Salesforce recently joined Apple in a partnership and CEO Marc Benioff already feels strongly connected to the iPhone maker since many decades ago, as he told CNBC on Tuesday. Benioff recalls working at Apple in the 1980s as a programmer and tells “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer, “I have Apple in my veins,” during an exclusive interview at Dreamforce, which is the company’s annual networking confab held in San Francisco.
“I’ll tell you right now that it’s so important to us to have this amazing new relationship with Apple and [CEO] Tim Cook, the ability to bring together Apple developers, Apple customers, our developers, our customers, and to show incredible new ways that you can connect with your customer,” Benioff says.
In the company’s new partnership, Salesforce will enable its mobile apps with Apple’s voice assistant, Siri. In exchange for using Siri, Apple will assist in building its clients’ mobile apps with specialized features for Apple devices. By leveraging the power of Apple’s mobile devices with Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform, Einstein, the partnership will further assist to “enhance [the] customer experience” at companies like Marriott, a Salesforce customer, according to CNBC.
Benioff demonstrated how a Marriott hotel guest might utilize the new features during an interview on Tuesday, which includes features that enable a guest to ask Siri to adjust a hotel room’s lighting and temperature. “I don’t think that anybody can walk away from Apple products,” Benioff said,”It’s the No. 1 mobile device in the world and the innovation that they’re laying out is incredible.”
“Of course, we have many amazing strategic alliances and strategic partners, but I am thrilled to welcome Apple to our family and all these Dreamforce attendees are thrilled to learn how to connect these amazing Apple mobile devices right onto our customer success platform,” he continued.
Although Benioff is quite excited with his company’s new partnership, he also states he loves “all of our children,” referencing Salesforce’s high-profile partners, including e-commerce colossus Amazon. “We’re going to get to Google, too, I’m sure,” he quipped.
“But today, we have an amazing new relationship with Amazon. We’re taking our relationship with Amazon Web Services to a new level. That whole community of developers is here. Those are the AWS developers, they call them. They’re doing incredible things on the cloud. We’re cloud brothers, Amazon and Salesforce. And we’re going to just show how you can use AWS in a new way.”
