LIVE SaaStr Insider Series: Announcing Digital AI Day 2025

Okay, hello everyone. It seems like we are live. Cool. Thanks everybody for joining. These are Saastr Insider webinar series. If you haven't been to one of these before, we do a focus primarily on what's coming up and what's new here at Saastr from the lens of potential partners and sponsorships. So thanks everyone for joining. If you've missed any of this series beforehand, you can catch them on our YouTube channel. It's just youtube.com/saastrinsider. Saastr and go to the live feed and you'll be able to watch any of the prior ones. So previously on the Saastr Insider webinar series, we chatted about kind of our early renewal incentives for Saastr Annual 2025 after 2024, and then like some of the data from that. So again, those are two good ones to catch up on if you've missed those. Those are just on our YouTube channel. We always, we also write them up on saastra.com. And then yeah, today we wanted to go over an exciting announcement that our AI Digital Day will be back in 2025. So I'm just going to go ahead and share my screen and walk you guys through this if you're unfamiliar with our AI Day offerings and go from there. So let me go full screen here. Okay, awesome. So yeah, AI Day. So we've done this a few times now, both in person and digitally. So this will actually be like our 4th time doing an AI Day or AI Summit, if you will, at SaaStr. We did two of these in person. So at the SaaStr Annual 2023, and then more so at the SaaStr Annual 2024 just this last September. And we also did a digital AI Day last year. I think more so, I think it was May. So it was like right before our SaaStr Europa event in the summer. But now SaaStr Annual, the big in-person one is in May. So we're going to do a SaaStr AI Day digitally again in 2025, which will be super exciting. Again, this will be the 4th time we've done a SAS or AI-focused type event. Second one we've done digitally for overall. So 2 in person, 2 digitally. These are always really well attended, whether it's in person or digitally. Obviously, this is something that people care a lot about right now and want to learn more about. So always great that we can get the community together to chat about these things. And what we'll— I'll go through today's, just give you guys an overview if you're unfamiliar with it, and then also go through the sponsor opportunities that we have for a Sastra AI Day. So this will be new for many of you since we literally just went live with it. We haven't even done a full-blown announcement, which is kind of now. But yeah, I wanted to, yeah, set the stage and announce Sastra AI Day today. So yeah, first and foremost, Sastra AI Day will be back. So be on Wednesday, January 28th, 2025. When we do These are digital events. We usually do like a block of time starting from, you know, anywhere 8 in the morning Pacific time going through 1 o'clock. It's online, it's live streamed much like this Saastr Insider Series is or any of our Workshop Wednesdays. So it's attended both, you know, in the platforms we use and also our broader social media platforms. A lot of people watch the live stream, they play it back. We write up all the content, we post it on saastra.com. So yeah, it's a great engagement. It's a good way to get together. And learn a lot in a short amount of time. Our theme for all of our AI events has always been, you know, where SaaS meets AI. We kind of have differentiated this from maybe other digital or, you know, AI events on focusing on like what's real, what will be, you know, what's kind of the noise out there to avoid. And so, yeah, we really focus on the tactical things within AI that, you know, our community can use. And a lot of our community are CEOs and founders. Followed by like go-to-market leaders in sales and marketing. So really important that that is the overarching theme and focus for our AI Day. And, and it's coming back digitally. So there are a ton of sessions that you can replay and watch from any of our 3 previous AI Day slash AI Summit experiences. Again, they're all on the Saastr YouTube channel. We've written them up on saastr.com. Another one just went live today on saster.com with Oracle. So yeah, that'll give you a good sample of, you know, what people have been chatting about, the type of engagement that we get and so forth. And the type, the types of topics that are engaging to our audience within an AI Day. So it's a, the way we do digital events, I would say is maybe a little bit different than your sure, like traditional drop-in digital event in that, yeah, we do livestream a lot of it. We do encourage all of our speakers to do Q&A. So it's very interactive. And yeah, again, the goal of it is to get folks more so together kind of in between our in-person events, right? So we just wrapped SaaStr Annual 2024. We're moving the SaaStr Annual 2025 earlier in the year to May of 2025 in the Bay Area. So it's a, again, a good touchpoint here. If you have an AI offering or starting to incorporate AI, in your product or you've been AI since day one, usually the AI Day is a great way to get that message in front of folks 'cause it's, you know, solely focused on AI Day. We talk a lot about a lot of topics on saster.com and at the Saastr Annual in any given moment. So it's a good way to hone in on that. And yeah, as mentioned, you know, we will follow up this digital Saastr AI Day with another Saastr AI Summit during the Saastr Annual 2025. So opportunities to do both there. At our— for those who don't know, we do it at a massive like 40-acre campus in the Bay Area. May should be a good timeframe. There's a few, a bit fewer events early in the year. If you guys haven't seen it on Saastr.com, attendance is up 166% year over year, even with the new date. So that's a really good indicator, I