AI, M&A, and the Future of SaaS: Lessons from Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, Co-Founder and Chair

I'm the last generation of CEOs to say, maybe you are too, that we only had human employees. Even now I work with agents every day to make Salesforce better, and I train my employees to do that too. I created this V2 mom process when I was at Oracle and have used that to guide Salesforce for many years. And now for almost three years when I write a V2 mom. One, I always have a Salesforce executive with me, and two, I. I now have an agent with me as well.

Yeah.

So that idea that it's the three of us working together, I like having an AI partner. I think it helps expand my own consciousness. Gives me a little more enlightenment myself.

Hey, everybody at Saster, we have a treat today. After 12 years of Saster content. 10,000 posts, 2,000 Saster annual sessions. I added over a hundred thousand LinkedIn posts, almost a thousand podcasts, especially the ones that Harry Stebbins did for us in the early days. He's done a lot with Mark. We have the og. We have Mark Benioff today to talk about a bunch of things, but I want to do a really practical discussion about AI and B2B, the real stuff at the application level. Mark, thank you so much for making time for your busy schedule.

I'm a huge fan and I'm so thrilled to be here with you and looking forward to the discussion.

Okay, before we get there, I want to talk about today and the future a bit. But one thing, you're at 40 billion AR plus or minus. I know AR isn't Gap, but you're right about there. Right.

I think we did give guidance at about 40.9 billion for this year and yeah, I don't know, something like 12 or 13 or 14 billion in cash flow.

How does it feel?

Feels exactly like day one. You don't think about those things. It's like completely irrelevant. Those aren't the things that are important, but it is amazing. But those aren't the most important things.

Once in a while, I think we. We almost forget to celebrate milestones. Right. Because there's always another quarter, another year. But I don't know. As someone who's been doing it for a while, I do think it's. I. I do think it's pretty. Pretty neat in its own way.

I'm not a celebration guy. That isn't how I know. I don't really do that are very important. Like yesterday was an important moment. We had an incredible tableau user conference.

Yep.

In San Diego. We had 9,000 folks. There was awesome. And the Thing about Tableau is it's a company that I always loved. It's a product I always loved. I always loved the space. I always loved analytics. I always loved business intelligence. And then we were able to buy the company, which was a moment in time that we were able to do that. And then we've been able to grow it really aggressively since we've bought it. And then we introduced this new product yesterday, which is basically completely new product. So inspired by the original founders of Tableau and the brand and the name, but then delivering this amazing new platform, really, that's all about apps and agents and AI and you and how it all works together for our. We call our data fam.

Yeah.

Which is the community around Tableau. So that's a moment that I'm willing to celebrate.

That's a good one.

I couldn't believe it. I've been waiting for that because I've always loved the product, but there were parts of the product that it didn't have that I always wanted. And so that's exciting for me to be able to create the value for the customers. And so I'm willing to celebrate that.

That's a good. Okay. Congratulations. How long was it on? Let's actually talk about M and A. It wasn't on my list, but it's so impressive what you've done with M and A. How long was Tableau on your want list before you were able to make the deal happen?

Oh, forever. Because there's only certain brands that really are meaningful in our industry, and that's one. And look, it's going to trade once. So you have to decide, is this going to be part of your solution? And the way I've always looked at it is that idea of business intelligence, analytics. And even in the era of AI that we're in right now, you can see with this new agentic front end, this vision of agentic analytics, combined with the marketplace of apps and the semantic layer, the ability to talk to Tableau in this incredible new way. It's just beautiful. And so I'm very excited about that.

Yeah, AI, just analytics has. It's all. It's one of the most important things in enterprise software, but it's been so limited to needing an analyst or someone that can run it for you.

It's a product that I used, I always. I admired. At times I was jealous of it. And now it's been part of Salesforce, I don't know, for about seven years or something.

Yeah.

But it takes a while after you buy the product. To then you're evolving the management team. You are really looking at what are all the different pieces that are, I would say relevant for the customers. You have to understand the community. It's not. You have to understand why they are successful as a company. And look, let's put in that category. Slack. We all use Slack. We've always been using Slack. Everyone loves Slack.

Right now I'm on Slack and so am I.

Guess what this moment that is very important that we need to be able to bring that same solution. But it's not the same old Slack. We are incrementally taking the same playbook where it's all about you and agents and Slack working together. And that's what's going to be cool. It's already actually in there. But it's incredible. The fundamental direction of Slack with AI. Slack and AI, those are two ideas that were really made for each other.

