Announcing SaaStr AI Summit

Welcome to another weekly SAFTR Sponsor Insider webinar. We're here every Thursday with the asterisk of we took a little break post-Europa, but we are back at it again. And so excited to be sharing some big updates here on the SAFTR front, and then we'll leave some time at the end for questions. I know some of the feedback is like, The webinars leading up to each of our events are always really long but chock full of information. And so since we're about 90 days out from Annual, we'll mainly talk about the AI Summit today and what that means for sponsors and partners of ours. And then, yeah, any specific questions, let us know. We will do a full kind of kickoff to SaaS for Annual. Hopefully you guys, just as a caveat, got our emails last week to update your POCs. Let us know who you want to get access to the portal. So if you haven't done that yet, please do so. But other than that, you know, that's, that's kind of the biggest action item now so that we can get you guys all set up in the portal. And then we'll do a big kickoff formally for all sponsors the week after July 4th, because I know some folks are— some sponsors have told us they're out for, you know, next week, and then some people are out the week after. So we're trying to align on the timing there. That all being said, let's get into what we want to announce today. So let me share this. This. Sure, that's working. All right, I'm gonna go full screen here. It's— I was almost hit the wrong button. Alrighty. Well, big news, everybody. David and I are very excited today to be chatting to you guys about SAS First AI Summit. David, I know you've been chatting to a lot of folks about AI Summit. I'm gonna get into some of the— of what Jason M. Lemkin posted last night and has been tweeting. About AI Summit and some of the feedback from Europa. But off the bat, like, what's your, what's your take on AI Summit? Obviously you were there for, for both London, last annual AI Day, which we did virtually. Obviously this means a lot of things, but wanted to get your take on it first for AI Summit.

Yeah, no, great. Awesome. Great. Happy to be here today and talk about this. So look, I would say Annual '23 is when we first started, AI became a topic and it probably was like, I don't know, 20% of our sessions seemed to talk about AI, even sessions that weren't about AI, people started talking about AI, ended up being about AI, right? And then Europa just a couple weeks ago, I don't know, I mean, I think it was probably 50%. It just seemed to be like the hottest sessions were AI, um, and, and the insights that it wasn't just pure AI, it was like this intersection of AI and SaaS and how to leverage AI for, uh, the SaaS motions and the SaaS scaling that's been going on and, and how to do it better and, and leverage the, the, the new, uh, the newest technology. Um, so I think there's been momentum building for quite some time, and people are just hungry for insights and learnings and bringing together great minds and the great, uh, the, the best businesses and the best thinkers around, uh, how to combine, uh, you know, what it means for AI and SaaS, um, where do they converge, um, how it's coming together. I think, you know, I've talked to so many startups where, you know, that's what they're building today, right? Like, it's just the thing to build. And, uh, why wouldn't you, uh, at this time? So I don't know, a lot of momentum going into this. It's what everyone's hungry for. It's what people want to talk about and learn about. So it's just, it's just, uh, feels like a great opportunity. And from a sponsor side, you know, so many sponsors have great AI offerings, AI capabilities, and just aligning that, um, with the theme of the event is something that's a really great match. So that's what I'm hearing.