think, that folks are excited about it being earlier in the year, and that should excite you as well as a sponsor. Sponsor or potential partner of SAS Annual or AI Day. So yeah, as we mentioned, I covered a bit of this as well already. But again, the focus is to highlight the intersection of where SAS meets AI. Again, give that practical real-world examples of how folks are doing it, who's ingrained in it. And we put some of the speakers here. Again, you can watch it all on saster.com's YouTube or go to just saster.com and you'll see the AI category. Bunch of it is there on zaftr.com. But I, we mentioned a few of these 'cause you know, these are folks that are leading AI departments that usually come speak at our AI-focused events, right? So like a head of AI. So Google Cloud's head of AI came to Zaftr Annual this year. You know, Dialpad's head of, heads of product who are working on the AI features did the AI Day. Blaster Digitally as well. So again, there's just a good mix here of folks that have been super knowledgeable about AI for a while that are now coming to the forefront, you know, to showcase how they're doing this. The goal here again, to be tactical and give, you know, in-depth examples and advice of how you're doing this and how other SaaS companies can do it as well to kind of round out our AI Day. And then we always bring in, you know, big, big company, big enterprise companies to hear their thoughts on how they're doing and what they're doing. I know Jason M. Lemkin, our CEO and founder, will be interviewing one of the monday.com founders during our 2025 Digital AI Day already. So again, we already kind of have a great headliner there in Monday. And again, we just announced this, so we're just going out to other speakers and partners. But I know a lot of folks that'll be listening or watching this back are current or have been current Partners of SaaS-ter at the in-person event. So a great way to kind of do, again, either digital as well. So yeah, so who comes to an AI Day digitally, right? So it's, it's slightly different than our in-person audience only because we can reach so many more people during a digital event. But it's still a very healthy mix of revenue leaders and founders. So again, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we see in person more than half the attendees being at that VP level and above. It actually went up this year to 61% VP level and above. A lot of that is still true for our digital events, right? So we will expect a strong mix of CEOs, CROs, revenue leaders, product leaders, investors attending digitally in 2025, and it's free for attendees to attend. So it's a great way for them, you know, again, to get plugged into the community in between our in-person events. And then we do a full write-up of all these sessions post-event and promote it out. So altogether it does get like a lot of impressions. If you are more interested on, okay, that's great, Amelia, but like, can this help me get lead gen? So I'll explain how that works with our digital sponsorships. I think for in-person, it's maybe a bit more straightforward of how it works, right? You get a booth, people come up to your booth, you talk to them, you scan them, and you count them as a lead for lead gen. We do it a bit differently, but again, similar concept for how we do it at a digital event. When we looked back at the data for our SaaS sponsors of the Digital AI Day that we did this year for 2024, our sponsors saw a range of between 200 to 800, which is a big range, qualified opt-in leads if they met the guidelines, right, of our speaker and sponsor teams, which we have a whole team that does this and walks you through the process of, you know, what What topic will work? What speaker format, right? Like how much time should be slides versus Q&A? You know, what are other people presenting about so that you're maybe not presenting all on the same topics, right? How can you be unique and help your presentation stand out? All of those factors go into, you know, will you be at the, you know, lower end, the conservative end, I should say, of the $200 range to the higher range of the $800. Some of that also has to do with time, right? So we, We launch our digital events first and then we launch the agenda about a month or 6 weeks before. And that's when attendees will start to sign up again because it's free. A lot of people from the broader SaaS community will register to attend. And so the sooner you can get in to an AI Day sponsorship, that will also affect ultimately how many leads you have. You know, it just gives us more time to promote it. So the more time you have to promote it, the, you know, the better you'll be on that higher end span of closer to, you know, 500 to 800 versus 200 if you, you know, come on at the last minute. Again, not that it can't be done, and I do think 200 qualified opt-in leads for a digital event is fairly healthy. It just means, you know, time does help and it's on your side in this case. Since we just announced it and it's not until January, there's plenty— you'll be in all the promotions. So that does actually factor into, you know, why you may see some sponsors skew again on the conservative range of 200, and then why some got on the higher end range upwards of 800 opt-in leads. The way we do it, and I'll, I'll show you guys on an upcoming slide of how we get people to sign up for content and sessions, is, you know, again, as good as your topic can be, that will help too. You know, things like making it stand out and unique, again, super tactical. That's what people want to hear. That will also help in how many qualified opt-in leads you get. And it's all opt-in, right? So all the attendees are physical, maybe not physically because it's digital, but are raising their hands to say, you know, they wanna go to your