Yeah, for sure. I'm excited because we all live in Slack and it should just do. It should be my meta agent. It should be my meta agent for everyone at the company. Even if I don't. Even if I'm not in Tableau. I'm not even in Salesforce. Slack should be my meta agent for all that data. Yeah.

And my vision is if you're in Slack, you are in Tableau and you are in Salesforce.

Yeah, exactly. Right.

There shouldn't be. It shouldn't be modal. That was something that I always learned from Steve Jobs. But it's incredibly hard to execute because you're buying something and you're acquiring something. It means that it's been built with a whole different approach. But this is possible and I think the Tableau really got there yesterday. And if you have a chance to look at the demos, I think you'll be pretty impressed.

I will do more and we will write it up. But M and A. So MuleSoft last quarter, 22% growth after years after you bought it.

Right.

Tableau 16 Slack ML. Everyone has their opinions on Slack because we all use it.

Right.

Everyone's got an opinion. 17% after you bought it. In all seriousness, you're going to lose the. Even if you had founders at these companies, you're going to lose the DNA. How do you bridge that gap when. Because you're. You're. Salesforce is successful because you're running it. How do you bridge the founder DNA when you buy it?

Revenue lines. These are not small.

They're all billions.

Yep, they're in the billions. And so when you're. There aren't that many software products in the billions. And these are. And I think that Slack had a huge year last year. Not only because the product is great. Competition let their guard down I think a little bit. But number two is that we changed our distribution model for Slack last year. Nobody really saw that. Which is that we allow all of our sales force to sell it, get quota credit for it to basically made a peer product with the rest of our products. And it was a huge supercharge for the product. And I'll tell you why it's exciting because up to that point we were trying to keep it how it was, keep it going, give them more reps, more this, invest in it, run it as a separate company. But then eventually we just hit the button and said, you know what? This thing is amazing but it needs to come together with our entire platforms. And you're going to see that incrementally, especially as we get to Dreamforce, how all the things that are critical with Slack are really gonna be deeply integrated with Salesforce as well.

Yeah. Is there and just is there in the deep enterprise is teams really even a competitor? Is this a social media fiction or is it a real competitor?

You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to Slack before we bought it and that was pretty bad. And they were running their Playbook and did a lot of dark stuff and it's all got in a written up in an EU complaint but Slack made before we bought them and you never really know what Microsoft's going to do. But that was pretty nasty. And I really am not. I don't. I'm not an. I don't really admire what Microsoft did with Slack. They. And how they used a lot of their assets to really try to attack them when Slack wasn't really going up against Microsoft. So to do these things I was. Did not find them to be on the up and up.

I would say yeah, it was an odd time. 2021 is like a generation before AI. Right. It's almost a different world where it seemed Slack and Zoom probably seem like these huge. They were going to bring down Microsoft and it's ridiculous to think about that today. You should support these applications in 2021. They seemed like they were taking over the world.

You can see that Playbook being used. We saw it on Netscape. We saw it on many things.

Yeah.

Over time. And it's like. And that's that. That that playbook should get ripped up and thrown away.

Yeah. Yeah. The. There is an inherent aggressiveness in enterprise software, but there's Limits as well.

You can see it, by the way, getting played out right now between OpenAI and Microsoft. So it's a weird dynamic. We saw over the weekend, this kind of really interesting presentation that Sarah Fryer, who used to work at Salesforce, and she's the CFO. Yeah, OpenAI. I did. And they revealed their stack for the first time, their data center, their apps, their APIs, all the different aspects of the future of OpenAI and the Word. Microsoft and Azure and Copilot weren't on the stack. And that was extremely interesting. And you can see how Microsoft is really starting to run a separate playbook against OpenAI. And it's a fascinating moment, I think, in the, in the history of OpenAI because of that.

Yeah, it's great. It has. It's so funny to think about Microsoft taking potshots at Slack because Azure is so rejuvenated.

Right.

And the world's changed 11 times since then. It's keep it as competitive, but as open as you can.

It's amazing, right? And I think that, yeah, that's not how Microsoft thinks. Microsoft is a company that wants to own it all, control it all. If they see a hot company or hot startup, they ask themselves, hey, why is that not in our world? And, and in the case of. They usually they like to either try to feign an acquisition and then based on that, they execute a playbook or in the case of OpenAI, a partnership is going to become a competition.

