And now our CEO and chair, Mr. Marc Benioff.
All right. All right. Good morning, everybody. How y'all doing?
Good. Did you enjoy the concert last night?
Yeah. Has Dreamforce been going well?
Fantastic. Good. I'm looking forward to everybody's feedback and hearing what you liked and what you did not like. And we have a great program this morning. So, would you kind of welcome my friends here, Chimoth and Dave and Jason, come on out, guys.
Mark, hold on a second. You've been frame mogging everybody. Now, hold on a second. Come over here.
Can I get a closeup here? Now, let's get a closeup and I'm going to give Mark some advice. When you're selling SaaS and you're doing that enterprise forward motion, you want to look him in the eye and add a zero to the price. We got to get a big package. We need more seven and eight figure deals. Okay. Let's get that stock up up.
I'm with you. I'm with you.
How are you, Freeberg?
Sorry. I tried to do a little coaching. His energy's low. His energy's been low.
By the way, I'm here. I don't know if you can see him.
Oh. Oh, and we have David Sacks. I see him right here.
Oh, Sacks Boo. Bring him on. Voice of put David Sacks up above.
Yeah. Oh, there he is. There he is. That's a frame mug.
He's actually calling from a skiff right now. He can't talk. He's with JD and President Trump, and they're making a plan to save us all from death from AI in 10 years. So, don't worry. They're in the war room. They're going to figure it out.
It's just software. It's just software, folks.
Very good.
You've made a lot of news. Uh, wow. These last couple of days,
Oh, well, we've just been in a bubble here, right guys? I mean, we're just hanging out, having a good time. We were with Usher last night. It was pretty good. And then we had Gwen Stefani. She was pretty amazing, wasn't she?
Yeah, she's doing great with her new generative AI startup.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm a sheet investor in it.
Really? Amazing.
Great. Yeah.
Is that are you trolling us or is that real?
I mean, it seems like it's the truth. We're probably in a bubble.
Are we all loading into that with you?
I'm running an SPV, so you can all get in. It's 10% loading fee and 40%.
Right. So, you'll make money and the rest of us will not.
What a time to be alive, huh, Mark?
Well, it's been a I'll tell you, it's been an amazing three days here in San Francisco. We have 50,000 people here in town, which is pretty incredible. But it's just the energy and the vitality of everyone. Would everybody agree the energy has been incredible. Yeah, it's just been an awesome vibe and we've had some great people, you know, come by. You probably saw some things online already, right? And we've had some great guests and I know that you guys have had an amazing show going in Los Angeles, huh?
I mean, it was the I think this week is like you got to give us an update because we were here. So tell us what happened in LA.
I mean I think the big moment was on Monday. Um we were all sort of circling Jensen, myself, Freeberg, Jay Cal, and Sacks and um you know there's like inner rings of presidential communication and one of the outer rings sort of like the most before the bat phone. Sacks has the bat phone, but the ring right before the bat phone is where there's this person that works with him and you get this blast of content. you must get it too where it's like this tweet is really important and so you read it and right when we were about to go on stage it was the hoax you know kind of busting around AI three of them successively in a row and Jensen's assistant says I think he's going to call you and he says just bring it on stage whatever we'll figure it out in real time and then we were all sitting there and I see out of the corner of my eye she's like jumping up she's like this like feverishly like and he sees her and he says, 'Oh, just bring the phone out.' And they get the microphone and there was a president and you know debunking in real time. It was pretty crazy but you know look that happened. Satya debunked the data center hoax. Uh Dena debunked the jobs hoax. Um, so I think it was really important and you know you you you actually put it all into perspective at the as a book end because you had the leaders of all the labs and you talked about very practical things and so you're left to ponder like what are we really talking about? And then Jason last night put the cap on it because he's like it's just software. It's good software. There's guardrails necessary but it's just really good software.