session and hear from you in the signup process. So that's how we deliver these qualified opt-in leads back to you guys. So again, a great, a great thing to think about maybe because it is a digital event. So in, in the grand scheme of things, it's a fairly low lift. It's really turnkey, right? Speaker and content is going to be the most lift that you have. Going into this being in January, you know, most people have, again, if you have a head of AI or a lead in AI that can really speak to this, usually that person is a shoo-in. And, you know, we may ask for co-presenters, etc., even though it's, you know, 10 to 15 minutes, just because it will help people think about how to integrate this more broadly into their systems and companies. So that's how it works on this. There's kind of, that's the majority of how sponsors and partners get involved with it. There is a way where you do not need to present a session, right? If you're like, okay, even that is too much of a lift for us. There's an even more turnkey way to do it where we do a version of what we call our Who Do You Wanna Meet program where attendees can simply opt in to meet with you and opt in to meet with, you know, executives from your company who wanna learn more and meet you as a sponsor. So the pricing on this, I will say, is list pricing if you do it bundled with a SAS TRA Annual. So that's the in-person event sponsorship. You know, there's kind of different nuances there that we can help guide you through here if that's something where, you know, AI Day seems of interest to you, either with or without a SAS TRA Annual physical in-person sponsorship. So again, we got to touch on this. I more so want to— I'll come back to that. But yeah, I wanted to flip to this slide of like how it works for the in-agenda placement. So this is really important. This is how we do it of, you know, all these— These sessions and contents go into the agenda for the day for AI Day. And then attendees, as they sign up, will be picking, you know, their sessions and also signing up for who they want to meet with. So again, it's a really great way to get folks opted into your company. And then we give that back to you as a lead. You know, most of them will come to your, to your session live. Some will watch the playback. Some will read, you know, the, the post-event write-up and like the recap on it. Overall though, you know, these do get a healthy mix of who comes IRL and then who you can follow up with afterwards to send the session to, right? If they missed it or if they had to drop, 'cause it is a digital touchpoint. But yeah, this agenda placement is super important to how we do things and how we drive leads. But again, just goes to show you how it is opted in on the attendee side. So really great to see that there. As I mentioned, we do livestream these, so there's, there's usually a varying amount of viewers depending on livestreams. And then yeah, lots of post-event impressions on sashr.com, et cetera. I think one thing I'll just, I'll, I'll address before I get to the slide really and dive in here is, you know, a lot of people ask me or us like how these digital events differ from in-person. And yeah, there's obviously a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. So some of the similarities being, you know, we pull from our core speaker pool of just like SaaS founders and like hero SaaS companies throughout the years. Sometimes it's just easier for them to speak digitally, you know, if they have a date conflict in May, that's how we can, you know, pull some of these folks to come be speakers and anchors at our digital events. So again, in terms of speaker caliber and quality, that's pretty much the same. It really just comes down to a scheduling thing and formatting. Sometimes digital is a little bit, again, easier schedule-wise, you know, if you're not in the Bay Area, then you don't have to get on the plane to come in May. So sometimes that is a for folks and easier for them to come speak or, you know, touch base with the Saastr community as a speaker. So again, that's, that's super similar. Our audience is super similar as well. Again, between our in-person or our digital events, you know, you'll see it here. You do get a healthy mix of, you know, we're, we're at 61% VP level and above for our in-person events. We're at 40% CEO/founder for our digital events, right? Where we have more sales and marketing on the digital side. That makes sense, right? If you think about it, you know, the tickets cost money to come to SaaS Trends and your team. So it is a lot of execs that are coming and it might make sense. You know, they, we've seen in the event, not to go too far in the weeds, but we've seen in our event trends, you know, most folks bring at least 2, if not 3 people with them to the show. Usually, you know, either another exec or decision maker or somebody in their go-to-market teams if they're not exhibiting. And so it just makes sense here that, you know, one of the differences being in our Finance on the digital side that you'll get, you'll skew more sales and marketing and product than we do in-person because it's free to attend, right? So it's, it's, it's a little bit easier for folks that are in the SaaS community to, to come and watch this. We do still skew primarily, you know, North American market, which is also true of our in-person annual event. You know, for our in-person Europa event, that's different. We skew mostly UK and, you know, EMEA. For our APAC event we did, it was mostly APAC and then EMEA. So yeah, that's really, again, a big similarity there. You will get mostly North American companies that are attending. That has to do a lot with how we do our time of day for our digital events, right? Like we don't start until 8 AM Pacific. That's already kind of the early afternoon for