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

Alex, thank you for coming, by the way, to Dreamforce. Excited to have you here. Thrilled to be here. Is this your first Dreamforce? 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-mogging is?

Well, I didn't know it as well as I do right now. You know it now.

You're a meme.

Actually, every year I'm a slightly different meme. A slightly

different

one.

I've been enjoying the frame-mog memes. Those have been big this year. I would say the other one is you and Jensen, where 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 was what

I was going to ask you. When you do the frame-mogging, are you thinking through, people are going to meme this?

I was just mentioning to a member of my team, I'm like, you know, a year ago we had a whole different set of memes and now we have a whole different set of memes. And like 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 in social media right now. My

favorite one is there's one of you and 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 megachurch sermon and science camp, but for B2B sass. And when you see you walking through doing that keynote, I mean, you've always kind of done it that way, right? Where did you have the idea? Because it's become such an iconic part of the conference. 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 a John Chambers. And one of his key executives, who I was very close with, who's since passed on, Rick Justice, then became kind of the second CEO Acolyte 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. You're pulling people up. Yeah. Well, there's like 12,000 people in the keynote room. Right. So, And then it's all set and around. But when we go on the road, we're about to go on the road. Oh, yeah. And we're going to do, you know, 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 this 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'll set it in the round and we'll always walk with everybody and try to be, you know, with our customers. It's a metaphor for being with your customer.

You don't