I mean you you've been around a long time Mark. Um, not saying you're old, but you are the elder statesman in the industry. We look to you for advice. Um, what what's your take on this kind of
Is this the end of the age jokes, Jason?
Yeah, that's the end of them. I mean, I got four more, but um the in all seriousness when you see people kind of freaking out, we're all going to die. What's your advice as somebody who's been through this, you know, for multiple decades of how to build software that's safe? Because we've had these scares before. Y2K viruses, etc. What's your best advice?
Yeah, Dave David was happy to not be included on the age jokes. So, uh, we're the only ones, you know, with the gray hair going. So, I would just say that, um, you know, number one is are we not all responsible for our companies? Are we not all responsible for the products that we're building? And and I think that, you know, you you you guys have a lot of perspective on this. I'd love to hear what you have to say, but I think that, you know, we can look back now over social media and really say what did we learn? You know, what went right and what went really wrong, you know, and you know, we saw kids get hurt in social media. We saw companies and countries get hurt in social media, but ultimately did CEOs and companies take enough responsibility for what was happening? Did they really step up at times of crisis and say I'm gonna change my product. I'm gonna make things happen. You I think that you know someone said you know I think only these engineers really know what's happening inside these products and these technologies. Companies have got to be you know kind of take their own set of responsibility and say we're going to deliver this and this has been true in every industry. you know, it doesn't matter. We kind of had a really good discussion with Sam Altman on this stage and one of the discussions was, you know, the example of the aircraft industry and, you know, if there's an aircraft accident, we're going to expect them to do a full investigation and to make the plane better.
And to the same point, I think that, you know, when we look at the Hugging Face accident, of course, you cannot make any comparison. This is kind of what Sam was saying between, you know, a loss of life of an aircraft and what happened in Hugging Face. And yet they were both technical accidents. You know, something's happening for technical reasons. There has to be a full evaluation. There has to be a full, you know, accountability. So that's I think that that is where it has to start. Uh, Sacks, I'm curious what your take is now a week later after this whole kerfuffle around AI security and safety versus build better software. Get back to work, nerds.
Well, I I think we're in a much better place than we were a week ago. It really felt like a week ago there was almost a panic forming in the country about this. And I don't think that panicking over a problem is the way to get to a solution. And I think you know Mark just hit on something very very important which is the role of individual responsibility and accountability and you know we had the leaders of these labs talking as if the frontier was somebody else. Uh it's not. I mean it's it's these companies and first and foremost they have to take responsibility. I mean certainly the government can provide incentives and penalties if they don't take that responsibility but we you know we want them internalizing that sense not externalizing it. And just if I could just provide kind of a cod to the whole week, you know, I think what we're seeing is that speaking very broadly, there's three ways we can approach AI regulation. Number one is we can pause. We can just stop. If we do that, I think we all understand that won't actually solve any problems. It'll just hand the frontier to China. Option number two is we send in the regulators and make they make all the decisions about what gets released or not. And the problem with that is as Mark just said the regulators this the space is moving too fast and the regulators don't have the technical capabilities to do that. So that brings us to number three which is that the companies have to internalize a sense of responsibility but the government creates the incentive structure. So that's when government works best with the private sector. We let the private sector run their businesses but subject to again, you know, making the right cost-benefit decisions for the public based on penalties. And you know, I'm all in favor of making sure that there's product liability on these companies, that we have transparency, we have audits, we know what's going on. Uh, but that's the right way, I think, for the government to work with the private sector on this.
