For Salesforce, is Ohana over?

Bloom off the Ohana hibiscus

The big question is not, "Was Benioff that shortsighted to go over the mayor's head and call for National Guard troops to roll into San Francisco?" Forget that part for a moment.

The question is about Salesforce itself: Is Ohana -- a family-like bond between the company, its employees, customers, admins, developers and partners that has been foundational to the company's marketing for a quarter century -- over? Was it ever really there in the first place?

After a week of being blasted in the press, Benioff eventually retracted his comments on X, saying that he didn't believe the National Guard was needed in San Francisco after all. He claimed his original comments "came from an abundance of caution" that Dreamforce be kept safe.

By then, it was too little, too late. Something about the city's "giant of generosity" had changed.

Even everyday San Franciscans I talked to on the way to and from Dreamforce last week expressed their disappointment. One guy at a Muni stop unloaded on me after I introduced myself as a tech journalist. He said that he had appreciated Benioff's support for the city over the years, but he felt let down by the whole National Guard affair.

Through it all, Benioff didn't explain the hard right turn that made him an "avid supporter" of President Trump, as he put it in the Times piece. This comes after he had served as a national co-chair for Barack Obama's re-election campaign, hosted a Hillary Clinton election fundraiser at his San Francisco mansion, promised to relocate Texas employees concerned about their reproductive rights after the state enacted a stringent law, and supported causes to benefit the homeless.

Benioff now says he was never a progressive, despite appearances. In fact, Benioff said he was a Republican who became an independent.

Don't forget about the bots

All is fair in love, war and Silicon Valley. Benioff can think and say what he wants; it's a free country. He is within his rights to change his mind today, tomorrow and again the day after. It's everybody's right, cognitive dissonance be damned. Yay, America.

But where does that leave Salesforce's loyal customers who had bought into the Ohana thing? Or the talented employees who might have chosen to work for Salesforce over Oracle or another competitor because Salesforce was more closely aligned to their ideals?

Take, for instance, the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. On one hand, Salesforce still proudly supports DEI, unlike corporate monoliths that discarded their programs soon after Trump was elected, including Meta, Walmart, Ford and McDonald's. On the other hand, Benioff now avidly supports Trump, who is aggressively rooting DEI out of the federal government and the military through executive orders. Trump is also threatening educational institutions and private companies with legal action to get them to stop supporting DEI.

And where does this leave Salesforce's claimed 56,000 nonprofit customers, many of which the company enthusiastically supports for advocating on behalf of vulnerable populations? Salesforce has found itself once again in hot water over its ties to ICE, which also had roiled employees during the Obama and Biden administrations. A group of customers, employees and others have signed an open letter imploring Benioff to end what it terms his "troubling hypocrisy."

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of independent tech research firm Deep Analysis, said at Dreamforce that Benioff's example of donating 1% of equity, technology and time to causes -- Salesforce's 1-1-1 Model -- inspired him to follow suit with his company. Some 18,000 companies have taken the pledge, by Salesforce's count.

"Salesforce has always been involved in politics and, to most people, in a good way -- supporting homeless people [etc.]," Pelz-Sharpe said. "This has cast a shadow over their whole event."

As if the political stuff wasn't enough, the bots are coming: Benioff bragged earlier this year that Salesforce replaced 4,000 people with AI agents in its customer service operations.

Get ready for more of that. What Salesforce calls "the agentic enterprise" was the focus of Dreamforce, a world where more bots -- not entirely autonomous but held in check by some number of humans -- is our future.

Ohana, indeed.

Editor's note: Marc Benioff has not yet returned a request for comment.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.