All right. Now we have Marc Benioff. He's larger than life, both literally in his vision, in his creativity. Could people take seats? I hope no one is scalping tickets for this one. I know you all want to hear what he has to say. He's awesome and I've spent a lot of time with him the last few months and I know he really cares about imagination, action, and he's already signed up to participate in the one in Davos in January. But today he didn't want to miss out on meeting you and sharing some of the things on his mind. So he's going to do that through telepathy, through this screen. Do we have — is Marc on the screen?
Great. Can we bring him up? And can you adjust it so he's tall? All right. You guys, you are being — Marc Benioff, ladies and gentlemen. Marc, you know, so you are one of the top tech leaders of our times and you're figuring it out. Thank you for making time to join us today. Marc, are you in Hawaii right now?
Oh, you're — no, I know. I know. Oh, yeah. Oh, you're here in the screen right now or you're in Hawaii?
I'm in an undisclosed location, John.
Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay.
Don't tell anybody where I am.
Yeah. All right. Let me ask you this. Are you an AI or are you going to show us something?
Okay. Are you an AI or are you real right now?
I'm an AI. I've been an AI my whole life. We all are.
Oh, the Matrix. We're living in the Matrix, you think?
Yeah. So, John, I have a bunch of questions for you, but before we get to that, how tall are you?
And are you getting bigger? Every time I see you, I feel like you get bigger and bigger.
I'm eating well, so it's working out.
And are you wearing flats too, or, you know, raise you up or whatever? Yeah, I wear 3-inch elevation shoes to keep it — I like to be 6'7" to 7 foot.
Yeah. So, did you come out of the womb 6'5" or what was that journey like? Have you always been a little bit taller than everyone?
Yeah, you're exactly right.
Yeah. Wow. What's it like in negotiating and in interacting with people, making people feel comfortable with someone who's, you know, taller and you're a power player in the tech world. How do you use that to your advantage?
I'm a power player.
John, before we go on and talk more about power and height and the womb, let's just — you know, I just had a great time at MIT a couple weeks ago. You know that I was there with you. We were enjoying our — one thing I did see is that a lot of the kids did not have internships lined up for the summer yet or jobs coming out of the graduating class, especially in computer science. I want to make sure that everyone who does not have a job or has an internship send me their resume at Benioff at gmail so that I can get it to Salesforce. I found so many great MIT students and people were not there. Anyway, I want to also tell you that I'm not only here, but I also have my friend here, Will.i.am is here with me as well. So, we're —
So, yeah, Will.i.am is no stranger to the imagination action stage. We love Will.i.am. I think you've earned two Chia Pets. Marc, as you know, if you speak three times at our event, you get a Chia Pet. But Will is one of the artist residents and just one of the most wonderful people. So, by the transitive property, I like you even more.
I did want to ask you about your visit to MIT, but I do want to pause on that. In this age, gray-haired people are saying, 'We want the next generation. We want the people that are trying to figure it out right now to help them figure it out.' There are a lot of Fortune 10, Fortune 100 companies that are going to totally go down a death spiral if they don't figure out this moment.
Are you talking about you? I have gray hair, but I use Just For Men. Oh, okay. I don't know who's talking about exactly what's happening.
All right. So, Marc, thank you for that generous offer. Does anyone — let me see a show of hands. Anyone going to follow up with Marc on that? Yeah, we see a lot of hands. I'll distribute your email.
Surprised how many kids need jobs. So, send me your resume. I'm hiring.
All right. So, Marc, let's get into some questions. And now that we have — I got to tell you when I was hanging out with Marc — Marc, can I share the message that you introduced me to when you were on campus or should I keep that on the down low?
You got to keep it on the down low.
Okay. All right. I'm not going to go there. All right. So, Marc, you started Salesforce in a San Francisco apartment with a wild idea to reinvent enterprise software. What gave you the conviction and how do you recognize a truly transformational opportunity?
It's pretty simple. You know, I was here in Hawaii at home at my house and I was just swimming with some dolphins and I was one with the pod. I was out there kind of doing my thing with the dolphins. Some dolphins were going by and as the dolphins went by, they said to me, 'Listen, the cloud is coming.' And I said, 'Let's go. We're going to go do the cloud.' So we did software as a service and now Salesforce is the number one cloud enterprise applications company in the world. 83,000 employees, over 46 billion in revenue this year, 16 million customers on Slack alone, and we're so about the agentic future. That's why I invited Will.
Great. So Will, do you want to make — do you want to do a pitch? I love ASU, one of the most creative schools, and I'm glad you're collaborating. Animal sounds actually. So, yeah, we're all about animal sounds on this.
Yeah, I — there's one — I can't swim, right? So one day Marc's like, 'Let's go out in the ocean.'
But you did play an animal, didn't you? And what was that movie?
Madagascar. What were you?
But why are you wearing the zebra thing? Is what I don't understand.
Oh, because it's — I'm trying to say —
I see. All right. Okay. It's not because you wanted the Chris Rock character, right? Oh, I see.
So we went out in the ocean. I had a life vest on. So Marc's like, 'Hey, Will, everything's going to be okay and in 10 seconds a whale's going to appear.' I'm like, 'Whatever, Marc.' And 10 seconds later, a whale appeared. So when he says he was talking to dolphins, I don't take that lightly because he is connected to the oceans and he does an awesome job helping clean up the oceans. Back to the agentic self. I teach a course at ASU called the Agentic Self where we help onboard folks building personalized agents configurable down to the agent's concerns, beliefs, perspectives, and expressions. They mint their own voice. They put it on their own GPU via our partnership with Nvidia, giving every single student a Jetson or a Spark where their agent lives for all the inferences to happen at home. It's a very intuitive path but through the course we teach ethics and accountability and responsibility on the agents that they build. So that when students graduate, not only do they have the ability to create the jobs of tomorrow, if they get an enterprise or corporate job, they show up to work with an agent that is certified and has a diploma. And ASU is providing a diploma and certification for the agent that students build during the Agentic Self course.
