers. With that, I want to say thank you very much to everyone who's attended to hear about the key insights from our State of IT 2023 Report. You do have a short link to download the full report here. But as Moya already mentioned, it's also listed as a resource in your ON24 view for you to download straight away. If some of the themes that Vala has discussed today have been of interest to you, if you're interested -- I saw a number of questions coming in through on the chat around our security portfolio. If you're interested in exploring the options available to you, please do check out our MuleSoft product area focused on integration and automation and our Salesforce platform product area within Salesforce, which is where you can find a lot of our security and compliance tools that will help you secure your Salesforce orgs and also extend and customize your Salesforce orgs for your unique use cases. And with that, thank you very much again. We hope you found this webinar insightful. It's been an absolute pleasure sharing the key findings with you. Thank you, and all the best.