A Conversation with Lisa Su and Marc Benioff

 Auto-transcribed on Thursday, September 19, 2024.media and text playback available on this page: https://aliceapp.ai/recordings/q3FDaYebhugAwGWRUf4vZIkMtQc7Cz_V

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Speakers:

 Speaker A - 34.37%

 Speaker B - 60.04%

 Speaker C - 0.79%

 Speaker D - 1.24%

 Speaker E - 3.55%

Notes:

- Mark Benioff: Are you having a good time at Dreamforce? Anybody built an agent, raise your hand. How's that experience going? Pretty well.- Mark: The level of quality of engineering is just incredible of what's going on. Your reputation is something that is core to who you are. And it's really about delivering and working very, very closely with our partners all the time. It wouldn't be possible without this next generation of computing.- Moore's law is one of the fundamental trends that has governed the semiconductor industry for the last 40 years. One of the things that I'm most proud of is we talk about technology for good. Technology can be used to make society a much, much better place.- Mark: I'm a big believer in AI is the most important technology trend to come in the last 50 years. He says it can significantly enhance every person's productivity. Mark: The level of empowerment is incredible.- The superpower of AI is not necessarily the hardware or the model or, um, any of those things. It's really about the data. And that's what the industry is trying to do, is to make AI as accessible as possible.- Daniel: We are a Slack consulting company at 21 B. We help companies implement, uh, Slack, optimize Slack. With the power of AI, leveraging all of that to make everyone's lives easier. What's one thing that keeps you motivated and inspired in the slack community?

[00:00:01]  Speaker A 
Our CEO and chair, mister Mark Benioff. Okay. All right. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. How are you all doing? Uh, good. Are you having a good time at Dreamforce? Very good. Okay. Anybody built an agent, raise your hand. Anyone's built an agent? Oh, quite a few people. Fantastic. How's that experience going? Pretty well. Great. On. Right on. I went over there myself and I was with a customer and we were building an agent and it was really cool. So I had a great experience. So, um, I was, I couldn't believe, I was very proud of my team. They've done a great job. Um, all right, and is everybody ready tonight for imagine dragons in pink? Oh, wow. Great. Fantastic. Good. Okay, well, please welcome my good friend Lisa Hsu, the CEO of AMD. Lisa, come on out. Please welcome her. Here she is. Lisa.

[00:01:01]  Speaker B 
How are you?

[00:01:04]  Speaker A 
All right, thank you, Lisa, for being here.

[00:01:07]  Speaker B 
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.

[00:01:09]  Speaker A 
Yeah. And, um.

[00:01:13]  Speaker B 
Super exciting. Dreamforce, by the way, just amazing.

[00:01:16]  Speaker A 
I am thrilled that you're here. I mean, this is great. Um, you know, first of all, I'll just tell everybody something. Lisa already knows this, but I'm super proud of her because there's one award that CEO's can receive in the year that's meaningful and that's chief executive magazine CEO of the year. It's a jury of their peers and, um, there is a difficult debate that goes on between, obviously, a number of finalists every year and this year's winner for CEO of the year is Lisa sue. So congratulations, Lisa.

[00:01:52]  Speaker B 
Thank you. Thank you, Mark.

[00:01:58]  Speaker A 
Um, so, Lisa, you know, we're so happy that you're a dreamforce, and I'm also so glad that everybody gets to meet you for a lot of different reasons. One is because I wanted everybody to meet you and really know your story. And two is we're all looking for the vision for the future of artificial intelligence. And, you know, it turns out that semiconductors are so important for what's happening. But number three is also how you have really augmented your employees in your engineering organization, using AI to go so much faster. Um, you know, I have so many questions. I'm never going to be able to ask them all in such a short period of time, but I'm going to do my best. But number one is I think that for everybody here, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about your background and how you really have kind of hit this kind of pinnacle, you know, in the industry. But also, you know, just, you know, you're, you've become just an incredible chief executive. But can you just walk us through, you know, your background a little bit and orient everyone into who Lisa sue is?

