Salesforce CEO sends surprising message on Google's latest tech

Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff might have tipped the scales in the hotly contested AI arms race. 

In a Nov. 23 post on X, he declared that Google-parent Alphabet’s (GOOGL) new Gemini 3 model just leapfrogged ChatGPT, a tool that had been his go-to daily for years. 

“Holy s**t,” Benioff wrote. 

That’s a massive endorsement, especially considering how tech leaders are constantly reevaluating which foundation models will power their apps.

A shift this massive, coming from the likes of Benioff, should prompt enterprises to take a much closer look at Gemini.

Why Benioff’s opinion carries outsized weight

I think it’s pretty clear that this wasn’t just any other endorsement for Google’s flagship AI model.

Benioff is one of the more outspoken names in the technology space, and far from a regular tech CEO. His comments become doubly important, considering Benioff hails AI as the most important technology in his lifetime.

Related: Cathie Wood buys the dip in Nvidia-backed stock

As the CEO of the world’s top CRM vendor, he oversees a platform used by over 150,000 businesses, with Salesforce dominating nearly one-fifth of the global CRM market, generating almost $40 billion in annual sales. 

That tremendous scale essentially gives him and his team a front-row seat to how Big Tech actually deploys foundation models. 

Also, Salesforce is wired into virtually every major stack.

For perspective, Bloomberg reports that Salesforce has a massive $2.5 billion, seven-year deal with Google Cloud that’s bringing Gemini into its Agentforce AI agents. Similarly, it also runs a long-running pact that makes Microsoft Azure the public cloud backbone for Marketing Cloud, while integrating Salesforce apps directly with Teams. 

As if that weren’t enough, it recently signed a new OpenAI partnership that allows customers to tap into frontier GPT-class models through Salesforce’s own platform. 

So when Benioff lays out that he’s “not going back” following a weekend with Gemini 3, the tech world takes notice.

What Gemini 3 does better

On paper, Gemini 3 felt like the need of the hour for Google, which has been playing catch-up to OpenAI’s ChatGPT for the past two years. 

Off the bat, Gemini 3 impresses.

Google’s own benchmarks showed that Gemini 3 Pro outscored GPT-5.1 and Claude 4.5 on reasoning tests. For example, a post on Vertu noted Humanity’s Last Exam (37.5% vs. 26.5%), as well as the Terminal-Bench 2.0 coding suite.

Additionally, it approximately doubled its SimpleQA knowledge scores.

Related: Legendary investor Ray Dalio drops most shocking take on stock market

A powerful new Deep Think mode has been nudging its results even higher on tougher benchmarks, including the GPQA Diamond and ARC-AGI-2.

For enterprises, the new model means a massive step-up in code generation, along with stronger document and data analysis, and multimodal workflows.

Consequently, Gemini 3 can efficiently process over a million tokens in tandem, spanning long PDFs along with images or video, while driving “agentic” automations that chain tools together. 

Independent tests also support those claims.

For instance, Tom’s Guide recently ran 11 head-to-head tasks against ChatGPT-5.1 and scored Gemini 3 the winner in seven, particularly in complex analysis.

And the performance gap isn’t just showing up in benchmarks; everyday users are feeling it, too. 

On r/Bard, a subreddit drawing nearly 300,000 weekly visitors, one poster described a real-world win that seemingly backs many of the wins discussed earlier. User AdvertisingEastern34 offered an example.

How ChatGPT and Gemini stack up right now

ChatGPT still dominates the large-language-model space, but Gemini’s now breathing down its proverbial neck, riding Google’s massive Search and Cloud footprint. Here’s the scoreboard, in hard numbers.

• Scale: OpenAI pegs ChatGPT users at nearly 800 million weekly active users, while Google claims the Gemini app has over 650 million monthly active users (MAUs). 
• Revenue: OpenAI’s annualized sales climbed into the $10–12 billion range (about $1 billion a month), Reuters reported, with Altman touting a $20 billion ARR (annual recurring revenue) target by late 2025. Alphabet doesn’t break out “Gemini revenue,” but Google Cloud’s AI-driven business is now running above a $50 billion annual rate.
• Pricing: ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month, Pro costs $200, and ChatGPT Business costs around $25-$30 per seat. On the other hand, Google bundles Gemini Advanced into Google One/Google AI Premium at $19.99/month, which is usually discounted through carrier and hardware promotions. 
• Enterprise footprint: OpenAI currently services 1 million+ business-related customers, along with 7 million+ ChatGPT for Work seats. Google counters this with Gemini, which is layered directly into Workspace and Google Cloud.

Related: Legendary billionaire Ken Griffin's Citadel makes huge bet on major tech stock