The only way to push the needle on women in technology, is to make it a priority from the top down, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff has said.

Speaking at his company’s Dreamforce conference today, Mr Benioff said overall diversity is important, but gender is where Salesforce is focussed, adding that the company wants more women leaders.

“I wish we could rewind history to 16 and a half years ago,” he said. “When we set out our corporate principals, one of the mistakes that we made was that we didn’t take any goals or initiatives around this (women in leadership). That was a huge mistake.”

Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris agreed, saying, “we need more women executives at Salesforce.”

Mr Harris who launched a programme on women in leadership at the company said: “We can talk about it and give it lip service and say it’s an important issue, but I wanted to do something. I’m an engineer.”

Mr Benioff said when he was starting out the company, things were different, adding that the issue of women in leadership “was not part of the narrative” at his previous company Oracle.

“I was coming out of a company where this was not an issue - or not discussed…There was no discussion around women’s issues, diversity issues, women in leadership.”

The Salesforce chief executive also called out the lack of women on stage at Apple’s recent product launch.

“They have great women in Apple. We know that Apple has great executives. Why are they not on stage,” he said.

More than 160,000 people are attending Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference, which is taking place in San Francisco.

Last night, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella took to the stage, enduring a tech fail.

During his keynote, Nadella demonstrated integration with Microsoft’s products, praising the company’s artificial intelligence assistant Cortana’s ability to provide voice-controlled analytics, but embarrassingly it failed.

“Show me at my most-risk opportunities,” Nadella told Cortana, which proceeded to bring up a Bing search of “show me how to buy milk at this opportunity.” Nadella tried again, but Cortana didn’t co-operate.

After trying a third time he gave up saying “no, this is not going to work.”