Announcing SaaStr AI Summit

To another weekly SASTER 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 SASTER 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 chocked 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 SAS for annual. Hopefully you guys, just as a caveat, got our emails last week to, you know, 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 time. That all being said, let's get into what we want to announce today. So let me share this. That's working. All right, I'm going to go full screen here. I was almost hit the wrong button. All righty. Well, big news, everybody. David and I are very excited today to be chatting to you guys about a summit. David, I know you've been chatting to a lot of folks about a summit. I'm going to get into some of the. Of what Jason 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 Day. 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 seem to talk about AI. Even sessions learned about AI people started.

Talking about 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 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 the SaaS motions and the SaaS scaling that's been going on and how to do it better and leverage 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, the best businesses and the best thinkers around how to combine, you know, what it means for AI and SaaS, where do they converge, 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 why wouldn't you 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 just 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 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, that's a couple context. I'll help share a little bit more. So, you know, AI is not new to SAS by any means. But to David's point, if you guys haven't seen the blog post yet, we'll, we'll cover a lot of it here of Jason, our CEO's announcement of the Saster AI summit inside of Saster Annual. So, so no, I think it's. Yeah, I think to your point, like a lot, we saw a lot of AI kind of come in to last year's event almost at the final mile of like we, 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? Yeah, maybe 30% as you said. And then, yeah, Europa was about half and some of Those were strictly AI companies, right, like OpenAI Synthesia, Deep Bell. These are like to your point, I think Sasser's 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 going to be accessory, annual, speaking about, you know, how they're doing, 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, 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, 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, those full day, right? People wanted more and so, so we did about half the content at Europa AI focused, right between those two buckets. And now we're going to do the AI Summit within Saster Annual. So it's going to be throughout the three days of Saster 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 still need to know how to grow and fathom the rest of this and operate. We always recommend coming to the whole thing, but if you want to come to the AI part, only you can. But yeah, obviously it's, we're leaning into. Right, 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 with that audio in the background. Sorry, the audio play for me 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 Saster AI Summit at Annual was like, there's a lot of. Obviously you can't avoid talking about AI now, right? It's, it's, it's, it's top of mind for everyone. I think I saw like a, you know, Jason sit 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's talking about, you know, CNBC or something about how, or Bloomberg on, on how, you know, AI is like, 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, 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 in Sastry Annual is to help everyone, including all of our sponsors, discern like what's real, what is it 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 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 Yom 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 going to be bringing to the animal. Like, okay, he's actually doing it for real, right? Like, he's a great example to learn from. 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, yeah, I would say, yeah, yeah.

Just to jump in, sorry, I didn't mean 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.

Right.

And I mean the place was standing room on Lee and you know, folks float 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 three 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 say to your point. Yeah, this, this is all the, the AI Summit is going down during. It's at Zaster Annual, you know, so, so yes, that is, so that's why you see the same dates. If there is any confusion there, it's inside of SAS granule as we say so but it's you know, a full, full blown content, you know, a lot of the networking and then to our point, a lot of the sponsors will be chatting about AI. So I think it's graduated from a sub theme to an actual summit after this year, which I think is actually super helpful for a lot of folks. Not that we won't have that great style of staffer content that's actionable to help you scale. There's 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 Saster. But I do think this is important to lean into and to also get some education around it. So we're actually being really, really picky with on who we say yes to to get to come speak at a summit. The rejections have been a little bit, we're like can you do workshop Wednesday? And then because 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 Open Air, like of course you're going to have those. But yeah, anyways, so 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, 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 SAS Drain 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 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 and 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 type of sphere, so any efficiencies you can help them gain with your product, whether that's AI or not, you know, that's, that's, that's really what's going to be helpful for folks to see at Faster I think too. One thing I'll call out we thought 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 boots and I want to call that out because last year at saster 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 after annual, it was not really by. 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 I'm 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, I would say half the booths, I won't say almost every, but I would say half the booth 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 it, 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 Zaster 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 talk about the process of some of the AI, you know, again, you can start. We creeped into last year's. We're going full bore with it now for AI Summit. The other thing I do know is like of the. Some of the folks I've mentioned, right, the Oracle's, 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, showing that off and in a real world format. So, yeah, I think to that point of this is a chance where the physical world will actually meet the digital world in AI, it's like, okay, how can we actually display how this works in a real world scenario? Because we're in an event. Right. So I think that's just an important thing to think about too. As you're thinking about this, it's not just 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 SASTER Annual this year. They're all on. If you go to either Saster, AI or Saster.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 that you'll, you'll notice a lot of it's AI, so don't be shocked now that we've told you it's, you know, AI Summit at faster. And then you're like, wow, a lot of these are AI Summit topics. It's like, yes. Well, we headed to the announcements. No one's surprised. Right? Okay. 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 up super early. Like, I know some people sign 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 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 perspectives and for AI Summit are the same as just saturational because again, the whole thing's going to be woven in. Right. So there is, there is a few displays, distinctions on the sponsor side, to simplify, like some of our folks have actual, you know, they want to be on the AI stage. Like, you know, there's distinctions like that. But again, the boots are still the same as the rest of Saster Annual. It's just yet 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 the levels, if you will, those are all the same. It's just more in how you deploy at SAS re Annual. 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. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't look every day. I get every couple days. So I do know we're less than 90 days out of the event. So starting to creep on some capacities in 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 Sasters way back in the day, as hard as that might be for some folks to believe. But I do think 90 days a sweet spot of like, okay, if you're gonna 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 and it's not like boots 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 want to make sure I have all my decks in a row. Meaning I know exactly what my booth graphic is going to be on the back, right? I know what I'm going to put on this monitor. Sometimes people don't think about this the last minute, right? I know I'm putting it on the monitor. If I'm, you know, a super gold, I know what I want to do for an activation. I know how that that either does or doesn't play into AI. I know what I want to do with my customer passes. I know what I want to do with my 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, and that band is the sweet spot for, you know, signing up for something like a zaft or. And having the right amount of time to be in all the communications that we started. Right. Like, we've actually just started this. Like you've missed anything yet. You know, you have time to design your bo comma, 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 want to avoid that. You can, you know, decide who you want to send now, get the pitch down. Right. Figure out what you're going to do. And a lot of people do get creative, Right. So to the point of Saster Annual and Saster Europa, a lot of folks get very creative in how they're going to get traffic to their booth in particular, which does take a little bit of time. So. Anything you want to 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, it's been done, you can. But yeah, I think, I think now is a good time to, you know, finalize a 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. Emily, did you announce a date for.

That yet for the port? No, I think we're doing the Portal next week, which will have like all the boots backs and stuff in it. And then we're doing. Yeah, kind of the kickoff of it are after 4th of July because that was kind of the feedback that we got.

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

Yeah, the sooner the better.

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

Yep, exactly. Okay. 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. I think. 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. 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. 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. Thanks for joining me. Hopefully everyone's super excited about AI Day and AI Summit at Saster 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. Davidasterink.com and that's the way to reach me. And if you want to reach someone else's Saster, I will pass it along.

Here. David, I'm a. I'm AI.com.

Wow, look at that. AI.

I know. Look at that. Right on brand.

I'm di. Oh, I'm not. Well. Yeah. Okay, well, good. Great.

All right, guys, thanks for watching. Hopefully you're excited for AI AI 7 at SAS per annual. We will see you guys next week.