Marc Benioff on the AI boom, SaaSpocalypse, and future of Slack

- Alex, thank you for coming by the way to Dream Force. - Of course. - Exciting to have you here. - Is it your first Dream Force? - No, it's my third. - Wow, amazing, congratulations. - A lot of things to talk about, but first I've got to ask you, Mark, do you know what frame magging is? - Well, I didn't know it as well as I do right now. - You know, and now, you're a meme. - Actually, every year I'm a slightly different meme. - A slightly different one. I've been enjoying the frame mag memes. Those have been big this year. I would say the other one is you and Jensen, you say we're all following you, bro. That's been a big one. And I think that actually speaks to the moment we're in. - These weren't planned, by the way. - That's what I was gonna ask you. Like, when you do the frame magging, are you thinking through, people are gonna meme this? - I was just mentioning to remember my team, I'm like, a year ago we had a whole different set of memes. And now we have a whole different set of memes. And the memes from a year ago are forgotten and gone. And I'm like, you don't know what's next. I couldn't have told you five days ago that this would be the funniest thing coming out of Dreamforce. But that's the nature of the world we're in and social media right now. - My favorite one is there's one of you in Sam and it says ARR meets AGI. That's a good one. And I've been reading about people trying to describe this year's Dreamforce on X. And my favorite one was it feels like a mix between a mega church sermon and science camp, but for B2B SAS. And when you see or you walking through doing that keynote, I mean, you've always kind of done it that way, right? That's, where did you have the idea? Because it's become such an iconic part of a conference. Is that open enough? - It's a huge nod to John Chambers, who was the CEO of Cisco who hated to stay on the stage. And so we would all be facing towards the stage. And John would walk off the stage and walk into the audience and I was like, whoa. And I'm like, I have to learn how to do this and train everybody to be at John Chambers. And one of his key executives who I was very close with is since passed on, Rick Justice, then became kind of the second accolade to kind of come off the stage with John. And I'm like, whoa, if he can do that, we can get everyone to do that. And then the one pivot is, you may see, we do more of a theater in the round. Because we don't really want to be a patriarchal structure in the room. It's a little, tries to be a little more democratic. 'Cause we have, well, there's like 12,000 people in the keynote room, and then it's all set in a round. But when we go on the road, we're about to go on the road. >> Oh, yeah. >> And we're going to do what we call the world tour. So we'll hit all the major cities, we'll go to Tokyo, we'll go to New York, we'll go to London, we'll go to Paris, we'll take the show on the road, Chicago, on and on and on. When we do that, it's the same thing, just slightly smaller. >> Right. >> You know, we're well, we'll set it in the round and we'll always walk with everybody and try to be, yeah, with our customers. It's a metaphor for being with your customer. >> You don't have a prompt, right? You're just, you're walking around. >> No, somebody, if you don't ask me that question, they're like, did you memorize you? But the, you know, the presentation is different every single time because of that, yeah. >> Well, Jensen does that too, if you go see Jensen speak, there's no prompt or, I'm always amazed by that. >> Yeah. >> The density of information that you're putting out. >> Yeah, he knows what he wants to say. >> Yeah, and he was there, and you said that we're all following you, bro. >> Yeah. >> And I do feel like that's true, like. >> I think it's true. >> I'm asking that too to say, where do you think we are in the AI hype cycle right now? Do you think there's a little bit of like nervousness? Kind of what you said there, I think was maybe speaking to a little bit of a nervousness that people feel. >> If I said it like that, I didn't mean to. >> Okay. >> I think we're in this incredible transformation of our industry and of many industries, and we're in the middle of it, it's exciting, you know, but we're still very much in the beginning to the beginning of what can be an incredible new chapter of the world. But you probably already heard me say this, you know, I was just spent two full months in Europe, and I met with hundreds of our customers, and you know, things are different in Europe than they are here in San Francisco than they are in Shanghai. You know, if you're here in San Francisco, you probably know there's more than 1,000 waymos driving around autonomously, and that's not the only autonomous company here in San Francisco. If you go to Europe, I didn't see one autonomous vehicle in two months, not one, not in any country. So that's kind of a metaphor, though, for me, that everyone is on a slightly different place in AI, as an individual, maybe as a company, maybe as a country. We're in a continuum, and we're all on that. >> I'm glad you brought up San Francisco, 'cause you and the company represent San Francisco in such a big way, I mean, the tower behind us literally, but with this conference is, and all the people you bring here for this, I've been dying to hear you just talk about the state of San Francisco, because it feels like it's been back for a minute, and now it's becoming, I mean, I spend a lot of my time in LA, and I'm like, I want LA to have a San Francisco moment now. I wonder if you think there's anything that could stop this train, if there, it feels like San Francisco is very much resurgent. >> I'm so glad you asked that, you know, I think that it's a funny thing to San Francisco, it's a spirit, it's not just a city, and you have to appreciate that to understand what has happened here, over a long period of time. People are like, wow, this is an incredible opportunity in AI, look at all these companies, they're all gonna go