Yeah, no, for sure. So related to that on AI. Let me ask you a question. I think maybe it was right after your last earnings call. I. I've been watching you since the first class of AppExchange in 2006. But I saw, man, I saw energy in you recently after I haven't seen it in years. I feel like you're so rejuvenated when you talk about AI, right? Is it like a refounding, a rebirth of enthusiasm for you? It feels like it.

You're 100% right. I've never been so excited about Salesforce. And even here I'm in my office and I just did a product oxide with my top 35 product leaders for three days. And the opportunities ahead are just absolutely incredible. What is going to happen with software? And the transformation of software at every layer is going to be beyond our expectation, beyond our imagination. And you can start to see some of that playing out already. You can see it in a lot of places, you can see it in the startup community, but you can also see with the customers too. And yeah, I'm pretty jacked. I just got back from two weeks in Asia.

Yeah.

And that got really motivated. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was really. I was like in Bhutan, and the king of Bhutan is using Slack to manage their new mindfulness city. So that was. That's motivating to be like. When I see the technology, we're being used in kind of creative and exciting new ways, I get really motivated. Even the hotel that I was staying at in Bangkok, all of a sudden they had to roll out and say, hey, look at. We've been using Salesforce forever and here's how we use it in our hotel. And then I got to Japan, where we've had just tremendous success. We're the second largest software company in Japan. We have a new Salesforce tower on the grounds of the Imperial palace in Tokyo. It's pretty awesome. And if you get to Japan, you got to let me know ahead of time because it's a sight to behold. And the customer success is probably the highest we have in the world. And some of these incredible Japanese companies, what they've done with these platforms is just awesome.

Yeah. We were there in November for a couple founders of Edge. I can let you know next time. It was great. I'll tell you what's weird is when I. I met it with a lot of founders, especially folks. 100 Millionaire is a lot there. Right. And the. But the. The shrinking of the population's tough. They're even worried about it in selling seats. They're like, listen, five years out, it's true. I see 20% seat contraction. This is a worry at a private dinner. Like, I'm literally seeing an annual seat contraction because population shrinking. It's a crazy thing.

Yeah, that's true. And we saw that. Actually. I met with one of the largest companies in Japan and, yeah. Meeting with one of their C level officers, and they have a goal to reduce the number of employees they have by 5% every year and replace them with agents. So that was really a remarkable conversation. But, yeah, you're right. It's very real. The population change is. Is very real in Japan.

Yeah. I'd never heard founders as a group talking about seat contraction due to population contraction. Hopefully we're 20 years out here if it ever happens. So you said you just got 35 product leaders together. Something like that. There was. It just went out that Toby leaked some. Shopify published his memo telling everyone to use AI immediately. What's your version of that at Salesforce? What are you telling folks to stay current and to be up to date.

On AI I'm pretty excited about Agent Force. I A year ago Agent Force was just beginning to be an idea and today it's in the hands of so many customers who are implementing it. Way more than we could have expected at this point.

Yeah.

There's about 5,000 companies who are implementing Agent Force and I already see so many success stories and to see this product in these customers hands at this kind of very early and exciting stage. And it's not what with other products because usually you roll out a product but then you're waiting a while for the customer to get value and start to show you what they're building. But in this case because it's getting birthed from within the platform it makes it very easy for customers to deploy. When I was in Asia I was with Singapore Airlines is a huge customer ours and has been for a long time.

Yeah.

And they of course they're running sales and service and slack and marketing. All the things you expect. But the power of Singapore Airlines is that the CEO his name is Go by the way. So let's go. Incredible visionary CEO and he's building an agentic layer over the airline and that was very motivating because here within a year we're going from idea to this point where these customers are able to deploy a huge amount of value in a relatively short period of time.

Yeah. So many folks talk about. We can talk about a little bit if we don't run out of time about AI for changing coding and programming. You talked about freezing hiring and engineering. I want to get to that. But most folks are not don't have visibility into the contact center. It's just as transformational in one year. It's crazy. The transformation. The contact center isn't it. Agent Force is at the bleeding edge of it. It's so fast.

Look at Salesforce. Salesforce has helped. Salesforce.com, we have 9,000 support agents. We've already done more than a half a million of these interactions with customers and agents. But that idea I think is pretty big and pretty incredible.

Yeah, it is. Do you. I know it's a. I know it's maybe a complicated topic but I'm seeing. I've invested early in a bunch of folks in the contact center gorgeous which has 20,000 Shopify customers and Talk Desk in the Salesforce ecosystem. I'm seeing folks already reducing headcount there 30% already. 30% in a year. It's crazy. What Any thoughts on that?