[00:03:04]  Speaker B 
Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, Mark, thank you for having me. Um, it's really, really a pleasure and honor to be here at Dreamforce. I've wanted to come for many years and, uh, uh, this is just a wonderful, um, venue. Just a little bit about myself. Um, I'm an engineer by training, so went, ah, to school, bachelor's, master's, PhD in electrical engineering. And what really excited me, uh, as I thought about careers and what I wanted to do was building products. Like, I'm a hardware person, you're a software person, I'm a hardware person. We both need to work together to, uh, get things to work.

[00:03:40]  Speaker A 
No, we don't.

[00:03:41]  Speaker C 
No, no.

[00:03:42]  Speaker A 
Hardware and software people don't work together.

[00:03:44]  Speaker B 
Well, you know, hardware goes in and out of fashion from time to time, right now.

[00:03:47]  Speaker A 
That's true. That is amazing, isn't it?

[00:03:49]  Speaker B 
We're pretty in fashion right now.

[00:03:50]  Speaker A 
That's also amazing, isn't it?

[00:03:52]  Speaker B 
It is.

[00:03:53]  Speaker A 
Does it surprise you?

[00:03:54]  Speaker B 
It kind of does, mark. I mean, I have to say, when I graduated from college, I would tell people, hey, um, I'm a semiconductor device person. And I'd go to a dinner party and people would say, what are semiconductors? Like? What? Like chips. What are chips? Potato chips, or like, what kind of chips are they? Um, because people didn't understand, right? So what I love about this industry is, uh, you can do amazing things by, uh, packing, um, all kinds of technology into really small form factors and build incredible computing. That's what I've done for my career. Uh, it's about, um, high performance computing and doing, uh, more, um, in each generation. But nobody really understood what they were 30 years ago. They were just these abstract things. And I think what's happened over, especially the last four or five years, I think if you think about what we learned in the pandemic, when we were short of a lot of things, all of a sudden we had to switch from, uh, people going to schools to everyone having to be remote. We took large, large enterprises like your enterprises, my company, many of the companies that I represented here, we had to flip a switch and you realized, oh, wow, computing is super important. And what's underneath that sort of the hardware architecture is super important. Um, and so, yeah, that's, uh, where I built my career, uh, uh, at Amd, I'd like to say I joined, um, twelve years ago. Uh, the company was 40 something. And as, uh, 40 something companies go sometimes you go through your midlife crisis. I think I joined during one of those midlife crises. Uh, but the vision that I had for the company was, uh, this day would come. The day when computing, uh, would change our lives and that you would need it in every part of the infrastructure. This day would come. And, um, amd was one of the very, very few companies that had the capability in the United States, uh, to really build the highest performance, uh, computing capability in the world. And I wanted to be a part of that. And so, uh, that's a little bit about, uh, how I came to this area. And I would say when we started, and I appreciate, by the way, mark, super appreciate the partnership between Amd and salesforce. When we started, we were, let's call it a smallish company. We were four or $5 billion in revenue, um, 8000 people. And now, ten years later, we're 25 billion plus, 25,000 plus people. So we're a little bit bigger than we used to be. But, uh, it is really about powering, um, all the computing technology, uh, that you need across the world.

[00:06:47]  Speaker A 
Yeah. Thank you. You can give her a hand for this. So it's really a transformational time for computing. And you have a unique vantage point as the CEO of Amddeendeh. Walk us back before we go too far into that, and just tell us a little bit about your life and how you got to this point because, you know, you somehow, you know, you ended up, you know, basically being able to join Amd. But I think that people will be super inspired to kind of hear, you know, how you got to that moment.

