Enterprise

Why Marc Benioff shouldn’t be surprised by Salesforce’s DEI issues

Internally, Salesforce employees were pushing for changes to its diversity and inclusion efforts as early as October 2019.

Marc Benioff
Benioff has publicly championed Salesforce's diversity efforts, but employees tell a different story.
Photo: Jason Alden/Getty Images

Marc Benioff was surprised by claims made in February that Salesforce's culture was discriminatory against Black employees. At least, that's what he told Fortune in a profile published on Thursday.

It's the first time the outspoken CEO, who prides himself on supporting a variety of progressive causes, has publicly commented after two Black female employees quit earlier this year over what they described as a culture of microaggressions and inequitable treatment at Salesforce.

But they weren't the only ones to raise these issues. Workers have brought similar claims to the attention of Salesforce's Office of Equality since its creation in 2016, one source told Protocol, who also confirmed that Benioff was made aware of the complaints at that time.

"The Office of Equality had been fielding these types of concerns for years, it just chose not to do anything about it," the source added. "That created real problems for its work in equality because it led to the team focusing more on the messaging and splashy events than responding to the real concerns of its Black and brown employees."

In fact, over 18 current and former Salesforce employees raised those same concerns as early as 2016 at the highest levels of the company about the slow pace of change when it came to diversity and inclusion, as well as the focus on publicity over real progress.

"Salesforce is really only inclined to care about diversity and inclusion as it relates to marketing," Neville Louison, a Black former Salesforce employee who left in 2017, said at the time.

That was in 2020, before the murder of George Floyd and other Black men and women brought about wider acknowledgement of systemic racism in the U.S. and ignited a deeper discussion about how to address it.

Since then, Salesforce has made progress toward resolving some of its own issues. The company began to compensate employee resource group leaders, for example, addressing a complaint that the burden of remedying these problems was unfairly being placed on underrepresented workers. Now, other organizations have begun to take a similar approach.

But Salesforce employees had notified senior leaders of their struggles before the racial equality movement began last year. In 2019, Vivianne Castillo, one of the two former employees who posted public resignation letters, wrote a lengthy message to a popular internal chat channel that unpacked many of the same allegations she would make years later.

In that same chat, other employees questioned why qualified Black referral candidates were being passed over for open positions. They raised issues with the treatment of those candidates during the interview process, like interviewers mispronouncing names after being told the correct pronunciation. Some were even asked if they "have an easier nickname" to go by, according to one post.

Benioff can't follow every message posted on internal chat, though he is known to be a micromanager who involves himself in minute details of the business, sources told Protocol. But his own former recruiting chief, as well as current chief diversity officer and chief people officer, responded directly to those messages with pledges to follow up for deeper discussions. At the time, diversity head Tony Prophet was even a direct report of Benioff's.

In the past, when repeatedly pressed on the concerns raised by Louison, Castillo, Perry and others, the company has stressed that equality is "one of our highest values." The most recent comments from Benioff at least appear to acknowledge there is a problem in adhering to those values.

But when asked how Benioff could have been "caught completely off guard" about the internal issues that had been raised at his company for several years, as Fortune put it, Salesforce did not respond.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

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Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

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Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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