public. I mean, I can think now, multiple times in our industry, whether that cycle is happening, but you need to realize something, Alex, this is not our first gold rush in San Francisco. We've had many gold rushes. >> It might be the biggest. >> It could be our biggest, but it's not our first. >> Not, yeah. >> And I think that, you know, we have our moments in San Francisco that this is the city of the summer of love. You know, this is the city of hate ashberry. You know, this is the city of the gold rush. This is the city of Levi's genes. Even, you know, I love the family of the gap, you know, and Salesforce. This is a special city, now open AI, and the topic all birthed in San Francisco. >> Yeah. >> And even, you know, Daria was a native San Francisco. And this comes from San Francisco, educated in San Francisco. So it's a special city. The spirit of the city can come through you and do some amazing things. It's doing itself again. And a few years ago, everyone was kind of second guessing. San Francisco, but my opinion had never changed, which was don't worry. It's just keeps going through this same cycle over and over and over again. This episode is brought to you by Granola, the AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings. It works everywhere you do, unless you focus on what matters. Try it at granola.ai/sources and use the code sources for three months off. This episode is also brought to you by Mercury, AI native banking that's loved by more than 300,000 entrepreneurs, including me. Visit mercury.com to learn more. Mercury's a fintech, not a bank, check the show notes for details. This episode is also brought to you by Jira Bayad-Lasian, where teams and agents get the context, coordination, and control to move work forward. Try it free at Jira.com. That's J-I-R-A.com. You had Sam and Dario here, which I think you might deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for. But there's going to be so much wealth that's unlocked by those two IPOs in San Francisco. I mean, a record amount. - That's very true. Yes. - And you and the company really pioneered a way to do philanthropy, right? With your 1-1-1 concept. And it's still obviously a big part of what you do. And I'm curious if you've had conversations with some of Dario, some of these other AI leaders about what you've learned from philanthropy and how you would like to see them give back. Because, I mean, we are talking about a record amount of wealth that's about to be generated. - Well, telling entrepreneurs anything is extremely difficult. (laughs) So, and especially those entrepreneurs, but I would just say that you're right. We put 1% of our equity profit in time into our foundation, so many years ago, and that has unlocked this incredible capability, our ability to get back at scale. We've done 11 million hours of volunteerism, a billion in grants. We run 65,000 nonprofits and NGOs for free. Many of them are here. That is very important to us, that we didn't just do it, but we did it the right way. We didn't have to kind of go back and say, oh, I wish I had done it like that. We're older than these companies for 27 years, but we don't have to look backwards and say, well, I guess we should know what it could have done. You know, we've done millions of hours of volunteerism in the schools. That is really important to me. I came from public schools that, you know, we're rebuilding playgrounds, painting schools. We give $100,000 every year to every middle school, principal in San Francisco and Oakland, to make sure that they have what they need to be successful. That is very important to us. So we're not just building another company that we're trying to get back, and also we're not going to be like 100 years old, and now we're going to get back. Because the power and giving is actually through, yes, you have this ability to write checks because you're public, but no, your greatest power is that you have your company. So you're comfortable relationships and the employees and all of that is the ability to really make change. - Yeah, I had Sam on my podcast recently and I asked him about this and I said, could you give back more? Could you build libraries, you know, lessons from the industrial revolution, right? And he said, well, I think the main way to get people to like AI is to build great products. Which, no question there. But I haven't heard any of the current leaders of this AI boom talk about, in the way you just talked about it. I don't know if you agree with me, but I would like to see more of that in terms of what practically are you doing in the community. Because as you know, people have a very strong feeling about AI right now. And if these companies were to be playing more integral roles in their communities, I wonder if that was shift. - Entrepreneurs always get dropped into different buckets in this category. And one bucket is a good friend of mine, who's a great entrepreneur, said, hey Mark, I don't think you're right at all. Who's done more for the world? The Ford Foundation or the Ford Corporation. And I said to him, I think this is a false choice, both. You know, why can't you not do both? That's my whole perspective. When you start to actually try to separate, these two things you're doing, I think, everyone into service, when you put it together, you're doing everybody a great service. And you have so much power in your capability as a CEO of a company or as an entrepreneur. If you actually decided not only build great products or have great customers, but also have great impact, you can do it all. And so, you know, this has been our message for a long time, but not everyone is going to buy in because entrepreneurs are very opinionated. Doesn't matter who they are, they have strong philosophical statements and they'll either buy into that or they won't. But 20,000 companies have joined our 111 model through Pledge1%.org. And if you do go to Pledge1%.org, you can learn all about how to do this with your company. And I think it adds to your culture, makes for a great company, helps you to, you know, set