The AI Economy with Marc Benioff and H.E. Abdullah Alswaha | Dreamforce 2025 | Salesforce

All right. Good morning everybody. How are you all doing? Great. Fantastic. Well, we have a great. First of all, are you looking forward to Metallica tonight? All right, we have a fantastic guest for us. And how many of you have ever met someone from Saudi Arabia before? Raise your hands. Oh, wow. Fantastic. We have a good selection. So we're going to do something fantastic. We're going to meet a really great friend of mine, His Excellency Abdullah Aswah.

Great to be with you. Always a pleasure. Always.

It is really great and a huge commitment and we couldn't be more grateful to have you. So thank you.

Anything for you, Mark.

Really, really good.

You're a true inspiration. True story. I've known Mark right now and observed him for the past 20 years. And hands down, there's no leader other than you from the valley that really have transformed folks, businesses and communities through your for profit and more critically for your not for profit activities. And I could not be more proud to do this for you.

Well, we couldn't be more thrilled to have you. Thank you, your excellent, Steve, for being here.

Please.

So I have so many questions and I am so excited to have you here. You have no idea.

But first of all, look at this energy.

I know, it's really great.

I love it.

We have a great group.

I got to so many of your bosses, the mom, the wife here. So we need to. Yeah. Behave today, huh?

I'm not going to do that, but.

I knew you're going to say that.

Oh, the first thing, I think that it's really because I think most folks have not had an opportunity to meet you to just kind of, you know, talk a little bit about kind of your background and where, you know, how you grew up and kind of how you got to this place. Obviously, I think a lot of us do know you've been at Harvard and all the western education work for western companies, Cisco. But just take us back to the beginning and just bring us forward. Give us a foundation to your life.

So let me start off with our journey. So the first time I got to know about Mark, he was actually on my board back in Cisco. That was about 23, 24 years ago and I had the honor and the privilege to see what you have done with Salesforce. And hands down, if I go back to the Cisco days, I could really attribute it and even John Chambers and Chuck Robbins right now will attest to that. How we move from $5 billion back then to $50 billion by focusing on top line, bottom line and the green line was hands down to Salesforce. And what I love is that you really have revolutionized the industry with SaaS and right now it's a $300 billion market and even growing. And right now I love how you shifted on the offensive with agentic AI because this is where the industry is happening so you're not leaving it to chance. And I love the work that you have done. And right now, last night I saw your keynote. Fantastic news. You talk about 30 to 40% productivity increases through agentic AI. But going back to my humble story, I would summarize it predominantly into three chapters. An opportunity to learn and learn from some of the best. And Mark, you've been an inspiration and a mentor throughout the years. An opportunity to earn a little bit of stripes and accomplishments and to return. And that's in essence. And I told Mark that I'm doing this predominantly not only for how Salesforce have shaped the industry, but predominantly for a lot of the work that maybe some of you don't even know. The first time that I engaged closely with Mark was during the COVID year was in one of the toughest years where I have seen him, hands down during the World Economic Forum with the center of the fourth Industrial Revolution laser focus on pushing back then the OECD principles of trustworthy AI. How AI should be human centric with trust, with security and all of these aspects that has inspired us under the leadership of His Royal Highness Mosleman, the Crown Prince and our Prime Minister during the toughest year to focus on pushing the adoption of trustworthy AI during the G20, which was a fundamental turning point in this industry. And I would argue that it's Contributed to this today 2 trillion ish dollar market because it was for the first time that the G20 adopted it. The G7 followed suit and then across the board and we just recently met in AI for good at ITU and all of these non for profit activities. But this is what really inspired me. Going back to my humble story. I started in Building 10 if you remember back in San Jose, just about half an hour 45 minutes from here. And I have to attest that the traffic has improved. So congratulations on that. So AI is working and back then we started writing code for iOS and if you remember back then iOS for us was the operating system for networking. Then Fast forward in 2016 His Royal Highness had his first Silicon Valley tour. And during that Silicon Valley tour it was me, John Chambers and Chuck Robbins and Haytham from my team. We had the opportunity to showcase to His Royal Highness what we were doing at Cisco, how we were digitizing India, Germany, France, across the board. And I remember his royal highness said to us, when are you guys going to stop talking to me about other countries and talk to me about digitizing Saudi? And this is when I got invited to make a leap of faith. And it has been the most defining moment of my life to have an opportunity to work for, hands down, one of the most inspirational leaders in the 21st century. And I'll share with you why, because this is a leader that has transformed a nation, a region and the world. You're talking about empowering women and jumping from 7% women empowerment in tech and STEM to 36%. Mind you, that in the Silicon Valley, it's still at 26%. Today, you're talking about pushing the boundaries to inspire the first Arab astronaut in history to go to the iss, to be able to work on tumor organoids, to tackle cancer. And last week, we had the pleasure to celebrate and I shared this with you, Mark, the first Nobel prize winner, a Saudi American from our national labs, working with UC Berkeley as well, working on metal organic frameworks of how we can create new structures for metal ions, which are positively charged metal atoms with linkers and structures to be able with AI to look at different structures, which effectively creates a sponge with pores to be able to capture water from air. We know that there's a number of billions of people today that don't have access to clean water and even critically, not only saving lives and the people, but the planet by being able to capture carbon dioxide, which is going to be fundamentally a game changer for how metal organic frameworks from capturing a ton of carbon for 94 bucks all the way to 40 bucks and pushing the needle to the sub 10 bucks threshold, which is going to be a game changer. Honestly speaking, this has been a very inspiring and rewarding story to empower people by focusing on women and youth, really safeguarding the planet and shaping new frontiers. And today, I have the pleasure of exploring it with Salesforce and with you, Marc.