No, it's Yeah, no, I think that's helpful context. I'll help share a little bit more. So AI is not new to SAS by any means. But to David's point, and if you guys haven't seen the blog post yet, we'll cover a lot of it here of Jason M. Lemkin, our CEO's announcement of the SAS for AI Summit inside of SAS 3 Annual. So no, I think it's— yeah, I think to your point, like a lot— we saw a lot of AI kind of come into last year's event almost at the final mile of like we kind of already had all of our speakers. And then a bunch of folks were like, Well, can I come and talk about AI though? So, yeah, it was, yeah, maybe 30% as you said. And then, yeah, Europe was about half. And some of those were strictly AI companies, right? Like OpenAI, Synthesia, DeepL. Like, these are str— like, to your point, I think SaaSers AI Summit is great because it's, it's both, right? We'll get into kind of the sub-theme of it and what that means for everyone here. But yeah, I think just at a glance, it's really great because it's you have companies that are gonna be at SaaS 3.0 speaking about, you know, how they're doing AI, you know, OpenAI, lots of really great ones that are GitHub, right? They're all chatting about AI and how they're doing it for real. And then you have companies that are more, let's say, of the traditional SaaS companies chatting about, you know, how they've incorporated AI. So you do get both, right? You get both sides of the mix of people who are in the space building, native AI things and apps and platforms, and then folks that are incorporating these things into their SaaS tools and products in the cloud, right? So no, I think it's such an interesting apex time of how this is all coming together, right? Because to your point of like, you know, annual, we saw it very last minute kind of come in. Then we did, you know, the virtual AI Day. Obviously that was all AI. That was a full day, right? People wanted more. And so So we, we did about half the content at Europa AI focused right between those two buckets. And now we're gonna do the AI Summit within SaaStr Annual. So it's gonna be, you know, throughout the 3 days of SaaStr Annual. You can come just for the AI part of it if you want. Obviously we recommend going to all of it because there will be, you know, you still need to know how to grow and, and fathom the rest of this and operate. We always recommend coming to the whole thing, but if you wanna come for the AI part only, You can. But yeah, obviously, it's— we're leaning into it, right? And because it's so top of mind. And I think too, there's not a whole lot of dedicated content on how to do this for real. So I'll let this maybe play without audio in the background. Sorry, the audio played for me. That's because there's loud audio in the background. But yeah, I think part of it is like, you know, some of this tagline, which I'll get into a little bit of like, what's real, what isn't, and what will be. So kind of the inspiration and nature for the SaaStr AI Summit at Annual was like, There's a lot of— obviously you can't avoid talking about AI now, right? It's top of mind for everyone. I think I saw like a Jason M. Lemkin sent around to our team like this interview Byron Dieter did where he was like, you know, it was this week, I think it was. He was talking on, you know, CNBC or something about how, or Bloomberg on how, you know, AI is like a— this is the next leveling event in like SaaS and cloud and technology. Like you're either on the train or you're not. It's the next big boom, right? So, but I think part of that, there, there's a lot in there that's hard to distill. And so I think where we've, where we've engineered our content, how we've engineered this AI Summit and SaaStr Annual is to help everyone, including all of our sponsors, discern like what's real, what isn't, and what's coming down the line, right? Because there is so much information out there. There's a lot of people talking about, about this on LinkedIn, but not necessarily the people who are doing it, right? There's a lot of commentary on it. And so I think where a lot of inspiration for the content came from is, you know, we want to do this differentiator, like what's actually real, what's working. And that's where we saw a lot of traction, just the London event of like, that's how we built that content and themes. And some of our sponsors did that as well in their presentations, right? They're able to talk about, you know, how they, you know, both Oracle and IBM, how they've been building this obviously for years, right? They've been doing this for decades probably. So they've been doing this a long time. They know how, what's real and what kind of isn't, right? So they've got some good parameters to share. Then you've got folks like João at Hypergrowth Partners who is, you know, has utilized AI in marketing to this crazy degree. Not that you have to get to that level tomorrow. But, you know, he's got a lot of really great tips. If you haven't watched that one from Europa, you can watch that one. But content like this, right, is what we're gonna be bringing to the annual. Like, okay, he's actually doing it for real, right? Like, he's a good example to learn from of he's helped all these great companies, right? Like, I think he said Ramp, Reddit, a few others that, you know, he's helped them literally grow for real and like improve their numbers with AI.

So I would say, yeah, just to jump in, sorry to cut you off, but that was one of my favorite sessions at Europa. You know, I don't get to see them all, but I got to see G's and like it wasn't about AI, it was about growing your business, but it was about how—

but using it. Yeah.

Top in class, best in class companies, like you said, Ramp, Reddit, others are leveraging AI to radically change their go-to-market. And I mean, the place was standing room only and, you know, folks flowed out and right there was the opportunity for sponsors to have, you know, to continue that conversation, which is really what you want to do, I think, as a sponsor, which is build off the themes of the event that everyone's there to talk about. And so that's something that's going to be a big opportunity in 3 months.