the right values. Also, I think it helps in the employee behavior that it sets the right tone from the top, we call it in business, that employees know, you need to really, you know, behave this way. Yeah. And I think it's benefited us in so many ways. Something else I've heard you talk about, and it's been the theme throughout Dream Force this year is how people are feeling about AI and the risks and regulation. You were very early saying social mediation, you know, it's like cigarettes and calling for regulation. And I wonder what you think about AI and regulation and what you would advocate for, how you want our politicians, our leaders to be thinking about it. Yeah, I think I'm going to pivot back to what I said about CEOs need to make the right decisions. And kind of we just had a good conversation about all right, CEOs, are you going to put philanthropy and giving back into your culture? Now, we have to kind of ask this question. Okay, hey, CEOs, are you going to put responsibility into your culture? You know, that you really are trying to build the right kind of company, steer it with the right capability. As I said before, the right values. I think that that is the question. I think that when we get to regulatory conversations or regulatory changes, especially as they need to happen on a global basis, we have to look back over the last decade or more of social media. So in social media, we can ask ourself the question, how many kids have been hurt? How many countries have been hurt? Why is it taking us so long for there to be some kind of come to terms with aspect to social media? It's been a shock to me and you're right. I've been talking about this in nauseam for quite a long time because I believe that if you are a CEO and you're an entrepreneur, you have a responsibility to build a great company, to build great products and to have a great impact on society and do it the right way. And I think that that's the basis of ethics in our society. And if we're going to have ethical companies, we're going to have to start with our ethical leadership and ethics start with responsibility. And it's that simple. And I'm sure a lot of people take me apart for saying such a thing, but it also becomes very prophylactic around regulatory issues as well. Because when you have companies that are behaving at that level, it's not an issue. I hope that liability basic concept of liability can help here, right? Luckily, you know, the open eye I had tugging face. Claim is great. It wasn't too damaging to hugging face. Imagine if that was a large bank. I wonder the reaction in that case, what it would have been. And I do think, you know, we rush to regulation often, right? As the public, but, you know, there are private market incentives at play. >> You are on the right conversation, you know. And I talked about those Sam Altman, if you haven't seen the video yet, it's what it's seen. But Claim came to see me after this happened. >> Yeah. >> And it's actually where the whole acquisition conversation really started. >> Oh, really? >> Absolutely. It was clear that here's this company, a great company actually hugged face. We invested in the company aggressively, a very important company for our whole industry 'cause it's holding the jewels of the open source movement. And I said, Claim, this is actually pretty serious. You only have 200 employees. You can only do so much. And maybe you don't have all the security and capability that you need to defend yourself when an open AI model has turned its sights on you and attacked. And I said, you also have the ability to do all these other critical things to create a very important company right now. And I think that's when he realized and I realized kind of together, maybe this was the opportunity for it to move from being an independent company to being part of something else. >> Oh wow, I didn't realize you played such a role in that. >> Well, I don't know how big of a role I played. I don't want to overstate it, but the conversation was very seminal. And I called him back and I said to him, whether it's Salesforce acquiring you or somebody else, I think this is the time where you need to actually become part of something else. It was clear to me, they are great entrepreneurs, but they were sub-scale at a moment that they needed scale. >> When you think about agents, I remember three years ago, you were talking about agents and here at Dreamforce, and pivoting the company towards this concept, no one was really talking about agents like that. And I know you're a prolific investor, you've got Salesforce Ventures, you've got the Anthropic Partnership, and I wonder if that allows you sometimes to see around corners, because I'm wondering what led you to see agents when you did, because now is when they're starting to work, I think, at scale. But you saw it seems like several years ago. >> Well, I think that fortunately for us, we're in a thriving ecosystem here in San Francisco, and so the dinner conversation might be around one of these new technologies. There's so many things happening. I'll also give a lot of credit to meditation practice, over three, four decades, that having a few minutes every morning, just to contemplate what is kind of going on, I think has definitely served me. >> I need to practice that. >> It's been an important part of my life, and I'm very fortunate to have some great teachers who impacted me very aggressively in the early '90s, and then I've been able to use that, even this morning, you know, I was made sure I took at least a few minutes to do that, because so much is happening this week, I just let my mind relax a little bit. My grandfather, he didn't have a meditation practice, but he made sure that on a regular basis, especially like he was a great trial attorney, he only worked a couple blocks away from here at 690 Market Street, now it's a Ritz Carlton resident, that was his office building, and he would say when he needed to relax his mind and have a great insight, he would go to the movies, and he would get this revelation because it was