Well, your excellency, I couldn't be more grateful for you to be here. And you've just laid out a huge canvas of things to talk about. And let's just start by talking and expanding that canvas, because in addition to that, you've also outlined in quite a level of depth and enlightenment, a vision for what the kingdom is gonna look like in 2030. So from your base in Riyadh, you've really mapped out. This is your vision for 2030, including a very broad Ecosystem of alliances with western and eastern countries and Middle Eastern countries and how you're gonna bring it all together. Can you give us that kind of vision for 2030? And we've all read the documents and we've seen the press conferences, but here we have you. So can you just lay it out for us exactly what your dream is? It's now five years away.

So let me share with you the investment thesis for His Royal Highness back then in the digital age, and then as we look forward to the intelligence age. So in the digital age, very clearly if we double down on women empowerment, youth empowerment, it's going to pay dividends. And as a matter of fact, every time the base economy grew by 2 to 3%, the digital economy in the kingdom grew by 6 to 7%. Which is testimony that talent and technology makes a difference. Also evident, one of our key criteria was to achieve non oil GDP by 50% diversification of our economy. As everybody knows, we're the trillion dollar economy among the G20 which historically have been a factor based economy shifting to an innovation based economy. And the thesis was digital. Just to let you know, last year we achieved 50% non oil GDP diversification. So a 2030 goal achieved seven years ahead of the goal that that's number one. Naturally, the Kingdom has been the energy leader for the industrial age. We power roughly 20% of the power mix globally and responsibly. We have a fiduciary duty in this new intelligence age as this general purpose technology proliferate to make sure that we contribute to closing down the new divides of the intelligence age. So the world is going to need anywhere between 63 gigawatts worth of energy and more recently they're talking about 70 to 80 gigawatts worth of energy. So we have a responsible duty first of all to be the empowering nation for the intelligent age. And we're already pushing the needle on a number of strides. So a year ago we launched within four months one of our largest AI nodes where today we're achieving 11 cents per per million input output token. Just to put this in reference, this is one of the most affordable tokens and the reason why we have done that. And you gotta love this mark. We were able to identify some of the bottlenecks within the compute industry. The compute industry really conforms to something called the Von Neumann architecture, which simply says that there's a compute component and a memory component. And every time communication happens between these twos, those are picojoules. And with billions of transactions to predict the Next token, the next word, the next image, and the next video. This is going to consume a lot of energy and a lot of water and a lot of heat as we speak. So we've doubled down on three memory architectures and as well as an interconnect solutions for the future. So we're doubling down on what is called near memory computing. So in other words, if you look at most compute architectures today, you have memory on the chip, next to the chip, on the side of the chip. Effectively, if you are able to predict the next word or the next token as an individual, you either call it from memory, fetch it from your phone that is next to you, or walk to a library and try to fetch it. Every time you make that transition, that is energy lost. So for example, just to let you know how inefficient the previous compute architectures, this particular phone, and not to promote any specific brands here, typically the theoretical value is 20 watts, but at best you get 11 watts. 11 to 12 watts, why? Because of the law of conservation of energy. So every time you have heat, and because of that heat, you need to throttle down the clock. So we were able to experiment with three architectures. An SRAM memory on the chip, a DRAM memory next to the chip, and with solid state memory with these architectures, we were able to do some level of optimization. The second big thing that we're betting on. So we shared the story of Omoriyagi achieving a Nobel prize with AI in chemistry with metal organic frameworks. We had an earlier Nobel prize winner from Japan. Your should I say second or third most favorite nation because Saudi is number two. Right.

