Artificial intelligence

By sector

Sector is the SEC's industry description of the company. Each count opens that sector's quotes below.

198 paragraphs · Services-Prepackaged Software show all sectors

•evolving techniques used to breach or sabotage IT systems and infrastructure, including as a result of the increased use of AI technologies by bad actors, which are generally not recognized until launched against a target, and could result in our being unable to anticipate or implement adequate measures to prevent such techniques;

Read in the 10-K filed Mar 5, 2025 ↗

We are increasingly building AI into many of our offerings, including generative and agentic AI. As with many innovations, AI offerings, such as Agentforce, and our Salesforce Platform present additional risks and challenges that could affect their adoption and therefore our business. For example, the development of our AI offerings and the Salesforce Platform, which provides information regarding our customers’ customers, present emerging ethical issues. If we enable or offer solutions that draw controversy due to their perceived or actual impact on human rights, privacy, employment, or in other social contexts, we may experience new or enhanced governmental or regulatory scrutiny, brand or reputational harm, competitive harm or legal liability, especially as geopolitical turmoil creates increasingly volatile political and market conditions. Inadequate or ineffective AI development, deployment, content labeling or governance by us or others that result in controversy could also impair the acceptance of AI solutions or result in unintended performance of the services. This in turn could undermine confidence in the decisions, predictions, analysis or other content that our AI applications produce, subjecting us to competitive harm, legal liability and brand or reputational harm. The rapid evolution of AI will require the application of resources to develop, test and maintain our products and services to help ensure that AI is implemented ethically in order to minimize unintended, harmful impact. Uncertainty around new and emerging AI applications such as generative AI content creation and AI agents will require additional investment in compliance, governance and the licensing or development of proprietary datasets, machine learning models and systems to test for accuracy, bias and other variables, which are often complex, may be costly and could impact our profit margin. Moreover, the move from AI content classification to AI content generation through our development of Agentforce and other generative AI products brings additional risks and responsibility. Known risks of generative AI currently include risks related to accuracy, bias, toxicity, privacy and security and data provenance. For example, AI technologies, including generative AI, may create content that appears correct but is factually inaccurate or flawed, or contains copyrighted or other protected material, and if our customers or others use this flawed or protected content to their detriment, or the owners of such copyrighted material seek to enforce their rights, we may be exposed to brand or reputational harm, competitive harm and/or legal liability. Developing, testing and deploying AI systems may also increase the cost profile of our offerings due to the nature of the computing costs involved in such systems. If we are unable to mitigate these risks, or if we incur excessive expenses in our efforts to do so, our reputation, business, operating results and financial condition may be harmed.

Read in the 10-K filed Mar 5, 2025 ↗

•evolving regulations of cloud computing, AI and cross-border data transfer restrictions and similar regulations; and

Read in the 10-K filed Mar 5, 2025 ↗

Issues in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (“AI”) may result in reputational harm and legal liability and could adversely affect our results of operations.

Read in the 10-K filed May 15, 2025 ↗

Our focus on cloud-based and AI services presents execution and competitive risks. We are incurring significant costs to build and maintain infrastructure to support cloud-based and AI services, reducing operating margins. Whether we succeed in cloud-based and AI services depends on our execution in several areas, including:

Read in the 10-K filed Jul 30, 2025 ↗

Our AI systems offer users powerful tools and capabilities. However, there may be instances where these systems are used in ways that are unintended or inappropriate. In addition, some users may also engage in fraudulent or abusive activities through our cloud-based and AI services, such as unauthorized account access, payment fraud, or terms of service violations including cryptocurrency mining or launching cyberattacks. While we are committed to detecting and controlling such misuse of our cloud-based and AI services, our efforts may not be effective, and we may incur reputational damage or experience adverse impacts to our business and results of operations.