the time where he could stop working and just let things happen. For me, it's just every morning a little bit of opportunity, and I think that it helps prioritize. Yeah, agents are very important. I think now we can see its data is very important, 'cause if you don't have your data right, you can't get your AI right. Applications and analytics are more important than ever, because if you don't have the applications and analytics foundation, including all of the APIs and the headless versions of these applications, it can inform the AI. You do need the agentic layer, and the fourth thing is this incredible new interface that we showed at this show, that the interface on the enterprise is going to radically transform. >> Yeah, you've got Cloud Force, you've got the, really it seems deep anthropic partnership, Dario is here, you were an early investor. Actually, I would love to know, I'm not sure I've heard you tell the story of that investment, why you wanted to back anthropic when you did. >> Well, it's been an exciting moment, because you're right, we have Cloud Force now, but also we've taken Slack, and we've built Slack Force, which is this new UI, and we have Slackbot, both of those are powered by Claw. >> This force is everywhere. >> And we have co-worker now running and lightning, also another amazing interface, and by the time we get back here, you're from now, I bet we'll have a dozen interfaces all built on this AI Force foundation and this headless capability. And you're right, 100%, it's because we have been pushed so close with anthropic, but it was really an unusual story. I knew Sam Almond very well and also had several moments with him, and I was like, hey, I'd really like to be investing now in the company, and he's like, unfortunately, because of the Microsoft relationship, we were not allowed to invest in open AI, so that pushed us, not because we were so smart to anthropic, to Mistral and France, to Sakana and Japan, to go here in Canada, like to many other model companies, because we felt like, whoa, we can't go here, we're gonna have to go everywhere else, and so we ended up with anthropic, which will be a great investment. I mean, we'll make, I think so. >> I think we'll make, not just billions, but maybe tens of billions of dollars on it, and it'll be fantastic for us. >> You've had a lot of good investments, so that's saying something. [BLANK_AUDIO] We have bought a lot of companies, more than 100, but we've invested from Salesforce, more than 700 companies. And we've taken so many of those great companies, public like Zoom, like Snowflake. There's been just some great, we just sold Wiz to Google. >> Yeah. >> You know, these have been great investments for the company. >> What are you looking for now in terms of acquisitions? >> Well, I think, you know, number one is, we always look at customer. Customers are word, we own a word. And it's all about customer for us. Customer 360, the customer touch point, whether it's sales, service, marketing, commerce, customer analytics, customer data platform, the customer interface. Anything to do with customer we're very, very interested in. Customer agents. Yeah, anything to do with customer, very interested in. You have the word customer in your tagline? >> You're going to get a call from my-- >> You're going to get a call from me. >> I'm going to be on your website. I'm going to be looking at what's going on. I'm looking at anything with the word customer. That is, and I think that's been important having a point of focus. >> Yeah, very important. >> I can't believe we haven't said this word yet. Sass apocalypse. I never really got it. I'm going to be honest when it was at its peak forever because I just think people can rush to narratives, but it does seem, I mean, I saw you guys recently guided ahead of analyst expectations of the revenue you're going to do through 2030 by several billion. And you've seen the stock start to come back. And I'm curious what it was like leading the company through kind of the pit of Sass Apocalypse, and how you navigated that. >> Well, it was a strange six months. >> Yeah. >> There's no question all the Sass Apocalypse nonsense. We just had the best second quarter that we've ever had. Everybody saw the revenue was amazing. The margin, the cash flow, very low attrition, and also very high contract lengths from all of our customers. But I think that people don't realize that we are in a world today of misinformation. And on social media, you just don't know when you're watching a podcast like this, or you're reading a tweet like that, or you saw a post like this other thing, which of these are real and which of them are not? >> We are real audience, we are real. But yes, you're right. >> And I find that to be a very important moment. And I myself get very confused. So I can understand why everyone else gets confused 'cause I get confused, and that's why, I mentioned this already, I'll mention it in a second time, why I just moved to Europe for two months, just to be with customers in their offices. Because that's reality. What do you want? What are you doing to your company? Where are you making investments? What is important to you? How am I gonna help you? What are the right things to support you? When we're looking at all of those things, that's real, and when we read a post about something that is trying to maybe get somebody to buy a stock or sell a stock because someone is trying to make money, or a group of people have gotten together to buy a stock or sell a stock, or to promote a private company, or a private company investment theme, that is not reality. And then nobody is held accountable for these things either. They go by so fast and there's so many of them. So you have to be more careful today than ever. Accountability may be losing money on your stocks that you bought at the wrong time or sold at the wrong time. But yes, I hear you. >> Listen, I just bought $25 billion of sales for stock in the public market, and I had to thank all of these investors who are here today for selling to me at $150. And