I'm not going to pick favorite. All of my children, I love them.

Equally, by the way. True story. Every time Mark pings me, he's from Tokyo, So we're going to change that to Riyadh hopefully soon. But we love Japan. Right? Arigatouximas to all of our Japanese colleagues here. There you go.

I'm not sure what you mean, but let me just check my phone here for just one second. Oh, yes, I see. Okay, thank you very much.

All right, so we believe that we have a fiduciary duty to deploy our capital, our energy, our intensity with his lord, your Royal highness leadership, to be able to tackle the compute challenge. The second piece that we're focused on is AI Photonics. So Nakamura, who is one of the Nobel prize winners for blue led, actually worked with our national labs as well. Today we're working on micro LEDs to be able to transform the Copper that you find within a rack for an Nvidia or an AMD GPU rack to be able to switch into that microled, which is blue light LEDs for communication. The heat intensity, just to put things in perspective from copper or even from lasers is in picojoules. That's 10 to the power of minus 9. You're talking about fem2 Joules 10 to the power of minus 12. Sorry, you're talking about fem2 Joules shifting to 10 to the power of minus 15. So that's 1000 improvement. You're talking per communication, per node by just using micro LEDs. The third innovation that we're focused on, and it's next here, next door, we're one of the early investors, is in heat sinks and liquid cooling. Just to put things in context, if we're building a gigawatt worth of data center and trust me, we're betting on a few gigawatts as we speak, 20 to 30% is going into liquid cooling, into cooling solutions. We were able to work with one of the innovators to work on 3D models for cold plates on how we could redirect these heat sinks aspects to be able to focus on tensor cores, CPU cores rather than on memory and other things that are doped on a specific chipset. These are the kind of breakthroughs that will achieve 5% achievements when it comes to the number of tokens. And overall on total cost of ownership, 50%. These are the kind of breakthroughs now shifting gears. We said we want to be empowering the intelligent age. We want to also be the most AI enabled nation in the world. And we're betting on three areas. Generative AI, agentic AI and physical AI. Let's focus on identic AI because I know you're big on this one. Today Salesforce is partnering with Humane, our national champion for AI to work on solutions on how we could streamline prompt to outcome. We're very big on models that create GDP and jobs. We're not big on models that are not able to shift the needles. General models, I believe if we look back at the mobile cloud era, the social era are good enough for monthly active users being able to tap into the consumer market. That's a play that we believe a handful of labs here around the Silicon Valley are going to win that race. We're laser focused on the enterprise play, similar to Salesforce, the secret and please take notes of that. Reinforced learning with verifiable rewards, with good rewards. That's going to be the secret. That Aramco have used to be able to achieve real savings of $1 billion over their bottom line by being able to detect the porosity of an oil well and decide when to do a drilling run and how to do a drill run. So that's a billion dollars of savings. A second use case that actually one of the early investors in Mistral, a company that we're both very familiar with, is actually working with asml. They create these lithography machines which are roughly half a billion dollar a pop. And today they are able to do a custom model with again, reinforced learning and verifiable rewards, or custom rewards, good rewards, playing with these eval sets to make sure that they can create precision. They can cut down the lithography quality assurance from six months to three months. And in no time they're going to achieve some real time achievements with that level of precision. These are the kind of real outcomes that we're looking for. The kind of work that you're leading, Mark, which is very inspirational, is how agentic AI in an enterprise environment, with guardrails, with the security, making sure that they can help our workforce be more productive, both from a back office and front office perspective, is actually an inspiration for us to collaborate. But I'll be more than happy to dive further if you have any follow up questions on that.

