Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says AI can't be 'bad' like social media if it's going to be trusted

• Marc Benioff called for greater public trust in AI in a panel at the World Economic Forum.
• The Salesforce CEO said he wants people to trust AI — unlike social media over the past decade.
• Winning public trust in AI will require greater regulation, Benioff said.

Marc Benioff says AI needs to be regulated to win the public's trust.

Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, the Salesforce CEO compared the lack of public confidence in AI to that of social media in recent years: "We have to cross the bridge of trust."

Benioff also said that social media has been a "shit show," adding: "It's pretty bad — we don't want that in our AI industry."

Benioff has been vocal about trust issues with generative AI in recent months. In a CNBC interview last June, he warned that generative AI tools could plagiarize, steal content, and be an "ultimate liar" as they're capable of hallucinating.

The entrepreneur repeated those warnings on Thursday. "We all know that there's still this issue out there called hallucinations. They're fun, we're talking to them, and then they lie," he said.

Salesforce has its own AI tool called Einstein. Benioff told CNBC the company was trying to tackle hallucinations and protect customer data with human moderators and a "trust layer" to anonymize data.

In a Bloomberg interview in Davos on Tuesday, Benioff and OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman discussed AI companies using other firms' data to train their LLMs.

The Salesforce cofounder, who also owns Time magazine, is in talks with OpenAI to license their intellectual property and content to train its model, Bloomberg previously reported.

Benioff tried to capitalize on troubles at OpenAI in November after Altman was ousted and most of its workforce threatened to quit if he wasn't reinstated as CEO.

In a post on X in November, the Salesforce chief offered to hire OpenAI researchers and match their pay if came to work on Einstein.

Salesforce didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.