[00:07:19]  Speaker B 
Yeah, absolutely. So I, um, actually was born in Taiwan, you know, um, uh, my parents immigrated to the United States when I was three. They wanted to, you know, they came here for graduate school and so they brought the family and, uh, you know, grew up in New York. And as, um, you know, many, uh, asian parents know, I can imagine someone in the audience would understand. You know, my parents were like, hey, it's all about math and science. And that's, does that sound familiar to some? Uh, so, uh, that's, you know, that that was kind of the focus as a kid. And what, um, I realized was I just really like to build things. And the idea that, uh, perhaps the first engineering thing I remember as a kid was my little brother had his, um, sort of remote controlled car that was going across the hallway and it stopped working. And I was like, hmm. M that's interesting. Why did it stop working? Let's figure out if we can get it to work again. And so you take off the little screws and you realize there's a little loose wire and if you connect the wire back, it'll start working again and you're like, wow, this is the power, um, of engineering and really putting things together. So, um, I like to build things, um, I love seeing teams build, um, things that they thought were not possible. I love pushing the bleeding edge of technology. And I spent the early part of my career at IBM, so 1314 years, um, wonderful, um, institution to really learn, um, uh, how to do many things, uh, and then I was cto of free scale semiconductor and then, um, amd after that. But all semiconductors have been sort of, um, my chosen profession.

[00:09:04]  Speaker A 
But now I've noticed especially that you have a very set of core values at AMD that you've really amplified and you've transformed the company and their core values from very much kind of when you got there, it was a company ready to get to that next level and you brought those values in. Can you give us your vision of how did you do that and what were the values that were most important to you in terms of leading it? And I know the engineering focus was extremely important.

[00:09:29]  Speaker B 
Yeah, I think probably what's most important. And mark, I can imagine you share many of these same principles. You know, what's most important when you're taking on, um, a big mission? You know, um, our mission, my mission was, you know, let's build a great company that, uh, you know, really builds the fundamental building blocks of the computing revolution. Like, I truly believed that the high performance computing would be one of the key cornerstones of what we would need, um, going forward. And it is today, um, all part of the cloud infrastructure that we're running on is something, uh, that was just starting at the time and then now with AI going forward as the next big wave. But in terms of, as a company, we really have to be clear, what do we want to be when we grow up and, uh, setting out ambitious goals? I think ambition is super important. Um, and in our business also, you end up having to make big technology bets three to five years in advance. Whatever we're doing today is a product of decisions that we made five years ago. And um, so the bets we're making today are really for five years, uh, down the road. And I think that's both, um, the pleasure and the curse of being in technology, frankly, uh, because you do have to kind of see into the future and make good strategic bets. But it's also about having a great team. And I'm very, very fortunate, uh, with the fact that people come to work every day and they have, um, at AMD and we have this desire to build great products that really allow um, our partners to do amazing things, um, with the technology.

[00:11:13]  Speaker A 
Well, this deep commitment that you have to quality, but also integrity. Did that come out of your family then? Was that like part of the, you know, this incredible commitment that you had to delivering a level of excellence? Was that something you picked up at IBM? Was that, uh, something that happened at free scale? Where did you get that? I think it's amazing. The level of quality of engineering is just incredible of what's going on.

[00:11:39]  Speaker B 
I think I've always been a big believer and um, I'm sure that many of us can relate to this is uh, it doesn't really matter what your badge says or what your job description is on a given day or which company you're working for today. Your reputation is something that is um, core to who you are. You know, my view has been, you know, it's not just my personal reputation, it's the company's reputation. Uh, you know, we do what we say we're going to do, uh, because that's who we are and um, we earn people's trust, you know, I have to say, uh, mark, um, when we started this journey over ten years ago, um, cloud was really just beginning. And um, you know, I said to the company, we are going to be, you know, sort of the number one computing company in cloud. And people would be like, what? What are you talking about? You know, we were probably 1% share of the market at the time, but we knew, I knew that uh, if we built the right, um, product, uh, capabilities and we uh, built that partnership, uh, and collaboration and trust, which is so, so important, um, that we would prove generation after generation that um, uh, we would deliver and that's what we've done. If you look today at uh, what powers the cloud, whether you're talking about some of Salesforce's, uh, services, or you're talking about um, Microsoft Teams or Zoom or Instagram or any of these large cloud services, most likely you're going through AMD computing, um, underneath it. And it's really about delivering and working very, very closely, uh, with our partners all the time.