Read in the 10-K filed Jul 30, 2025 ↗

We depend upon our employees and contractors to appropriately handle confidential and sensitive data, including customer data, and to deploy our IT resources in a safe and secure manner that does not expose our network systems to security breaches or incidents or the loss, alteration, unavailability, or other unauthorized processing of data. We have been and expect to be subject to cybersecurity threats and incidents, including denial-of-service attacks, employee errors or individual attempts to gain unauthorized access to information systems. We also continue to incorporate AI solutions and features into our platform, which may result in security incidents or otherwise increase cybersecurity risks. Further, AI technologies may be used in connection with certain cybersecurity attacks, resulting in heightened risks of security breaches and incidents. Any security incidents, including internal malfeasance or inadvertent disclosures by our employees or a third-party’s fraudulent inducement of our employees to disclose information, unauthorized access or usage, the introduction of viruses or other malicious code or any other breach or incident or disruption of our platform, systems, or networks or those of our service providers, could result in loss, corruption, unavailability, or other unauthorized processing of confidential information, and any such event, or the perception that it has occurred, may result in damage to our reputation, erosion of customer trust, loss of customers, litigation, regulatory investigations, fines, penalties and other liabilities. For example, in June and August 2022, we became aware that threat actors had conducted sophisticated social engineering campaigns against some of our employees after having obtained employee names and mobile phone numbers from unknown sources. The attack identified in August 2022, which involved smishing text messages that purported to be from our IT department, resulted in the threat actor obtaining some of our employees’ credentials and access to certain data of approximately 209 customers out of our total customer base of approximately 270,000 at that time. We notified and worked with our affected customers. We also notified appropriate regulators and addressed their questions about the incident. We also took steps to remediate the incident, including enhancing our security training, improving our two factor authentication requirements, implementing additional layers of control within our VPN, reducing access to certain internal applications and tools, running simulated phishing attempts to increase employee security awareness, and increasing the refresh frequency for access to certain internal applications. Industry reports indicate that the threat actors also attacked other technology, telecommunication and cryptocurrency companies.

Read in the 10-K filed Feb 26, 2025 ↗

Outside the United States, an increasing number of laws, regulations, and industry standards apply to privacy, data protection and cybersecurity. For example, the GDPR, the United Kingdom’s General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 (“UK GDPR”) and the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, impose strict requirements for processing the personal information of individuals protected by the legislation, whether their data is processed within or outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”), the United Kingdom (“UK”) and Switzerland, respectively (such jurisdictions, collectively, “Europe”). For example, the GDPR imposes significant requirements regarding the processing of individuals’ personal information, including in relation to transparency, lawfulness of processing, individuals’ privacy rights, compliant contracting, data minimization, data breach notification, data re-usage, data retention, security of processing and international data transfers. Under the GDPR and UK GDPR, government regulators may impose temporary or definitive bans on data processing or data transfers, require a company to delete data, as well as impose significant fines, potentially ranging up to 20 million Euros under the GDPR, 17.5 million GBP under the UK GDPR, or 4% of a company’s worldwide revenue, whichever is higher. Further, individuals may initiate compensation claims or litigation related to our processing of their personal information. Other privacy and data protection laws in Europe impose strict requirements around marketing communications and the deployment of cookies on users’ devices. As another example, Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais, or “LGPD”) (Law No. 13,709/2018) may apply to our operations. The LGPD broadly regulates processing of personal information of individuals in Brazil and imposes compliance obligations and penalties comparable to those of the GDPR. Additionally, we expect an increase in the regulation of the use of AI and ML in products and services. For example, in Europe, the Artificial Intelligence Act (“AI Act”), once effective, will impose onerous obligations related to the development, placing on the market and use of AI-related systems. In the United States, numerous states have established study commissions that could lead to regulation of AI, and certain states have enacted legislation regulating aspects of AI. Other countries also are contemplating laws regulating AI and ML. We may have to change our business practices to comply with obligations under these or other new and evolving regimes.

Read in the 10-K filed Feb 26, 2025 ↗

Evolving laws, regulations, and other actual and asserted obligations relating to privacy, data protection, and cybersecurity, as well as any new or evolving obligations relating to the use of AI and ML technologies, could reduce demand for our platform, increase our costs, impair our ability to grow our business, or restrict our ability to store and process data or, in some cases, impact our ability to offer our service in some locations and may subject us to liability. Further, in view of new or modified federal, state or foreign laws and regulations, industry standards, contractual obligations and other actual and asserted obligations, or any changes in their interpretation, we may find it necessary or desirable to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or to expend significant resources to modify our practices and platform and otherwise adapt to these changes. We may be unable to make such changes and modifications in a commercially reasonable manner or at all, and our ability to develop new products and features could be limited.

Read in the 10-K filed Feb 26, 2025 ↗