the UK and elsewhere in the world. So it does help us like keep our community, which again, most folks in our just broader community who are like reading the newsletter, sign up for SaaStr, et cetera, are in North America. And so that's why we have structured the digital events that way. So those are some of the, you know, differences and similarities. Obviously a big difference of when you're in person, you can talk to these people face to face. I, you know, I can't stress enough how much that helps on, you know, pipeline and time to close. And value for leads. So obviously that's a bit different than coming to present at a digital event that is maybe like our AI Day that is AI-focused. But again, it just, you know, means that you will get probably more leads at once in like one shot, right, from a speaking session. And you may need to qualify it a bit more than, you know, if you're having longer conversations with folks at an in-person event. So you're just getting, you know, more volume, high-level touchpoint in the digital event, and then more so like down funnel at the in-person event since it is face-to-face. That's just, you know, the nature of the formats of those two things. But again, our core audience, pretty much the same across both entities. So yeah, AI Day will be super exciting. Again, it'll be our fourth digital event that we're doing. I'll just flip back here for a second of, you know, if this is something where you have an AI offering or embedded into your product, or you've been, again, AI since day one, Highly recommend considering the AI Day and getting involved there and reaching out to us to see, you know, what, what might make sense. It is in Q1 for most folks, you know, depending on where your fiscal ends or begins. So how we thought about this date is, you know, since we're doing SAS for Annual in person in May of 2025, you know, again, that's Q2 for most folks. It's a good earlier touchpoint again to drive people down funnel, a little bit faster time to value at the in-person event in May. And, you know, H1 of 2025, we see this as a good one-two punch to maybe couple together. If this is in Q1, right, it's January. There's enough spread and time in between the two things that they are, you know, similar but different, as I just explained. But being at the end of January too means that, you know, if you get involved sooner, like we promote this all through, you know, the holidays and then the new year, and then you have some time to really promote it as well and hone in on, you know, your speakers and content to make it really good because you have until the end of Jan. So I do think it's a good, it's a good touchpoint, right? There's not, it's usually quieter in January from what I've seen from a lot of like lead gen events. You know, most people are just coming back from the holidays and getting back into the swing of things and, and, and maybe doing some last minute planning of you know, how to hit the quarter. But this is a good way to kind of boost your lead gen if you want to get a turnkey way to do it. The biggest thing is coming up with the speakers and the content. The rest is turnkey, right? We do the rest. We get the attendees, we drive the opt-ins, and then we deliver you your leads. And so, you know, the follow-up is on you guys. But again, that's for post-event. Really going into it pre-event, it's fairly turnkey and only needing to, you know, work with our team on the speaker content. And we will work with you to make sure it's great and that it's something that resonates with our audience. So all that to say, I will flip to the last slide and keep it brief so that, again, if you have any questions on AI Day, you can reach out to our team and maybe how this works, you know, with Saastr Annual in mind in May of 2025. But if you are interested in learning more about Saastr AI Day, just let us know. You know, you can email sponsors@saastrinc.com. That goes to me and a few other folks. You can also just email me directly. I'm just amelia@saastrank.com. Pretty easy. It's just my first name. And yeah, we can go from there to help you get involved. Again, if this is something that sounds of interest and, you know, even if it doesn't work out, we'd love to see you attend Saastr AI Day. As I mentioned, it's digital, it's free. Signups, we're just doing the announcement now. So signups will go live in the next few weeks once we have a few more speakers. But yeah, it'll be a great thing to attend and touch base with on the SaaSWorks community. That being said, again, you know, if you've missed any of our last ones, feel free to email me. I can catch you up. But we will do one of these again, you know, in the next couple weeks. We're going to talk a lot about our summits on the next SaaSWorks Insider webinar. That was something new that we added for 2024 that we're going to continue and build on for 2025. You guys might have seen the ones that we did this year that was like, you know, the CMO Summit, the CCO Summit, all those kinds of things. We'll do those again next year and explain how you can get involved if that is something of interest. But obviously that's in May. So, you know, there's a little bit more of a timeline. And we are just now announcing AI Day for January. So again, if you want to get involved, just let us know. But yeah, hopefully this is exciting. And in either case, you participate in AI Day, it'll be our 4th one. So yeah, these are always really good to attend. I always learn something new. And yeah, it's really great to always connect with our community in between our in-person events. So, um, with that, you guys now know how to reach me and us. Thanks for watching. We will see you again next time for another SaaStr Insider webinar. Hopefully you've been enjoying these, um, and we hopefully you're getting