[00:13:26]  Speaker A 
You've delivered some of the highest, most highest throughput processors ever. And it wasn't just in the cloud, it's these other platforms as well, right, as these gaming platforms. That's where all of a sudden you got everybody's attention, where it was like, wait, she just delivered this benchmark and won this vendor.

[00:13:44]  Speaker B 
And so I'd like to believe that everyone in this audience using AMD somewhere in your life. So, uh, if you think about, so I've talked about cloud, if you think about on prem enterprises, we're in, um, lots of different places. Uh, if you think about game consoles, you know, if you're a Microsoft Xbox or a Sony PlayStation fan, uh, that's all powered by AMD. Uh, we power lots of the services, um, in embedded markets. You know, if you have a Tesla, you probably have AMD in it, you have a Mercedes car, you have Subaru. We're just in a lots of different places. But I think that what's underneath all of that, you know, what I'd like people to understand is, look, it's our job to make sure that, uh, the computing that you have is, uh, the most capable, the most reliable, the most efficient, and frankly, that it unlocks the vision. Um, some of what you talked about in your keynote yesterday, Mark, that it unlocks the capability to do, um, agent force and sort of the next generation of, aih, I want you to know that underneath that all, you know, we will have the computing for you.

[00:14:48]  Speaker A 
Yeah, I would say that it wouldn't be possible without this next generation of computing. When we started the company, we've had leaps, obvious. Um, in Hawaii, where I am my next door neighbor for many years, is Gordon Moore. And so we all have a debt of gratitude to what he was able to deliver. But really, to see how you've kind of carried on this vision and to accelerate this and to deliver these next generation platforms is amazing. And then to see how it manifested in these consumer products even, or enterprise products, is awesome. And this isn't where the industry was ten years ago. This is what's remarkable about, uh, your leadership.

[00:15:28]  Speaker B 
Yeah, let me maybe give you a little bit of a vignette. Right. So we talked, and by the way, uh, I agree, uh, Gordon Moore. And Moore's law, uh, is sort of one of the fundamental laws that has, uh, we call it a law, but it's really, um, one of the fundamental trends that has governed the semiconductor industry for the last 40 years. And it's the idea that every two years you can double the performance, um, in semiconductor chips, which is quite amazing if you think about it. You can do something like that over 30 or 40 years. Um, and the truth is, people have said, uh, for the last at least 15, that Moore's law is dead or Moore's law is not around anymore. And frankly, I'm a believer in, uh, Moore's law is actually being extended because of the tremendous innovation that we're bringing, um, to the party. And that's the beauty of our industry. As a technology industry, we're, uh, able to bring just tremendous innovation and new ideas for how to get to, um, the next level. But one of the things, uh, that I'm most proud of is we talk about technology for good. Um, that's something that's very important to me, is technology is great for our businesses, technology is great for our personal productivity and all that stuff. But also technology can be really used to, um, make society a much, much better place. Um, our national labs are actually some of the biggest technology infrastructure. So, uh, one of the things that we've done is really partner, uh, with, um, our national labs to build some m of the largest supercomputers in the world. So today, the largest supercomputer in the world is housed at Oak Ridge national labs. It's, uh, called frontier, uh, and it's based on AMD technology, and it's a product of work that we've done over the last, uh, really six or seven years. Um, but that machine is being used to help really understand, uh, sort of the limits of climate change, uh, going forward. Uh, uh, looking at, um, new drug discovery, looking at how do we model what's happening, um, in weather patterns, going forward. And it's just the fact that if you really put your mind to something, uh, you can really build, uh, technology for good. And, uh, that's something that really, uh, inspires me, uh, to keep really focused on. Why is the next big thing important? Because we're just at the beginning of what technology can do for us, um, in the overall, um, society.