now it's $250. So, you know, I was very grateful to that. >> What's even the confidence through all that? I mean, you can see the numbers obviously, but I mean, I think there's some logic to people saying, anyone can make software therefore, a large software company like Salesforce is challenged, right? I see through the clouds, I see the logic of that, right? And you were saying like, it's hard for you to make sense of when it's coming at you fast. Like, were there ever moments where you were like, man, like, am I not seeing what everyone else is seeing here? >> Well, of course, you're going to get that kind of doubt. That's why I think ground yourself in the customer reality. Get back to the customer, really pay attention to understand what is their need, what is their un, you know, unarticulated need. >> Yeah. >> I think this is really an important part of business, more important than today than ever. >> Do you think there's any SaaS apocalypse risk for any kind of company? Or do you think it's all over-blown? >> Listen, we're in a world in business and technology where technology is always getting lower cost and easier to use. And companies are always succeeding in failing. There's no difference. >> Yeah. >> You can see that across the whole stock market, look at who the top 20 stocks are today and who are the top 20 stocks 10 years ago. It's a different set of stocks. So to all of a sudden say that you've got it exactly mapped out, you know, it's a very aggressive, you know, prediction frame. >> So humility, just expect the unexpected. It sounds like. >> I think it's a very key time to really to ground yourself in reality. I think COVID really illuminated that for me. >> Oh, yeah. >> Through COVID and I think a lot of the things were kind of going, what's true, what's not true? And you might be reading something in social media and then six months later you went, wait a minute, that actually did not happen. >> Right. >> Or that is not real or this is real. And I think that each one of us has to kind of take, you know, more personal time to say, okay, let me just dig in a little bit and know what is really actually true. >> I spend a lot of time context switching between meetings. Often with no time to process one before the next starts. Thankfully, Granola runs in the background the whole time. It's an easy to use AI notepad for meetings that works everywhere, even on phone calls. I use Granola to recall what was set in meetings and create helpful summaries. I use it every day to stay on top of what I need to get done with my team. It connects to my email and suggests follow-ups for me to quickly review and send saving me valuable time. Granola isn't just a core part of my workflow, it's basically my second brain. Try Granola at granola.ai/sources and use the promo code sources for three months off. Mercury is a modern take on banking. Built for startups like mine. When I decided to start my media business, Mercury was by far the most straightforward, full-featured banking solution for me to set up quickly. The interface is intuitive and simple, saving me valuable time every day. I use Mercury to track my spending, bills and invoicing. I love that I can delegate permissions to my team so they can keep things running for me and exactly the way I want them to. My favorite part is how forward-looking Mercury is with AI. Legacy banks are stuck in the past, but Mercury is built for how modern software works today. I use its built-in command assistant to analyze cash flow and help me move money and Mercury also connects to other AI tools like ChatGPT and Cloud. I use this feature all the time and the folks at Mercury actually let me know that I'm one of the top users of it. So trust me, it's finally easy to get real-time financial data about your business wherever you need it. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a FENTAC company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through choice financial group and column in A members FDIC. Framer is the AI website builder that brings agents into the same canvas where your website is designed, managed and published. So you can move faster without giving up your taste or control. Framer powers the sources podcast website at podcast.sources.news, where you can find new episodes, transcripts, and a lot more. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free. Today at framer.com/sources for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/sources for 30% off. Framer.com/sources rules and restrictions may apply. AI is only as useful as the context it has. But when that context is scattered across tools, threads, and DMs, your team, and your AI agents are flying blind. That's the problem Jira by Atlassian solves. What's the goal tied to your project? What got decided last week in Slack DMs? Atlassian's teamwork graph pulls all of the valuable pieces together from Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Slack, and more. So nothing falls through the cracks. You get 44% more accurate results with 48% less token usage. With Jira, you can easily share your work context with the AI agents you already love, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Co-Pilot. Assign them work directly or connect your tools through MCP. All of this lets you spend less time digging through endless links and messages, chasing down what got decided and by who, and spend more time actually shipping. Learn more at Jira.com. That's J-R-A.com. I'm fascinated by Slack right now. There was a story recently where Meta shifted to Slack because Alex Wang said internally, it's the best platform for agents. It's true. I have a lot of agents in my Slack. I know a lot of other people do. Open AI and Anthrop, like I think those companies quite literally run on Slack. You hear about it when you talk to them constantly, Slack, Slack, Slack, Slack, Slack. You bought Slack many years ago. And it was well before-- - Six years ago. - Yeah, well before agents. - Yeah. - And I'm curious now looking at where Slack is now and how integral it is to Salesforce into