I'm thinking that I would like to try to do that myself. And that's a big idea. I can deploy those resources to other parts of the company where I desperately need more help and more capability. And I encourage customers to really look at that. That said, customers, especially large companies like ours, the ability to do something like that in a material way, it takes time.

Yeah.

It's that old phrase, people overestimate what you're going to do in a year and underestimate what you're going to do in a decade. And that is where we are with this as well, which is that, yes, we can say this is what's going to happen to the contact center, but we might be saying that a year from now or two years from now still, and then incrementally, we'll have more examples, we'll have pioneers. People have done it, but we're still at the beginning of a lot of these opportunities.

Yeah. Have you. So we rolled out a little AI just on Saster itself. We had 30,000 conversations in one month. It's just pretty crazy. And a lot of. One of the things that surprised me, I thought I knew about AI until I saw it on the other side. I'm what's really interesting how people do things you wouldn't expect. Do things you wouldn't expect.

Right.

Like today someone had a half an hour board discussion about how to work with their board. They up, they shared their board deck. They reached out to me. They did. You wouldn't expect it.

Right.

Any things you've seen that are unexpected?

I think some of the things that I've seen that are unexpected are also expected. And I think, like with. And I like talking about some of these customer stories.

Yeah.

The Singapore Airlines story, the Salesforce story, this idea that we're doing. Already done a half a million conversations. As we kind of head to Dreamforce, I'm sure that we'll get into the millions.

Yep.

And then when I see, like, really solid customers of ours, Lennar, which is one of the largest home builders in the United States, for years they've had this vision that they've talked to us about of not just using our apps, they use all of our apps and do all the customer work. But how can they really provide more service to their customers? How can they provide more revenue lines to their customers? And that idea that has become very real, that's actually happening right now, that idea is going down, that this is going to be something that these customers are going to be served by these agents. And for Lennar, they have given us incredible revenue projections based on what they have found. And I think that is going to be something that we're going to see with a lot of customers. I think a lot of customers are going to all of a sudden start to experiment. And I'll tell you the most exciting thing. Like since we're in the Lennar zone. Yeah, they called me originally. The CEO Stewart is incredible person. Father was the founder of the company. And he said, our guys went to Dreamforce, they came back and we did a hackathon here on Agent Force. And then we have these five use cases. And if they deliver these five use cases, you're going to dramatically impact the financials of this company. And that is what is exciting for me, that we're seeing customers say, hey, how do I really use this technology in an exciting new way and then deliver that value? And that whole cycle from idea to innovation to actually delivery with Lennar, because they're live now, was about six months. So now that's fast at that size. That's fast. And also, is that the end of their story? No, this is the beginning still of the story. Because when we think about what are companies going to be like that are going to be agent first? What is an agent first Salesforce or an agent first Lennar? An agent first Singapore Air. It doesn't look like where we are today. I'm jealous of all those founders who are starting companies now because they're going to be creating agent first companies. I'm the last generation of CEOs to say, maybe you are too, that we only had human employees. Even now I work with agents every day to make Salesforce better and I train my employees to do that too. I created this V2 mob process when I was at Oracle and I've used that to guide Salesforce for many years. And now for almost three years when I write a V2 mom. One, I always have a Salesforce executive with me and two, I now have an agent with me as well.

Yeah.

So that idea that it's the three of us working together and we'll ask that agent really important key questions. For example, hey, how is this competitive against these key competitors? Or is this going to really expand our distribution capacity like we want? Or is this what we want to have happen with our ecosystem? And the answers are surprisingly awakening. That is all of a sudden say, whoa, I didn't think about that. So I like having an AI partner. I think it helps expand my own consciousness. It gives me a little more enlightenment myself. So it's a tool. It's another tool in the Tool chest. And I think it's extremely important that founders use that.

Yeah, I didn't. You've been saying that for a while. The last generation without all human team. And I'll be honest, maybe until six months ago, I didn't fully get it. Like, I thought it was a great catchphrase. But even with now we have our agent AI come to meetings. And what I love about it is it also remembers everything. You don't actually remember what Marc Benioff said on that podcast two years ago, but you know what your agent remembers it and can contextualize into what you're talking about today. Right. It's crazy, right? You're. I like going with the prime version of myself. The digital version of me just remembers stuff and connects it in the way. I can't do it. Like, it's crazy.