Yeah. Yeah, and it's not that far away. So I'm going to try and flip to the next slide if it lets me. So yeah, to your point, yeah, this is all— the AI summit is going down during SAS Grand Annual. It's at SAS Grand Annual. So yes, that is— so that's why you see the same dates if there is any confusion there. It's inside of SAS Grand Annual, as we say. But it's a full-blown content, a lot of the networking. And then to our point, a lot of the sponsors will be chatting about AI. It's, it's, I think it's, it's, it's graduated from a sub-theme to an actual summit within SaaStr this year, which I think is actually super helpful for a lot of folks. Not that we won't have that great style of SaaStr content that's actionable to help you scale, right? For multiple days. And we still have a lot of that to help you round out your business. And that's why a lot of people come to SaaStr. But I do think this is important to lean into and to also, you know, get some education around it. So we're, we're, we're actually being really, really picky on who we say yes to, um, to get to come speak at AI Summit. Um, the rejections have been a little bit great. We're like, can you do Workshop Wednesday instead? Because we're, we're, we're like full for AI Summit. So yeah, it's a little crazy. If you look at the website, you can see some of the speakers there. We try to be, you know, super picky with like, you know, we have like NVIDIA, OpenAI, like of course you're gonna have those. Um, but yeah, anyways, so we've, we've been super picky so that you guys can get the, you know, the learnings of what's real and what's not at the AI Summit this year. And, you know, for our sponsors or maybe those thinking about sponsoring, I think to David's point, a lot of this, you know, it calls it up here a bit. I've linked the article here. If you go on sas.com, it's on our homepage. We just announced this. I think to David's point, right? Like if you, whether you have AI in your product or not, I think it's important to help folks who are attending SAP re:Inno, because a lot of them will be there for this AI summit, right, is to how to monetize an AI, right? Like, what can you do that plays nicely with things, right? Like, do you play nicely with things like a Zapier, like an Apollo, you know, anything like that that uses AI? Do you, do you integrate with OpenAI? Anything like that, right? I think that's important for folks to know. I think, again, from those who have been in the trenches, like the Oracles, the IBMs, the Google Clouds that are coming and sponsoring in September and have been doing this for a long time, Right. I think they're, they're, they're also trying to help get folks over this hump of like expectations versus reality in AI, especially as like customers or prospective customers, how it makes them more efficient. I know that's top of mind for a lot of our sponsors and partners too. And it is for the attendees, right? So I think anything you can weave all together in that of like gaining people, you know, efficiencies, obviously we know budgets are tight this year. So any efficiencies you can help them gain with your product, whether it's AI or not, you know, that's, that's, that's really what's going to be helpful for folks to see at SaaStr. I think too, one thing I'll call out, we saw at London that we actually didn't, maybe didn't see as much at Annual last year is we're starting to see AI on the actual booths. And I want to call that out because last year at SaaStr Annual, right, like to our point of, of how David brought it up, like a lot of the content ended up being about AI last year at SaaStr Annual. It was not really bite. We were like, okay, we know we just have like an AI track. So we did an AI track. But that was kind of, yeah, again, it was at the, at the, the, the growth of AI was just like starting last, last fall. So, so yeah, a lot of it was still, it creeped a lot into the content. It creeped a lot into like what people were chatting about, you know, to the point of we had sessions that weren't about AI that ended up talking about AI and that's all fine and good. I think that's the nature of where we were not even a year ago now, right? In the landscape. And now at Europa, I did see, oh, I would say half the booths, I won't say almost every, but I would say half the booths had some sort of AI tagline on it. Either, you know, if their app did it natively or if they integrate with AI, a lot of folks were hyping that up, touting that out to folks. It is a good conversation starter for folks who walk by the booth. So that's something to think about there. Anything, I think any other like feedback, David, on how it's kind of merged into the physical world? Because that's one thing I noticed, right? Yes, we did more than half the content on the app, but it actually was on a lot of the booths too.