Well, I think that what you're really starting to articulate is kind of a holistic architecture across the whole spectrum from the chips, the data centers, even the governance, the compliance, the data residency, all, all aspects necessary to have success for the Kingdom in terms of 2030. And I think that that is what is the most interesting part of your vision and especially as you lay out the aspects of efficiency. Now, one of the things that I've been incredibly impressed with is your diplomatic skills to be able to kind of harness really the world's ecosystem to help achieve that. And maybe this is something that I've never met anyone other than, you know, your Excellency who's able to kind of connect to. Not all. Obviously you have tremendous relationships here up and down the valley that you've had for years, but really across the world in the east and the West. So, you know, you've been able to tap into these alliances, the relationships that you've been able to do that. How have you done that? How have you been able to build a bridge where others have not, where you're able to talk to, you know, major, major vendors? I won't go through all the names because it's all been Very clear what you've been able to do. You know, how do you achieve that diplomatic success so easily? It seems so effortless.

Let me share with you the coaching and the guidance that I have received from His Royal Highness. He believes that AI is a general purpose technology where nobody should be left behind. If that is the conviction that we have to double down on bridging west and east and east and west, I'll give you three data points on compute. We share that we need 63 gigawatts worth of energy by the way, by 2030, that's as much as India, the most populous nation is going to need. We cannot afford a world where Oxford just recently done a study that where 32 nations out of the 192, 93 depends. And I see Doreen in the audience within the UN, we can't afford for only a handful of the nations to have AI zones, mind you, 90% concentrated into two countries. I can't imagine a general purpose technology being concentrated into two countries.

We should recognize. Doreen, the head of the ITU is here.

Doreen, please give our round of applause.

Please and be recognized. Doreen, the head of the ITU is here. Thank you so much for being here, Karina.

It's been fundamental.

I'm so grateful to you.

We worked with her on equals during the digital age and now on AI for good. And it has been an absolute honor and a privilege both of us mark as a strong contributor to the rtu, to the waf, to all the multi stakeholder engagement scenarios. But going back the COMPUTE divide His Royal Highness thesis, this is general purpose technology. We have a fiduciary duty to leverage our capital, our land, our captive market to be able to close down this divide. Secondly, there's a data divide. The last time I checked, and I love, I was educated here, I have huge gratitude to this economy and to this nation. But the last time I checked, there is as many English speaking folks around the world as Arabic speaking folks. And we can't afford a world where models today are only trained predominantly in one language. We need to make sure if this is a general purpose technology, we can't leave anybody behind when it comes to the data divide as well. On the algorithmic divide, I'll call our dear friend, our common friend Jensen here. 50% of the AI researchers come from the East. And if we want to allocate talent and technology, let's call it as it is powered by US technologies, to close down these three divides, we must come together and the kingdom wants to serve as this bridge between west and east and east and West. And I think, Mark, with the incredible leverage, access and influence you have, I want to congratulate you from the stage for the instrumental piece that you have played also in Bridging between West and East. So let's give a big round of applause for our dear friend here. Thank you.

So I think this is the seminal piece that I am fascinated with, with your leadership here. You have laid out this vision, I think, brilliantly, not only starting with your background, but then kind of leveraging into 2030 and then getting into the specifics. We've all heard this, but now we're really kind of getting to the crux of the matter where you've really kind of said in kind of a brilliant way that this kind of divide or this gap between west and east is bridged by the Middle East. And I think that that is such a powerful thought. Now, this is a historic week for the Middle east, and it has been. And there's, you know, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. But in this moment of really redefining the Middle east, that also one of the roles in the redefinition is the bridge that you are building yourself and that you're able to tap these things and connect them. Can you kind of enlighten us to kind of how you see this world? Because this is something that you have done that no one else has done.