the tech economy more broadly. Did you have any idea that this would be what Slack is now when you bought it? - We always knew that we wanted to own Slack. And we knew we wanted to own it because our premise was that it was going to be the agent for business. - No way. Six years ago. - I have the paper I can show it to you. - Wow. - So this was important to us. We paid a pretty high price for the company at the time. - Yeah, you did. - About 25 billion was controversial. - You know, it was a bad idea. 900 million dollars so you can in revenue so you can think it was about 25 times revenue and we got a lot of slack for buying slack if you will because we paid a high price but it was gonna trade once and we felt that we needed to step up today everybody says it was the greatest acquisition it's up there of all time and we've innovated aggressively on the platform we've introduced slack code yeah so that you can code in channels we have slack CRM so you can operate sales force directly from slack or even if you're a small business you can use slack as your CRM and now we have also slack force so you can build a highly customized surface across your whole enterprise you know on slack that's dynamic and intelligent composite and has zero data retention so none of your data goes into the model and it's been a great platform but the ecosystem and success and like you said these large customers like not just Facebook but or you know meta it's also Nike has gone to slack I just spent some time with the COO there's the big power user there general motors just move from teams on to slack and I think this is the moment where more companies need to look at slack as they're operating the system it has been a huge boost of productivity for our company I'm sure for every large company well the way it works with that I mean where you can send it send stuff from AI in there back out super flexible it's amazing isn't it yeah it is and I it's just so interesting to hear you say that you were thinking about agents six years ago yeah we were we're very fortunate I'll give a nod to our chief futurist Peter Schwartz who worked very closely with me on the slack acquisition because he actually was the one who wrote this now you may know Peter Schwartz because he was involved in writing the movie minority report that's right and also war games and deep impact and a few other things and he is remarkably pressure and has tremendous vision just turned eight years old it's my very lives very close to me and we spent a lot of time together and you know he's been an incredible influence on the whole company and in slack I had felt very closely it was about slack I don't I didn't think that they would ever sell to us you know and then Peter kept pushing pushing pushing saying you've got to do more with slack do you insturred ever catch up and just marvel at the the state of slack now probably not as aggressively as we should yeah yeah you know I'm sure yes a mixed feelings about selling the company realizing that today it is the operating system for the whole AI industry we mentioned great companies like Nvidia open AI and drop it guess what platform they all use to run their operations slack yeah it's pretty remarkable it is when you think about the future of slack what is it I mean I would venture to say there's maybe more agents already on slack than humans maybe but I certainly in the future and I'm curious you know when you're thinking about the roadmap for slack what what is it when we talk about the data for the company when we talk about the application and analytics and semantic layers and we talk about the agentic layer in the interface layer slack is very much three of those so it's not holding all the data for the company but it's holding your DMs it's holding the channels it has a lot of the application functionality over and it has the agentic framework that's integrated with the top agents in the industry like for sale and linear and all the major agent platforms and then now it could build these highly customized interface is really cool product related to slack I'm curious how you're thinking about pricing in AI because you and the company basically invented the way that sass is sold on a seat based basis and I'm hearing a lot from AI startups that it's all outcome based now you guys are starting to do some of this I'm curious like is there can you actually do outcome based pricing well right now well let me tell you you know my view directly from being with so many customers and that is number one there is no perfect pricing mechanism for all customers so I look at it on six dimensions so you know look name users is still a major you know aspect of our industry I'm sure you have either Claude or open AI and you pay up for a user price per user per month so name users and also named agents so you're paying by the agent you know I think number three is usage I've used so much of the product number four might be consumption I'm consumed so much it could that could also be tokens that could be storage number five is going to be outcomes transaction outcomes I completed the transaction therefore I'm paid and the final one is business outcomes I saved you so much money I want a percentage of that or I made you so much money I want a percentage of that and you're going to do all this well company our size we're going to do more than fifty billion dollars next year right we cannot be limited by one pricing model we have to do users agents consumption usage transactions and business we have to do all of it and our customers we're willing to write with them a customer agreement to say this is the perfect agreement for you and I think it's the right way to think about it we're not a one-product company you know we're not just have slack or just have to have below or just have inframatic or just have sales force or whatever we have many products to build another one for Finn yeah every all of these things are a little bit different which one do you think is the biggest growth vector over the next few years out of the ones you just