By the way, if you want to give a historical example to both of these, let's let's imagine going back to Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press. There was an effort to try to control that technology and it was through the Vatican. And the sitting pope at the current time, the biggest fear that he had was that the diffusion of this technology threatened his power and the reaction was to try to control the dissemination of that technology and to prevent people from having the ability to print their own ideas and thoughts on paper. If you go back at that moment and you ask yourself, would we have been in a better moment? Because even with the diffusion of the technology, we still had the reformation, we still had the dark ages, we had all of this problematic stuff. Do you think it would have been better if it was controlled by a singular organizational body? No. Take a different example in the 1960s when we saw the creation of OPEC and then how the coordination of OPEC has allowed a certain group of countries to control a critical resource. But the implication of that with respect to how the United States has had to be involved militarily from the intelligence community, the cost of life in general. There are so many examples of where you have this foundational leap in capability when it is controlled and metered out. And by the way, it's so crazy that the organization that wants to meter out is called Meter. I don't know if anybody thinks that that's insane, but it is. It's literally called Meter. But the organizations that want to meter out this technology have never seen diffusion not work well. So I just think the artifacts tell us diffusion works. Control how you deal with the aftermath. Do root cause analysis. Be profoundly serious engineering organizations and things will be okay.
Freeberg, I want to bring you in on this discussion and level it up a little bit. We have convinced the public that they're going to lose their jobs and get killed by Terminator robots. Um, which has not been great for the industry. How do we change the narrative to one of abundance and the upside of this technology? which is how they feel about it quite paradoxically or ironically uh in China 80% of people in China are stoked about the possibilities for AI here it's the reverse we have more to lose maybe than we have to gain or that might be how we feel and I think other parts of the world have more to gain than they have to lose and that's why they're embracing not just this technology but technologies like nuclear biotechnology and other things that we are uh kind of set up for more fear than we are for uh enthusiasm and optimism. And so I think it's kind of a very tough moment for the US. Um, a lot of people don't see the the core tangible benefits and it's easy in this moment for individuals to claim authority and say, 'I am one of the people that you should listen to and I should be in charge of making sure that you're safe.' And that paternalistic moment historically has not led to good things. That's a moment we have and we have a choice right now to make as a population, as voters, as individuals. Do we want to live in a paternalistic society? Do we want to embrace that model and the consequences that arise from that? Or do we believe in individuals? Do we believe in choice? Do we believe in liberty? And I ask people in this room to think a little bit in a very simplified way. Would you like to pay $50 for a million tokens or 15 cents for a million tokens? That's the choice. And um there's a lot more that comes along with that choice by the way
which Mark I think takes us to a very important discussion AI sovereignty for enterprises for individuals open-source versus closed source of course you made a very prescient bet on Anthropic and they are the lead but we're also starting to see Jensen embrace open-source what are your thoughts in the enterprise and for individuals the importance of us having an open-source alternative to the frontier models and the impact it's going to have.
Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, you you're going to have both. You're going to have these kind of we closed models, if you will. Okay. I I think one thing that we should continue to also really break down is that for all of our customers here, none of their data has ever gone into any of these models from Salesforce. We practice zero data retention. you know, it's safe AI and we we're deeply committed to that. That's audited by our security team. Our security team has architected with both Anthropic and OpenAI really strong zero data retention. So this this concept that intellectual property is passing somehow from our customers into models is simply not true. This is number one.
Number two is that you know these kind of pioneering models, frontier models have added our industry huge value in the last you know 3 years especially they have motivated us. They have inspired us. They have showed us this incredible direction. We have a lot of gratitude to give to these labs. There's no question. At the same time it's also been incredibly inspiring to watch these open-source models come up so fast and so many. But open source has been such a critical part of AI for the last decade, you know, as we've kind of seen kind of AI really accelerate. Without the open-source capability, we would not have gotten there. And a lot of it came out of, of course, our research universities like Stanford. That was a critical part of all of this happening.
Hey, Sacks, you're an expert on SaaS. I was wondering if you could handicap and maybe give a performance review to Mark on how he's doing in terms of getting Salesforce, Slack, etc. to embrace SaaS. Now, I want you to be candid and honest, but I don't want you to be an asshole, okay? So, just keep it back 20%. He's a little sensitive at times, but let's give Mark his grade for the for the season. Go ahead, Zach.