Yeah, I think it was here. There's the opportunity to really put two and two together, you know what I mean? There's an opportunity to speak to your AI capabilities relative to the AI being talked about in the content tracks. You know, I mean, just to keep in mind, so many folks come to SaaStr because of the amazing speakers, the amazing content. It's what draws the high-profile, you know, demographics and audience that we have. It's what brings the community together. And so I think just, you know, tying into that, embracing that, talking about your AI capabilities or how they've impacted your product, right? Some of you you know, have added AI into your roadmap and it's offering new capabilities to what you were doing before. And so just embracing that here, I think makes a lot more— will make a lot more sense even than it did last year where there was just like this focused approach will, I think, bring it together and add a lot of new opportunity for sponsors.

Yeah, I think the other thing I'll say, while we're talking about the prevalence of some of the AI You know, again, you can talk, we creeped into last year's. We're going full bore with it now for AI Summit. Good thing I do know is like of the, some of the folks I've mentioned, right? The, the Oracles, IBM, the Google Clouds, the Runways that have, you know, a distinct AI product. I know a lot of them are thinking this year about doing activations on site that have, that showcase their AI or their intelligence, right? All those companies have said they want to do something that showcases some sort of tie-in back to their model, their intelligence, right? Like showing that off in a real-world format. So yeah, I think to that point of, you know, this is a chance where the physical world will actually meet the digital world in AI, right? It's like, okay, how can we actually display how this works in a real-world scenario because we're at an end of it, right? So I mean, that's just an important thing to think about too as you're thinking about this. It's not just— and we did AI Day digitally a few months ago, but like, this is an actual physical in-person thing. So it's a good opportunity to kind of bring those two, the two worlds together of the AI digital world and the physical world by having this event, right? And, you know, it is a great area to do it. Obviously, a lot of these folks that are coming to speak are based in the SFA area still, you know, doing AI and artificial intelligence. So it's a good call out there. On that. We talked about some of these folks that are coming. We've been super picky about saying yes to, but just a quick, you know, brief look at some of the people who will be speaking about AI at the AI Summit within SAS or Annual this year. They're all on— if you go to either sas.ai or sas.com, these speakers are there. You can see them. We are announcing the agenda, I think, next week. So that will come out soon. And you can see the whole thing. But you'll notice— A lot of it's AI. So don't be shocked that we've told you it's, you know, AI Summit at SASR, and then you're like, wow, a lot of these are AI Summit topics. It's like, yes, well, we had the announcements. But no one's surprised, right? OK, and then I guess just one tactical thing that we'll run through. If you are current sponsors, right, I know some of our current sponsors actually already have AI Summit in their contracts included. If you're like, hey, I signed super early, like I know some people signed literally before next year's event at the other event, and you're like, oh, I have an AI thing I want to showcase, et cetera, just, you know, if it's David, let David know, or, or Waylon or Brian so that they can help you guys take advantage of that. If you are new here, then you'll notice the offerings in our Prospectus and for AI Summit are the same as just Saastr Annual, because again, the whole thing's gonna be woven in, right? So there is, there is a few distinctions on the sponsor side to simplify. Like some of our folks have actual, you know, they, they wanna be on the AI stage. Like, you know, there's distinctions like that. But again, the boots are still the same as, as, as the rest of Saastr Annual. It's just, yeah, the theming and then kind of where we're placing your content if you have content and then, yeah, how you think about activation. So a lot of it is in how you activate, not necessarily necessarily the levels, if you will. Those are all the same. It's just more in how you deploy at SAS Re:ANUAL. So if you haven't seen this before, the other thing I'll call out is I do know we are starting to not hit, but we're starting to creep up on kind of show floor capacity because we are less than 90 days. I think when I looked on Monday, it was like 87 or so. So we're probably 84 or so. I don't know. I don't know if it's— I don't look every day. I do look every couple days. So I do know we're less than 90 days out from the event. So starting to creep on some capacities and some of these levels. So I also think too, 90 days is a sweet spot. Just as an aside, like, I used to be a sponsor of Saastr way back in the day, as hard as that might be for some folks to believe. But I do think 90 days is a sweet spot of like, okay, if you're going to do this for real, you kind of, you could do it in less time if you're motivated for sure. Like I've seen people do it less and it's not like booths are due yet for like another, I think month or two. So there's definitely time on like graphics and that sort of thing. But I think to think about it, like 60 to 90 days is usually that sweet spot of like, okay, if I'm gonna commit and like I wanna make sure I have all my ducks in a row, meaning I know exactly what my booth graphic is gonna be on the back, right? I know what I'm gonna put on this monitor. Sometimes people don't think about this at the last minute, right? I know I'm gonna put it on a monitor. If I'm, you know, a Super Gold, I know what I wanna do for an activation. I know how that, that either does or doesn't play into AI. I know what I wanna do with my customer passes. I know what I wanna do with my, you know, 10-minute speaking session. Like all these things, they do take time, right? And so I think that 60 to 90-day mark, which we're kind of at, we're in now in that band, is the sweet spot for, you know, signing up for something like a SAFTR and, and having the right amount of time to be in all the communications that we've started, right? Like we've actually just started those, like you haven't missed anything yet. You know, you have time to design your booths calmly, you have time to think about your content if you do a Super Bowl or up level, you have time to think about what you want to put on the monitors, right? What you want to, how you want to tie in the physical space and the footprint to the digital stuff and AI. So, and then who you want to send, right? I know travel when you book at the last minute is an added expenditure. So you wanna avoid that, you can, you know, decide who you wanna send now, get the pitch down, right? Figure out what you're gonna do. And a lot of people do get creative, right? So to the point of SaaStr Annual and SaaStr Europa, a lot of folks get very creative in how they're gonna get traffic to their booth in particular, which does take a little bit of time. So anything you wanna add there, David? I kind of rambled a little.

