Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce (CRM), is a big believer in artificial intelligence and what it could mean for his customer relationship management software company.
"We've seen a lot of exciting waves of technology in our industry — the cloud, social, mobile — but this AI wave is going be the biggest that anyone has ever seen," Benioff told Yahoo Finance earlier this month.
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The buzz around AI has been great for Salesforce's stock price -- which has jumped nearly 60% year to date -- as well as for the stock price of any company that is even tangentially tied to emerging tech.
So if Benioff believes in the transformational power of AI so much, why did he just sell a bunch of Salesforce shares to the tune of of $100 million?
Benioff made a series of trades last week, according to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and dumped a bunch of Salesforce stock.
Some people on Twitter pointed out that dumping such a large amount wasn't that big of a deal for Benioff, who has a fortune of more than $8 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Others pointed out that if Benioff really believes in the transformative nature of AI, then dumping a bunch of stock isn't practicing what he preaches.
Despite his seemingly bearish actions, Benioff is saying all of the right things about AI and its ability to transform Salesforce.
"The amount of data that we already see being entered into the systems of our data cloud is at record levels," Benioff said. "So I think it's an indication of how well these generative AI systems will do."
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