[00:18:08]  Speaker A 
Well, I think here at the show, we've been talking a lot about things like productivity, augmenting our employees, and also getting better business results, and how really this kind of these next generation technologies, especially artificial intelligence, have really opened the door on those three things. And we just heard this kind of amazing discussion with Marcus Leones and Will. I am that the fourth thing is the level of empowerment is incredible, or what we call, you know, being able to create a trailblazer, taking somebody who maybe even has a completely different career, but can be empowered and enabled with this technology to all of a sudden deliver the next generation capability for any specific industry.

[00:18:45]  Speaker B 
Yeah. Um, I am super, uh, excited about what I think AI can do for us. And I know that there's a lot of discussion about AI. So sometimes people are like, hey, is it overhyped? Is it really that good? Is it really going to be that transformational? And I'm a big believer in AI is the most important technology trend, uh, to really come, uh, come in the last 50 years. Um, it's bigger than any of the other waves that we've seen. It's bigger than the Internet, it's bigger than cloud, it's bigger than mobile, it's bigger than PCs, uh, because of that empowerment. And what is so special, um, AI has actually been around for more than ten years. So it's not as if it's the newest kind of thing. But what fundamentally changed is this idea that it's so easy to use. Like, it's the chat GPT moment, right? Over the last 18 months, the fact that now everybody can use AI, everybody knows how to ask a question. Everyone can say, hey, what's the weather like tomorrow? Or more importantly, um, you, uh, can say, hey, I'd like to know what I should do in San Francisco this week of Dreamforce. These are the types of things that you couldn't do before because, uh, you didn't fundamentally have an easy way to access it, technology. And I love the vision that you've laid out, mark, because I think it's actually right on the idea that it can significantly enhance every person's productivity. Every single person, every single business, every enterprise, our productivity can be enhanced. And what does that mean? That just makes, you know, that just makes us more capable, um, to win that next customer, to design that next product, to, um, write that next, um, essay that needs to be written to build that next content. I thought, uh, uh, the whole agent conversation, um, uh, of this conference is actually right on in terms of how we can really capture AI to increase productivity across, um, all of these areas.

[00:20:51]  Speaker A 
Well, I think that what we're trying to do is, I just had a great experience, went over to our launchpad where we're trying to encourage customers to get into these agents for the first time. And as with one of our, one of our customers has been a longtime customer of ours. I know them very well. They're even in our focus group in Los Angeles. And we were grounding a model, we were fine tuning a model, we were setting guardrails on a model. We got the model running. Um, the model augmented their existing, you know, customer service implementation and sales system and marketing system and so forth. And it was highly intelligent, you know, um, um, model, very high accuracy, low hallucination rates. It's very impressive. And, you know, there are two things that happened in the conversation. One is that, you know, it became clear that because I was sitting with a couple of other of my friends, that they didn't have to make the decision. Do we have AMD in there? We have AMD in there. What model did we choose? You don't need to worry about that, by the way. What database did we choose? You don't have to worry about that. What security model did we choose? You don't have to worry about that sharing model. You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to diy it, because that's our job right here. And then, um, at the end, you could really see that we talk a lot now, and we have a lot of intellectualism around artificial intelligence, but it's so kind of, there's a lot of mystique and mysteriousness and an agent. What are the elements of an agent, and how will I build? But then, oh, this is. I get it. And this is not, you know, we're not doing anything that complicated. This should be something that everybody can do, and everyone should be able to make their business better. And everybody is gonna have agents, and there's gonna be billions of agents. And the people who are gonna create all these agents are the people at this show and every show and everybody. This is the new industry that we're all walking ourselves into. Is this the right way to think about it?

[00:22:48]  Speaker B 
Yeah, absolutely. And, mark, I start from sort of this notion of there's no one size fits all in compute. There's no one size fits all in AI. Uh, there's no one way of doing it. And frankly, uh, we do need, um, the ability to bring these things together. I think that your point of this isn't a diY. AI is a great point. Uh, frankly, when I spend time talking to Enterprise CIo's, um, everyone knows that they have to move forward in AI, but they don't quite know how. And there seem to be so many decisions to make. Some of them ask me, hey, should I go out and build my own data center? I'm like, I don't know that you need to do that. Um, our job, my job is to make sure that you have the right compute. We work with all of the largest hyperscalers, um, as well as, uh, top enterprises, uh, like yourselves. Um, our job is to make it easy for people to use. And the superpower of AI is not necessarily, um, the hardware or the model or, um, any of those things. I think you said this, um, as well. It's really about the data.