said well I don't know I mean slack is like up into the right in a way that we haven't really seen I mean an enterprise software it's pretty incredible so that's the current you know rising star but you mentioned Finn we just bought this company I'm a huge fan of Owen and what he's built it's a company that we have wanted to buy for years and it was just Kismit that finally Owen said you know what Mark now is the time that we want to be bigger and we want to bring to bear we're introducing Finn to a lot of enterprises and mid market companies here and I always felt that they would love it and I think they're realizing Finn is it just for small businesses it's for all businesses and it's the fastest way to customer agent success yeah there's no question you want to go fast into customer agents you want Finn it's an incredible product Owen and his team are remarkable they've done a fantastic job and everyone should see the product it's just awesome this headless idea that you and the company are doing and more people are starting to do how headless does all of this gap do you think I mean how much of the interface do you need to control versus an anthropic inside you you know Salesforce and Claude and then there's Claude and Slack and all these things but what part of the interface do you have to protect as the CFS it's a funny thing when we first tweeted that we're going to do headless were regardless these incredible visionaries and amazing now we actually finally understand you know with the internet is all about an AI so and then I said to myself you know we didn't get that kind of support when we announced our XML API 20 years ago our SOAP API or our REST API it's only that when we announce our MCP API or CLI interface that all of a sudden everyone's like oh wow these guys are just doing an incredible job MCP is exciting MCP is exciting yeah but I feel that way I love all my APIs equally so Salesforce has always been headless you've never had applications that were fixed all the apps are always decomposed in a metadata yeah and then that metadata was always then recomposed into these browsers in a Chrome and Safari into Mozilla now the metadata is just recomposed into co-work or into Claude or into maybe Chatchee BT the new versions look like they are getting ready to be a surface into Slack into lightning so that idea that you have this ability to start to render and generate many surfaces you need to have the application definition the fields the page layouts user models the sharing models all of that is stored in Salesforce metadata that then gets recomposed into these incredible capabilities and you were talking about Trapped data in the keynote a lot and bringing that Trapped data that's what I really am trying to say and I'm probably not saying it correctly yet is when we have so much data in that metadata with our customers that there is value in there that you don't see and you can't go through all that yeah and the the AI is going to find the Trapped value and it is going to deliver that in some incredible new ways I am calling I already see it in our own business because we've deployed Claude Force already yeah internally so our major operating unit leaders are running on Claude Force and you see it change 100% like we're showing our customers here how we run our business on these new next generation surfaces now how does it change how you run the company the way I can run the company today is I'm able to use a variety of surfaces to look at the data not just the traditional lightning interface but as we mentioned like Slack is a great interface. for me. I love Slack, because not only can I look at the applications and operate in them, but I can also operate in the channels, which I do aggressively, and I can even direct message customers. In a very specific example, touring the show, on Tuesday night, I got a message from a friend of mine who had a sick employee's wife in a hospital in Madrid trying to actually find somebody who could help them. Well, guess what? We have 100 and something employees in Madrid. We have a channel set up with those employees. I was able to broadcast to them, hey, can anybody help this person? And that was like the ability to communicate, to share information, to manage it, I love Slack. I'm so in love with it, really. It's such a great platform. I wanted to get your thoughts with the time we have on the state of the media, because you also own time. And I think times-- Congratulations on your cover story. I thank you. I was fortunate-- I hope everyone read the cover story. I think people did. Trust us. Did you trust the headline? I did not. The editors control the headlines, as they say. They do. But I was very fortunate to get to do that with your team, and it was a great process. But I mean, time, it seems like it's very ascended. And I'm curious, when you bought time, why? And to hear you talk about what you think about the media right now, because it's in a huge state of transition. Yeah, I mean, I think again, if you read on social media, all these things about mainstream media and the end of mainstream media. But listen, I think that we can stand by a lot of our stories in time, if not all of them, as being true. This is very important to us. We publish information that we believe that is true. It's one of the reasons why, today, there are more agents that are readers of Time Magazine than humans. Did you know that? >> No, I didn't. >> Yeah, it's surprising. >> It's pivoted in the last couple of months. We have more agents reading time every day than humans. And as humans go to those AI sites, whatever, and they want answers to questions, those calls come out to time to get real time information. And we've opened our doors to those agents to let them work with our platform. Now, to do that, however, we've had to rewrite the way that we do our content. Even our ads have to become agent friendly, because agents are also reading our ads. Yeah, I know it's that cool. And so we've had to rebuild how we're doing that. And it's very important in today's