As His Royal Highness always shares it. Praise Mohammed bin Salman as the heart of the Arab and the Muslim world. A prosperous and a peaceful Middle east is a prosperous and peaceful world, if you look at throughout history. As a matter of fact, I was just sharing this with you. If you look at the kingdom, if you look at history in terms of archeology, you're talking about more than 5,000 years worth of civilizations, pre Judaic, Judaic, Christian and Muslim times. And it shows you how close we are and how much shared values we have. And that's why I believe genuinely, that His Royal Highness wants to leverage our resources, our talent and our technology, similar to the amazing work that we see here in this room, to double down on peace, on progress, for prosperity. And that's, in essence, why we exist.

So what advice would you give to leaders who are trying to bring these things together? And what do you think? And when I say bring these things together, I mean bringing the west and east together, you know, as kind of, in some ways, not only someone who's accomplished doing it, but as a somewhat, you know, observer of both worlds. You know, that bringing these worlds together, that you found that link, what is it?

I'm a big fan of does it make sense?

Kind of where I'm. Yeah, okay.

Makes a lot of sense. I'm a big fan that history is a great predictor of the future. If we look at the analog age, it took us what, Doreen, 106, 70 years, 112 years. 112 years to achieve a trillion dollars of economic value in the analog world. And practically we left everybody behind. As a matter of fact, if you talk about south and north, you're talking for every dollar made in the south, you're talking about 10 to $15 being made in the North. Now it got a little bit better during the digital age where for every dollar made in the Global South, 3.$5 were made in the North. But you're still talking about 2 billion people without clean water. You're talking about 800 million folks without clean cooking solutions. You're talking about without access to health care and a lot of the services and education. And when we saw that firsthand in Covid, how many folks were left behind? So we know that fragmentation and polarization is not a net positive outcome for humanity. We know that hands down, for the Intelligent Age, we have to act now and we have to act fast. Because if the digital economy created in roughly 50 years, $16 trillion worth of economic value, we're going to see $16 trillion of economic value in five years. So we're going to have to move 10x the pace and the speed. That's why in the ITU and in every single platform, from this platform, I think if the Intelligent Age wants to deliver AI as a general purpose technology that leaves no one behind on a net positive fashion, we must come together to close down the data divide, compute divide and algorithmic divide. And I love the work that you're doing here, Mark, and you're definitely part of this solution and you're advocating for it.

Yeah, I'll tell you when it first hit me, it was almost simultaneous. Tomorrow we're going to have Sundar here with Google and you know, you've done an incredible transaction with them. It's amazing. It also enables us as well, for example, and others mainly, let's just use them as just one example. Amazon, others as well.

Okay, but we love everybody.

Oh, everybody. You love everybody. But at the same time, kind of an analog, you're also doing the relationship almost the same week with Alibaba, with Huawei, all the other partners as well. And then you're doing it beautifully in the left hand and the right hand. It's a dance, it's emotion that's synergistic. And yet other countries don't seem to be able to kind of have that beautiful balance. They're forced to choose sides, but you're not. How are you able to do that? How are you able to have that positioning and that flow?

I'm a technocrat at heart. And as a technocrat, we look at the fundamentals. Anybody who conforms to a regulatory and security environment, we're open. We're a market first approach. But my plea is that going back to my own background in the Kingdom, roughly half of the cabinet were educated in the US Personally. I started my career in the us. You have a head start over everybody else. This is your alliance. The kingdom is your longest standing alliance in the past 90 years. The founder of the kingdom, King Abdelaziz, who's the grandfather of the crown prince and the father of the crown, King Salman. Later, he bet on the US if we go back to history, he got a phone call from a number of European nations. We love Europe. I'm not gonna go into which particular European nations. And it was back in the 30s that he said he's gonna bet on FDR, on Roosevelt. And he sent him a letter. This is facts. You can't change history. FDR decided to come and visit him. And since then, they have forged the longest standing alliance. And it's no wonder. We are also your longest standing technological partner. We had the first mainframe since 1946. We had our first national labs, the one we just celebrated micro LEDs with the collaboration with Nakamura, and more recently with a Saudi professor, Omar Yagi, who is a Saudi American who works within UC Berkeley and our national labs, which was also an alliance about helping us not only build our factor based economy or innovation based economy. So my plea here on this stage and my call to action is that the world is much, far better the moment we all work together. And please leverage the Kingdom as that bridge and as your longest standing partner. You know us very well, Mark. Once we partner, we partner for a lifetime. And for us, the US relationship is a lifelong partnership and friendship.