[00:23:58]  Speaker A 
Mhm.

[00:23:59]  Speaker B 
And it's about every one of our companies has our secret sauce. It's all of the information that we've learned, um, over years and years and years. And then how do we turn that learning into something that makes our business better going forward? That's the superpower that we're trying to unlock. And that's what you're trying to do? That's what I'm trying to do. That's what the industry is trying to do, is to make AI as accessible as possible. Because, uh, we're all in with this notion of, hey, if we can use compute and infrastructure, uh, to make every company more productive.

[00:24:38]  Speaker A 
Mhm.

[00:24:39]  Speaker B 
That's a great thing. That's a great thing.

[00:24:41]  Speaker A 
Yeah. Ah, it's an amazing moment, I would say. And it's a moment unlike anything that we've ever seen in computing before, where we really kind of have the ability to really kind of take everybody's productivity to another level. And this vision of how do we do that? And that we've had these breakthroughs in AI, but it's not about the model. These models seem like they're commodities, but, and like you said, if you don't have the data, you don't have the metadata, you don't have the workflow, you don't have the logic, you don't have the. The models don't run. So these. These. These are critical components that have to be kind of somehow integrated together. So now, one of the things that I really want to address is that in your organization, because I've studied AMD, and what's been so impressive is the productivity increases in your company also have been anchored very much to your engineering organization, and you are using AI to advance your engineers and to trump your competitors. So just tell us, how are you doing that? How did you get this a. The vision for using AI to make your, you know, your core engineering team is much, much better than it's ever been. Higher performing, you have more efficiency, and I think it is the highest performing engineering organization in the industry. So thank you. Give us your secret sauce, would you?

[00:26:01]  Speaker B 
Well, uh, thank you for saying that, mark. Um, the truth is, when you take a step back and you look at how do you get productivity, it's not always about more people. We used to have this conversation. Yeah, that's right. People used to ask me, oh, Lisa, how can amd compete against these people who are so much larger? Like, there would be engineering teams that would be ten times larger than our engineering team, and people would say, how can you possibly do, uh, that? And I'm a believer in, it's not about um, it's not about how many people you have, it's about how many of the right people and then how you focus the teams on those efforts. So uh, you know, I've been um, you know, myself, my CTO, mark Papermaster and I have been on this journey of how do we build, um, in our industry. It's something called first time, right? It's the idea that uh, you can start a product. Our products take about three years to build and you want to make sure that it comes out right the first time. Because if it takes longer, that's an extra year. That's bad for time to market, that's bad for many, many things. And uh, that's really what we've been working on. And then when you think about um, what AI does to that. So seven or eight years ago, we decided that AI was going to be our number one priority because we could see that there was a way to uh, make things much more, um, efficient. And now, uh, we see that you can really use AI to make every aspect of our product development more efficient. You can make uh, uh, the process of design more efficient. You can make the process of manufacturing more efficient. You can make uh, the process of um, code generation software much more efficient. Um, we use it in um, really figuring out how we make the quality better. So all of these aspects, uh, are what allows us to really build our next generation chips and to ah, give you an idea. Our largest chips now are like 150 billion transistors, um, 150 billion transistors. And every one of them has to be right. You're not going to do that with human beings. Um, looking at things, you really do need tools and that's where we see AI as a big piece of that. Um, I do believe that it is about workflow as well as it is about just pure engineering capability. So workflow is a very key aspect of how we get, um, uh, AI to help us with productivity. And I think we're still very much in the early stages. Again, talking to our peers, Mark, Mark and I are on the business council together and uh, I would say, uh, pretty much every meeting or so there's an AI conversation. Uh, it's not about um, how do we go from zero to 100. It's about how do we continue to experiment, um, along the way. So we have hundreds of pilots that are running um, on different parts of the workflow to try to accelerate, uh.