No, look, I think it is, You definitely want to— you don't want to do this last minute. So if you're, you know, you can't—

it's been done.

You can. But yeah, I think, I think now is a good time to, you know, finalize sponsorship if you haven't yet. If you are a sponsor, you're on this call, you're, you're in the right place. And communication, as Amelia said, is really going to be ramping up. Our— the portal is coming out really soon. Right, Amelia, did you announce a date for that yet?

Fourth of July? No, I think we're doing the portal next week, which will have like all the boot specs and stuff in it. And then we're doing, yeah, kind of the kickoff webinar after Fourth of July, because that was kind of the feedback that we got.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, you're, if you're here, you're ahead of the curve and all of that's coming soon. But no, I think Amelia's right. I mean, we've had sponsors come on 2 weeks before and it works out, but it's a lot more stress. So, uh, you know, definitely, uh, the sooner the better.

Yeah, the sooner the better.

Um, and content will be, you know, there's only so much time to do that as well. That has a, uh, you know, there's a harder deadline on that.

So, yep, exactly. Okay. Um, I know we're at the, we're basically at the half hour mark. Anything else you want to hit? Maybe I'll leave it on Super Gold.

No, I think we covered it. And I think, you know, look, let's talk more about AI Day. You know, with Super Gold, there is that opportunity. There's not that many spots left, but there is an opportunity to get your content, you know, on AI Day, you know, if it aligns with the theme. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about it sooner than later. Let us know if you have any questions. Portal coming next week, official kickoff right after July 4th. So yeah, lots of great things to come. And yeah, I think this AI Day is going to be great. We're getting tons of interest, tons of excitement from the community. So yeah, it's going to be great.

Awesome. All right. Well, cool. Thanks for joining me. Hopefully everyone's super excited about AI Day and AI Summit at SAS Annual. If you have any questions, reach out to us. David, how can folks get in touch?

You could, if you want to email me, it's easy, david@saastrinc.com, and that's the way to reach me. And if you want to reach someone else at Saastr, I will pass it along.

Yep, you can reach David at, I'm AI@saastrinc.com.

Wow, look at that, AI.

I know, look at that, right on brand.

I'm DI, well, yeah, okay.

All good, great. All right, guys. Thanks for watching. Hopefully, you're excited for AI, AI Summit at SAS Preannual. We will see you guys next week.