That's cool. And I think that idea. Crazy that there is an agent around all the time and we're not totally there. Like, here we are on the podcast. We don't have an agent talking with us.

I think in six months, we will.

Okay. So that's. We're getting. It's like we're making these kind of incremental gains. And I think that's a big thought. And now, what question do you want to ask Mark Benioff about the future? And so this idea that we're wrote a little tagline that I used at Dreamforce last year, which was humans with agents working together to create customer success. And I believe that. I think that this is about us working well with agents together. We're not at that point yet. Still, if you go to help.salesforce.com, we're still at the beginning of what that could be. And I think that for a lot of our customers, we're still at the beginning of what that agentic layer means. And then over time, it can really expand. Now, let's just say this also, the agentic layer is very important, but we still have human beings in our company. I don't know about you.

So a few less than a year ago.

But yes, we have a lot of people that we're hiring.

All hundred thousand in Salesforce. Something like that.

I'm hiring. Yeah, I'm hiring. And I have a lot. I'm hiring more in a lot of key areas because of just demand levels are impressive. So I would say that at that point, applications are still important. Like, we mentioned that we're both using Slack.

Yeah.

And I'm using Tableau and I'm using our sales Cloud and our service cloud, our marketing cloud. And, I mean, and then we've got a lot. I don't know if you've seen, like, what we've done with field service, but I was on the phone yesterday with the CEO of a very large power utility. We have two amazing ones in California. Both of them are huge customers of Salesforce. And our field service app, if you go to App Store and download it, you'll see, like, we have this amazing field service app. Like, these apps are still really important. And in this case of, like, Fire Mitigation, especially in California, it's really important that these folks are out there, they're automated, that we can do things to prevent wildfires. Apps are still important. Humans are still important. In this case, there aren't robots out there doing that yet. Maybe there will be soon. Agents can only go so far until you get into the natural world. So this is a big moment where we can say, wow, we're going to bring huge value. So it's. The apps are important. The data is way more important than ever, because if you don't have the data, your agents are not going to perform with the level of accuracy and capability. I'm wearing a shirt. My favorite customer, Disney. Here's Mickey. And I love. I'll just buy all of the stuff on Disney Store, not because it runs on Salesforce, but because I just love the brand, love the products, and go to the parks and the hotels and all that. But we built this incredible agent that's incredibly fluid, that's able to go through all of their products. But they have done such a great job as a company, Disney, they have so many products. No human could possibly understand all of the products and the combinations and the promotions.

Yep.

But the AI offers tremendous value at that point for the customer and for what they call the cast member, which is their employee. And that is critical. And this idea now that the apps, the data and the agent, these three layers together. And for Salesforce, that's only one piece of code. Like in that new version of Tableau I mentioned.

Yep.

You look at that and you take a look at what we did, and you'll see on my Twitter feed, I have a stack diagram of what we've done with our architecture. And it's just not just some AI thing running out there in the wild. It's something that we're going to use in our company that create a better company. And AI and agents are a key part of it. But so is the data and so is the app, because it's about you and apps and agents all working together and that idea of these three critical layers. And then like last week I was on a zoom with the CEO of an incredible robot company in San Jose. And that fourth layer is going to be the robotic layer, but it needs the other three layers to operate because the agents are going to get manifested into these robots. So that will be a key next step. And we'll see that by Dreamforce. I'm sure that these four layers all have to work together. But remember, it's one piece of code. It's one piece of code for Salesforce. Now we sell it in different kinds of brands and flavors and this and that, so forth, but it's still one piece of code. And that is going to be incredibly important going forward for these customers, especially as they scale these implementations and make this, these enterprise wide implementations that are going to be like transformational for how they interoperate with their employees, their customers, their partners.

I'll tell you, for what it's worth running our AI agent, what I learned I didn't get this before was I actually think within 12 months this agent human combination, I think every single zoom, every single meeting, every sales rep, every cast member, every person human should come with their AI. And we, I trained mine on 12 years of 10,000 pieces of content and all this stuff. It knows there is no excuse to show up to a sales meeting and not know whether this integration works in Slack. What the pricing is for 10. There's just no excuse. And we should be on a meeting together. And if I don't know, I should be able to say digital. Mark, remind me, how does this slack plus tableau integrate with a 1970s SAP implementation? And you should have this. The answer like that should be like 12 months because I can already do it on our AI. It's crazy. So everyone should come to that meeting like now.

100%. That's the vision of the future, right?

Yeah.

It's about humans and agents working together.

Yeah.