[00:29:01]  Speaker A 
With AI, I would say that when we look at what's happened, especially with the business council a year ago, CEO's were very suspect and they weren't really sure, you know, what to believe and they didn't understand the technology. I remember very specifically, we were in one meeting and there was a vendor presenting some of their advances in their models and voice, but CEO's, they're not really those. They weren't sure how to incorporate these ideas in their leadership. You know, I think at this point we're kind of on the other side of that where there's so many science experiments going on now they're thinking wait a minute, am I ever going to get value from this technology? Or I thought all I needed to do was build this model or do this or do that and then it hasn't worked out for me. And that's where I think over the next year or two we're going to get into kind of where we were at the cloud. Like at the beginning of the cloud, everybody was trying to build their own cloud, every company, and now they realize, oh wait, I can use a platform. And I'm hoping that this is kind of where we're going to land the plane. Do you see that happening?

[00:30:08]  Speaker B 
I do. I think um, this notion of experimentation will turn into, these are the places where we think we can add the most value. And I would say that we're very uh, sort of optimistic about the fact.

[00:30:21]  Speaker A 
That what's an example where you've really found traction, especially in engineering?

[00:30:26]  Speaker B 
Uh, very, very clearly when we look at uh, for example, software development, software development is probably one of the easiest places where um, um, you have just so many products, so many lines of code that you need to write. Um, some of that can be automated and uh, you will be able to ensure that, uh, your software developers are working on the hardest tasks and not on the, let's call it the step and repeat type tasks. Um, we see it in um, test development as well. Those are areas where they're just ripe for that. But by the way, uh, mark, I have to say we're very excited about some of the salesforce technologies as well. So we're piloting um, the Einstein, uh, technologies as we think about uh, our sales and marketing and how we go forward in those areas. And I think these are really low hanging fruit.

[00:31:22]  Speaker A 
Yeah, well, I think that we are kind of in an unusual moment in the history of the industry that we will all look back and remember, oh, this is where we really were able to hit the accelerator, by the way.

[00:31:34]  Speaker B 
I do believe that. One of the things that, um, I believe is we'll look back, this is like a ten year arc, this is not a two year arc. So let's not think about this as, um, what's going to happen next quarter. The following quarter we will see incremental improvements, but we're going to look back at this technology ten years from now and say, wow, like, I can't even imagine what life was like before I had these tools and, you know, before I had these agents and before, I mean, we can see that, right? We can see where that, uh, clearly the technology is there. Um, you know what I, what I love about it is there are now so many ways to make it easier for people because at the end of the day, I think it's our job to make, make it super easy to consume the technology. Uh, and, um, so we have to, collaboration is a key piece of that to, uh, make that happen.

[00:32:26]  Speaker A 
So Lisa, looking at this, from this arc, from MIT through IBM and free scale now to AMD and where we are, what has been your biggest surprise? Looking at that.

[00:32:38]  Speaker B 
I would say I would have thought I would be bored by now. I mean, don't you guys have that feeling? I used to think to myself, hey, I can do anything for two years. Like, I can do anything for two years. And after two years I've done it. Um, it's time to move on to the next thing. And 30 years later, still in the semiconductor industry, uh, I can say that, my goodness, how exciting is it? It's shocking just how much innovation. You know, people used to tell me, hey, you know, semiconductor industry, tech industry, it's a mature industry. Like, mature industry means boring, right? That means like you're supposed to lean out costs and do all that stuff. And I'm like, okay, yeah, something like that. There's nothing boring about what we're doing. I mean, it is more exciting looking forward than it is looking backward. And that's what has surprised me.

[00:33:35]  Speaker A 
Well, I think that this is a moment where unleashing energy in ourselves, but also in our customers, when they can kind of get that hands on experience, I call it get their hands on the soil.

[00:33:45]  Speaker B 
That's right.