Well, Minister Alshawa, I want to just help the audience because many of them have not yet really been to Riyadh yet and been to Saudi to really be able to kind of come and create the partnerships with you. Can you give them advice? I know there's so many entrepreneurs here, not only physically with us in the audience, but Also watching online, they'd like to kind of understand what are the kind of the one, two, threes, the specific things. They want to come to Riyadh. They want to help create this vision that you're outlining, help to amplify and strengthen the kingdom. What are the things that they should be doing to support you and the 2030 vision?

So, Mark, you were kind enough last night to host us for a dinner and let me share with you the story about what happened on the dinner. Remind me of the Japanese artist.

Oh, Yashiki. He's speaking at 3:30 today.

Yoshiki, what did he say? Where is he speaking next or performing next? Do you remember?

Yes, he's speaking. He's going to be performing next week in the kingdom.

Indeed. So as he was introduced by Mark and he was introducing him, he cut Mike and sorry for doing that. And he said I'm performing next month actually in Alula, which is the place that I told you that has more than 5 to 8,000 years worth of history at Alula as a Japanese artist that we're very fortunate to have. Also he had a couple of celebrities on the table and those celebrities last year they were in the kingdom during the Joy Awards and all of them, they were sharing their own personal stories with you. So in terms of the kingdom, this.

Is a part of Saudi Arabia that has not really been open very long for. But isn't that right? I mean, I think it's a metaphor in some ways, isn't it? Can't you just, I think we should just tap into what we're talking about because it's so important what you're talking about. And that incredible part of Saudi Arabia is something that's, you know, metaphorically, I think represents, you know, everything that we just talked about in the last 40 minutes.

I think seeing is believing. And that's why from this stage, I think as you have invited me, Mark, to Dreamforce and congratulations on putting together, hands down, I thought we had the number one AI event. But this is indeed one of the top up there. I want to invite you back in 2026 March in Leap, which is our largest Tech event with AI as well focus with 250,000 tech folks attending. And I would like to invite all of your colleagues here to be able to see it because seeing is believing.

If it's 250,000, I'm not going to come in because I'm going to be jealous. We only have 50,000 here right now.

Well, it's an opportunity for you to see firsthand how His Royal Highness Vision during the digital age with doubling down on women empowerment in tech and STEM space, the first woman astronaut, a Nobel Prize winner leveraging AI for metal organic frameworks and how we have shifted to the intelligent age, tackling the three new divides of the compute, data and algorithmic divide, all coming together as the bridge for the world closing down these global divides. This is an opportunity for us to continue inspire and let me wrap it up by saying a peaceful and a prosperous Middle east led by the Kingdom is the heart of the Arab Muslim world. Is definitely an opportunity for once again for the Kingdom to demonstrate with its partners and friends how talented technology can.

This is the great place for everybody here. This is the action item next March to come to the Kingdom and to enter the ecosystem in this way.

But let me emphasize this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to join hands with a key partner that is genuine and has demonstrated since the launch of Vision 2030 under the leadership of Israel Highness Mohammed Bin Salman how talent and technology is all about empowering people, safeguarding the planet and shaping new frontiers not only for the digital age, but for the intelligent age. Mark, this has been fantastic and you've been a lifelong partner and a friend and I want to extend it to all of your colleagues by saying that once we partner, we partner for a lifetime. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.

We're so grateful to you. Thank you, Minister, your Excellency, for coming today. Thank you very much. Sam.