And you just articulated it beautifully. And look, you might be there, but most people are not.

No, no. I wasn't even there until three weeks ago. But now I get it now, Now I get it because I tried we Brian. I tried to used to talk to Digital Brian Halligan. He was early, it was pretty funny from HubSpot. But he. And he's great. But he trained it only so much.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

And he's like, I trained it. I'm like, I'm going to try to train this to S level S tier level. And I trained it on everything. And now I'm like, if this guy just comes to zoom, then first of all, he can answer all the questions at night and on weekends. And if he comes to every meeting, there's no excuse, there's literally no exc. To not know every corner case at Salesforce. There's no excuse to not know how every custom tab, every workflow.

It's a huge vision for the future.

Yeah. I think it's soon.

It's pioneering.

All right. One people talk about all over social media. I don't think they know what they're talking about is where the money comes from. AI. What are you seeing at budgets? Is there really an AI budget at Leonard and Singapore era? Are they repositioning budgets? Are they stealing it from old boring stuff like where's the money? Where's the incremental money really coming from in your experience?

I think you have two things going on. First of all, we just talked about how excited AI is and that's going to change these companies and transform them and transform these employees. But for the vast majority of companies.

Yeah.

Who have been playing around with these models and tools over the next call it three years or four years of generative AI, they've mostly failed. You don't have that many great stories of how AI has transformed these companies. That's one of the reasons why Agent Force is as exciting as it is, because it's practical, it's specific, it's tactical. It gives them clear action plan on exactly how to go ahead and execute the AI playbook for a company. And in a lot of cases, you had a lot of like just little science lab experiments and those things did not work out for those customers. So that is really step one. I think everybody needs a win. Everybody needs a help.salesforce.com up to that point, even Salesforce, it's like we have all the technology, we've done a million things. We've got Einstein. We do the predictions, we do all this stuff. This. Whoa. This is actually dramatically impacting my business process itself. Okay. So everybody needs a huge win. That is really the next step.

Yeah. And so just, just do, you know, and I think everyone's got to be excited about AgentForce, whether they're deploying it now or Dreamforce or a year. Everyone's. And I'm invested in the platform. This has got to be on my top two or three initiatives. Right. No question. But where am I going to my CEO and asking for more budget? Is it take like just, I just want from this sort of overall money GDP going into software.

I think, no, you're totally on it, but I think that it's going to resolve back into the line of business budgets. And I think that this is just an extension of those line of businesses. I think that where there was an AI budget, that was a mistake and that where it should be is like you should be holding. At least this is what I do. I should be holding our service team accountable. Our sales team should be held accountable for that. And that is where the budget should be. It should be the line of business. Hey, you're going to need to get this much more efficient, this more productive. You need to augment your employees, you need a higher level of enablement, you need more capacity. You need to be able to integrate your compensation plans and do our strategic goals. All of these things are going to be done with AI. But should there be a separate AI budget? I think that could be an indication that you're not moving in the right direction. Because if you have a completely separate AI budget, you're probably not integrated at that level. And I'll give you an example. We work really closely with RBS bank and Royal bank of Scotland. They're in Canada. Incredible CEO Dave McKay, and they have an incredible AI team. They have an incredible set of PhD researchers. They come out of University of Waterloo in Canada. They're incredible people. And actually they're very near those Shopify guys. And this is a great bank, great institution, great customer. And for a couple years he keeps coming to see me, hey, I'm doing this with AI. I'm doing that. I want to do this, I want to do that. And I don't think he was getting the value that he really wanted. And then I was working with his wealth team, which is actually based in the us and all of a sudden we had some incredible success. And that's where I was like, hey, you really need to look at. This is the very tactical, practical thing. So we're going to do make your wealth business a lot more successful. And yes, we're going to convert your call center to not only service your customers, but sell mortgages also. That's going to be really important. And this fundamental transformation, I think in their consciousness, they all of a sudden realize not only could they do all of these things, they could start thinking about things strategically for the future of their bank that they were not able to think about before and that this AI was going to really give them a capability that was not on their business plan. This doesn't come out of an AI budget. This comes out of your line of business. Managers really having to think about what is the future of their business and that is where you're going to have the best impact. Not just having the two dozen world class AI PhDs, but hey, let's look at the apps and let's look at each app and then look at, let's look at the employees and let's look at productivity, let's look at augmentation, let's look at all of these areas and I think it's one of the reasons why Agent Force has been as successful as it has been so early on. And we're going to see some and continue to see a lot of great stories.

