SAN FRANCISCO — Speaking at his company’s annual Dreamforce convention, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told the 12,000 keynote attendees Tuesday that he’d just returned from a two-month trip to Europe and the results were slightly worrying.
“Europe is not as far along as the United States in AI. Things are not as far along,” he opined Tuesday. “If you went to Shanghai, that's the farthest along, and then the United States or San Francisco as an example. Europe is not quite as far.”
As an example he cited autonomous vehicles. In China the roads are packed with self-driving cars, and they have become a feature in many American cities - initially in San Francisco but later in nine US metropolises. But in Europe, excepting the UK, self-driving cars like Waymo are nowhere to be found.
This worries him, as Salesforce is increasingly making AI key to its business plan, and that of its subsidiary Slack, while also trying to expand its European operations.