world. >> Yeah, well, that's the economic model of the web you're talking about. And so that's what I've been thinking about. How does the advertiser get something on the other end when it's an agent that reads it, not a human? >> The same way, you're charging basically on the advertising, you're still charging companies and showing them that they're getting these ads being read. You can even have these very specific metrics. But you made a very important comment. You said time is very ascendant right now. And I think it's really true. I mean, one is we have made a lot of important changes with the companies so that we have a business model that works, a technology model that works. And also we have outstanding journalism. And we also open our journalism to folks who are competent, very capable people like yourself, or even though you're not an employee of time. You wrote a major cover story for us. I like to encourage a lot of my friends like Ray Dalio also writes for time quite a bit. And others, and I say, please write for time and give us that expertise. So these things are very important to me. I'm very happy the time is doing. Well, it was a little bit of a high risk maneuver to buy it when we did. But I would say it's worked out well. I'm very happy with the team. And I'm very proud of the work they're doing. >> Are you still interested in media as a category for future things? Are you? >> No, I don't. I think anyone should have more than one magazine. >> Okay. >> Or media company. >> It's a good advice. >> This is my one moment in media. >> Okay, okay. We were talking earlier about you saw agents three years ago pivoting the company. What are you looking at now that's exciting you that you think we're all going to be talking about in a few years? Is it still going to be agents? Is it going to be everyone's talking about these personal assistants, instincts, town, et cetera? I think that's still early. But what are you seeing that you think we should all know about? >> Well, I am very, very excited about these dynamic interfaces. I think people will be shocked when they see what the future interface of the computer looks like. We've only seen it in science fiction. We've only seen it in the movies. And we showed at this show I think for the first time on a large scale the next generation enterprise interface that is intelligent, that is conversational, that is adaptive, that is dynamic, you know that feels like it's live or living. That's a big idea. And that's not the way enterprise applications are today at all. Those aren't words that we use in enterprise applications ever. That is a big thought, you know. These other areas that we've gone through, data, applications, semantics, analytics, agents, I think are very well, you know, discussed. And I think the part that's not well discussed is the interface. So I think that when we kind of said to everyone, here's the next big thing, which is what, look, we want to, you know, be relevant and we want to be able to kind of make it clear. Like we have a good vision for the future. I think we got it right on interface. I think this is going to be the next moment and we're going to see everything change on the interface. Look, pick up your iPhone right now or your iPad and you're going to see that your interface has not changed since we started the interview. >> Nope. (laughs) >> Nope. >> That is not going to be true for very much longer. >> Okay. >> It's going to be like listening to me, it's going to be adaptive, it's going to come back and say oh, this is going so well, Alex, but you didn't ask Mark this or have you thought about that or yeah, I went back and when Mark said, to say I'm all minute of you, yeah, I read and maybe you should consider this question now and also, oh, and here's how your whole life is going and how many emails have come in and all those things. But no, if you look at your iPad now, the interface is none of those things. It's the same thing, the same icons, the same email list, Alex, that is going to change and that is going to be exciting and that's going to be a huge opportunity for not only companies like Apple and Google and others who make these kind of interfaces or televisions, you know, like the Samsung's of the world or the LG's, but for a lot of new companies, that's why you hear companies like OpenAI and others are investing in new kind of phones and new kind of devices because there will be a way of new interfaces. So each of these levels will change. You know, a lot of discussion is about the data center today, the land, the power, the energy, the chip, the memory chip, the GPU, the physical data center, all of those things, the conduit, the transport. But then we get back to the application stack that we just went through. You know, a lot of those pieces are evolving to be able to support both a deterministic world which where we've traditionally been knowing exactly what is happening with the probabilistic world that we see in AI, which is that the AI is trying to figure it out and putting those two things together so everything becomes more grounded and true. But when you do that, it can become more dynamic. And that is what is going to be very exciting. >> All right, Mark Benioff, I'm going to hold you to that. >> All right, Alex. >> All right, thank you. >> Thanks, great to have you here. >> Thank you, of course, again. >> Thank you. >> Number three, all done. >> All done. >> Thank you. >> Grenola is the best AI notepad I've tried. It works everywhere on a video or phone call in person or an Apple Watch. Try it now at Grenola.ai/sources and use the promo code sources at checkout for three months off. Banking should feel like modern software. Get everything you need in one place. Mercury's a fintech, not a bank. Check the show notes for details. Framer is the AI native website builder that lets you build faster without giving up control. Visit framer.com/sources for 30% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. Jira by Adlassing is where your team and your agents work from the same context. That's j-i-r-a.com.