Yeah, wealth management really should be a space utterly changed by AI. It's such a weird space because there's big dollars with terrible service. Like just, I want a mortgage, I want a line of credit, I want to do. And like it's 11 calls and someone gets back to you in two weeks. This shouldn't be this hard for this amount.

Hey, we're still, we're still in that zone on health care. Yeah, I like just had a full recovery from a proximal rupture of my Achilles last September and the number of phone calls I have to make and all that, it's crazy. And the energentic layer on the medical center is really important. I just spent some time with the medical center that I work really closely with showing them exactly what we can do, how we can do it, the immediate impact they can have and the huge productivity gains. And I'll tell you why that's also important. We talked about the Japan situation, but think about it like this. Call any doctor or nurse or medical center you work with. You're here that they're all pretty overloaded. They're all pretty burnt out. For some reason, they never recovered mentally from that. I don't know if I did myself. But the thing is that it's also because patients are like, get their labs from there done and they call their doctor right away. Hey, this number is not exactly right. What is going on with this number? Doctors will talk about it on your visit, but instead there can be an agentic layer surrounding the medical center that kind of provides that first level of care. But also it can not only do pre and post operative care, pre or post procedure care, but it can also do things like just, hey, we know you're coming to the hospital. You want to make sure you're doing this. This is how you're going to get ready today. I still get phone calls and when I get some of these phone calls, I can tell these people who are making the calls, they're very high value people. It's super expensive and it's not the best use of their time. It's not necessarily that the medical center is going to have less people a year from now. It's more that the people are going to be used in a more value added way. And I think that's also true in my help that salesforce.com as well.

Yeah, so maybe before we're out of time and if we're out of time, just let me know because this is great. But maybe just two things that people talk a lot about like budgets but maybe they don't understand. You talked about people, agents, data and then robotics. Right. I might have gotten the four layers wrong, but that's roughly right. Data. Data. Everyone on social media and in SF talking about I can disrupt everyone in the enterprise with my agent, but data, man, there's a lot of data in Salesforce. So talk about that. And it's like at a meta level because you've also invested in many of the best. Who wins? The incumbents of the startups? I know it's a goofy question, but what do you think about that? Who wins? The incumbents or the startups?

I think there's a broad misunderstanding still of data and I think that when I get to Dreamforce in October I have to clear it up. It's one of my strategic goals and I think one way to think about that already is there's more data in Salesforce than ever. And I'll make the case that yes, it's about the apps, it's about the data, it's about the agents, and it'll be about the robots. And at that data later. It's not just about the Salesforce Data, which is 230petabytes of data, it's also about all the data we're federating to. Of course Salesforce was core investor in Snowflake, but we federate data to Snowflake and now there's a huge amount of Snowflake data that comes back to Salesforce through our federation mechanisms as well. So whether it's databricks or Snowflake, whether it's Shopify, whether it's Bigquery, whether it's all S3, all the places where you're storing data through your company, all of that needs to be one consistent data layer for that agent to be able to really be as good as it can be. And for that AI to be everything you want it to be. We can talk about individual AI like we did, which was, hey, are you remembering my meeting? What is my next step? But when we get to organizational AI, that means that that data layer has to be this federated data layer that is going to have to then be fully interoperating with those apps and those agents, and all of it is going to have to be one seamless platform for these customers. And that's where we're going. I think that vision is a little different than where everybody else is, which is everyone else is a little bit more. And by the way, I think this is great for a lot of the startups to do this. Yeah, they're more like, see a bear, shoot a bear. Hey, I have an agent. I'm going to take down this use case. I think it's great. But where we want to provide for our customers, which are the largest and most important customers in the world, enterprises and governments, we want them to get their data together, number one. Two, we want them to use this next generation of apps, like we can see, like Tableau next, that we showed yesterday and others that you'll see continuing to get release from Salesforce. And then three, we want them to deploy these agents at scale. And I think that is the right transformational motion for our customers. And that's where I've got my head around that idea and that platform, that as a platform is different than what others are working on. So that's what we think is going to happen. And I hope we're right, because that's how it works.

That's why I'm asking.