Uh, it's kind of crazy that you're asking me to grade the the greatest SaaS entrepreneur that we have in Silicon Valley. That's kind of kind of ridiculous, but but let's do it anyway. Let's do it anyway. You use the products every day. What do you think of his embracing platforms?
This would be like Jason Calacanis is trying to grade Einstein or something. It's just a it's a silly silly exercise. But no, look, I we knew and we said on our podcast that Mark would weather the storm, that the whole SaaS apocalypse was completely overdone, just like the jobs apocalypse was overdone, just like the humanity apocalypse over the past week has been overdone. Look, people love to rotate between these like crazy scare narratives. Um, and the media loves to feed them because you know the old saying that if it bleeds, it leads. So they the media loves to promote these apocalypse stories. So and we knew Mark would figure this out and weather that storm. And um you know he's done a great job.
You know what's impressive about this Mark and Salesforce is that he's always been ahead of the curve for 20 some years on whatever the big trend is. I mean I remember when I was doing my startup Yammer. I mean Mark was the first person um you know along with me to see that social would be a huge thing in the enterprise. He also embraced mobile. He embraced data and he's embracing AI and that's why he's always been so relevant and Dreamforce has always been the number one conference is because Mark's ahead of the curve on all these things.
So Mark, congratulations. That's a solid B+. Room for improvement, but it it's solid grade. Let's give it up. Well done.
Well, there there there are two two things that he did recently that I think were very your team did. Um, one is there was a lot of belief that the models would suck up all this data and you would lose your moat. And then he was like, we're just making the whole thing headless and let's see what happens. That was like a really interesting decision which again uh upended one of those hoaxes. And then the second one was a lot of us like at 8090 we use Slack effectively as our control plane for so much of it. And now all of a sudden you can you have Slack code. I don't know if you've really I don't know if you guys will see it or it's already happened, but the the ability for you to be able to use Slack as a mechanism to now manage your product development process. Those are like really big features that allowed us to just stay in our natural workflow, which when you introduce AI turns out to be the big change management problem that we all deal with. How do you use these? Where do you use it? To your point, you can prevent CDR because of what you're doing. But then what the risk is the individual employee going off to the web using a model directly off their website and you that's where all of this stuff happens. So the more you can bring it back into the governed enterprise use the existing tools that we know to be secure but those two very practical changes in like the last 30 days were super valuable for us.
Yeah. You were on the you were on the Slack board of directors weren't you?
Yeah I was. I did we did the series A and Jason is still like a major Slack power user. Well, I mean, I was going to mention um one of the things I respect about you so much is you are still got your hands in the product and you still got your hands in understanding the customer. When we were in Davos, you were texting me like and we were having a dialogue about Slack and I said, you know, it's still a little bit too hard to get in there and get your own data out. And you cc'd six people and we started this dialogue about how do I get access to this knowledge inside of my Slack instance. We figured out how to unlock that data and now we're building, you know, essentially this oracle of what is going on in our venture capital firm. How do we make decisions and looking back on over a decade of decision making and it's obviously really really valuable and it it got unlocked because of that dialogue. And so you just making that time for every customer including a 25 person venture capital firm I think is just incredible.
And then I'll give you another little bit of extra flowers. The thing we were building was what you just released I think about three weeks ago with Slack today. When you open up Slack, it's an experimental feature. Anybody have that yet? The Slack today?
We've tried it about a third. The rest of you will be getting it, but it just tells you here's what you should focus on today. Here's the conversations. Here's the decisions. We were hand rolling that. We were trying to build that and um you you released it and I think that I think this company is Slack. I think Salesforce is Slack. Slack is the oracle and it what a precious
It's not really a word that we like to use at Dreamforce by the way Jason.
I mean do it or don't do it or don't I just something about Slack and AI at this moment
PTSD reaction every time you said it twice now and everybody just stood up.
It's pretty amazing what Slack represents in terms of knowledge. Anyway,
Mark, um, can you share with us some of the conversations you've had with Dario on pacing the frontier?