That's all we're doing. And then when you're using Slack, it should be running on that platform where it's got your data cloud and it's got your agents also running all together as one thing. And like you said, it's a meta layer on all your agents. And look, it's been an incredible 26 years of Salesforce. When we started Salesforce, we could never have anticipated that we would have gotten to where we are. And we're just still at the beginning now we're in the 40 billions like you said. And as I think about the next layer, what's possible now, what wasn't possible even just a few years ago, I guess the best decision we probably ever made was not that technology architecture or strategy, it's that we took 1% of our equity, 1% of our profit and 1% of all of our employees time 26 years ago and put it into a foundation. We just had a board meeting for our foundation just last week. And I'll tell you the thing about that's exciting is that we've done 10 million hours of volunteerism. We run 50,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free on our service. We've given away about a billion dollars to organizations all over the world, but especially focused in K through 12 education, which is our focus area. And in our San Francisco and Oakland public schools, we've given over $150 million. So this idea that we are built a company that's also, we think is a platform for change in those areas as empowered, enabled through the foundation is extremely important. And trying to hold those values together as we get bigger as a company, this is a huge challenge. No one really said it'd be. It's a huge challenge as you get bigger, but it is. And we're. This is where people should be holding us accountable. That whether it is in trust and customer success and innovation and equality and sustainability, these core values of who Salesforce is, we're really trying to maintain these core values and also deliver this next generation of our platform. And we want every customer to have this incredible value experience with AI. And that is what is really going to get me super motivated over the next couple of years.

Yeah. And for folks, because I know it's all documented, I think everyone really should check out. Salesforce has a whole program to help you implement 111, right? It's got a whole program.

Oh, yeah.

Pretty turnkey for you. It's pretty turnkey.

There's a whole nonprofit profit called pledge 1% org that me and the founders of Atlassian, who also then copied our one one one model have put together.

Yeah.

And I'd recommend any founder to take a look at that because you might not think about it. Today you're starting your company, maybe you're a year in, but 25 or 26 years later, which a lot of people are like, oh no, I've already sold my company and we retired in Hawaii. Whatever, great, congratulations. But here's the thing. You kind of want to be able to look back and say, hey, I did it the right way with the right values, and you're not going to want to be like some of those other software companies that we mentioned who maybe operate with a whole different kind of set of values. So you have to decide what kind of company you want to be.

Yeah, I think it's wonderful. I remember. I don't remember when you rolled it out, but I remember when you back in the day thinking, Mark, that's nice, but like Salesforce is worth like 2 billion at the time. 1% is 20 million. That's a lot. But like now look where it's grown, right. 1% of 300 billion or so is. It's. Or 240 billion is quite an impact, right? It is quite an impact.

It's been. And the people. It's about the people too. And also, don't forget about your technology and how you can. Most of our podcast has been about technology. You can impact all these organizations with your technology. So when you deliver a full package, that's where you're going to get the most power.

Yeah. I just think for folks that haven't heard of one, what we used to do a lot of promotion during the lockdown days of it with Byron, Peter and others. Because honestly, sales, the pledge, 1% in the team, obviously started by Mark, but it's turnkey. So if you're founders and you want to do something to help but you're overloaded, you can get help here. You can roll this out pretty quickly. And then down the road you've got this wonderful almost mini foundation that is at the edge of turnkey. Right? It's at the edge of turnkey and it's pretty small.

We want to have a great technology model, you want to have a great business model and you want to have a great philanthropic giving back model because at the end of the day, you're going to look back at your company and say, hey, did I do it the right way? Not just did I hit the technology home run that I was looking for, but what kind of impact did you have across the board?

Yeah, it's wonderful. All right, Mark, this is great. Anything we hit anything coming up at Salesforce the next 12 months, you're excited about. We didn't talk about. We talked about celebrating Tableau.

I'm not going to roll all those things out right now, but I've got a live. It's going to start and end with Agent Force. You know that. But there's going to be some other really incredible things. And don't underestimate Data Cloud. It's been our fastest growing product ever and the revenue levels are awesome. We rolled out a lot of that already. It's going to be our fastest multibillion dollar product ever. And then the fundamental regeneration of all these core apps.

Yeah.

And you're starting to see our template for that. So there's a lot of cool stuff coming and by Dreamforce, and I hope everyone will be there and building on our platform. We're going to have an incredible vision for the future of the industry and for customers.

It's great. It's exciting. I'm excited for the next generation of AI Salesforce. It's fun to see. It's fun to be a little piece of the journey. And Mark, congratulations. Thanks for the time. Thank you.

I appreciate it. Great. Thanks for everything you're doing as haster. It makes a huge difference for the whole industry. Everybody really appreciates all the work and time and effort that you've put into it.

For sure. You're the best. Thanks, man.

Bye now.

Appreciate the extra time.