[00:33:45]  Speaker A 
And then all of a sudden they go, wait a minute, this is what this is. Because I think even if you asked me, you said, you know, let's say six months ago or a year ago, hey, what is grounding? What is rag, what is, you know, what does it mean to fine tune these models? What is this? And then to see what we are going to have to do to actually make that happen at the code level. I'm saying, why is this going to impact salesforce? I don't understand. But then all of a sudden they're like, oh, actually no, we can abstract this and we can deliver this capability and then that's an energetic moment, not just for me, but I think for the customer where they can really say, wow, I'm gonna, I can do this.

[00:34:24]  Speaker B 
That's right.

[00:34:25]  Speaker A 
And I'm not gonna have to hire some AI engineer to make it happen because we're abstracting above that. It would be kind of like saying like, I started in the industry as a semi language programmer, so I had, you know, 6502 microprocessor computers, please don't.

[00:34:42]  Speaker B 
Program in a separate language anymore. It's bad, right?

[00:34:45]  Speaker A 
But that was the point and that was really hard. You know, it was like very time consuming. It was difficult. I would be sitting there, I was like 16 years old and I was like working on the one instruction at a time and it was like I was building these video games and I'm like, wow, this is today, if you ask me, to build one of these video games, like one of the games that runs on one of your machines that you have. I mean, I think I have several platforms that are AMD based that are amazing.

[00:35:11]  Speaker B 
Thank you.

[00:35:12]  Speaker A 
But when I look at those machines and, you know, some of those companies are our customers, some of them are not. Um, when I look at that machine and I look at the games that are running, I'm like, wow, I knew how to build a game and I delivered a game basically with myself. And then I have a partner in my high school software company who actually works at Salesforce with me, Steve Fischer. We were able to build these games on our own, but today there's no way that, uh, being at home in my, you know, I was in my parents home in Hillsboro, you know, working, you know, into the night, writing code one instruction at a time. No, no, everything has really changed and transformed and we're at a different level in terms of what's possible. And it seems like we're at a moment where all of that is going to again transform and change. How do you think we should think about that?

[00:36:05]  Speaker B 
I think you're absolutely right, Mark. When I think about where we are today, uh, and I think you said it earlier, it's this notion of we're using technology to empower people and to empower enterprises and businesses to do much more than they thought possible. I've been super impressed by the number of AI startups out there who have been able to build apps that can be, um, very, very capable, uh, in a short amount of time, and enterprises like yourself that are able to put all of these, um, applications together and really make it easy for people to use. I think we are at that technology arc where, um, it is an opportunity for us to bring out technology that can make it super easy for people to unlock what their vision, uh, of where things are going. And that's a very exciting arc. People ask me, um, quite often, do I think this is a bubble? Do I believe that, uh, it's like a fad? And I'm like, no, no, no, this is not a fad. This is actually the next wave of what you can use computers for. And, um, the other beauty of it is, uh, I don't think there's any one company that can put it all together. I think we all have to partner. And so the fact that, again, we're going to specialize on sort of the hardware and the foundation you're specializing on, um, sort of the application and the services level so that people can take it, and then sort of our joint customers are going to take it with their data, um, into practice. I think there's no one company that can do it all, but there is, um, certainly, uh, a way for us to make it much, much easier for people to access the technology and use the technology, uh, for business, uh, progress, as well as, uh, for societal, um, advances.

[00:38:09]  Speaker A 
I'm sure you have an opportunity to go back either to speak at MIT or other engineering organizations and say, okay, right now, thinking about the future, this is the area that I would really specialize in, or these are the areas that I would focus. What advice are you giving teams right now, or individuals, you know, who are really, okay, I'm ready for the next level of my career. I think this is the place I'm going to really accelerate things.

[00:38:33]  Speaker B 
Well, I'm a big believer, and when people ask me for advice on these things, I'm a big believer in, uh, that school and training. It's not like you're doing job training. You shouldn't go to school and say, hey, I'm going to learn how to program in Python because that's the next big thing. Um, of course you may need to do that, but, uh, it really is about learning how to think. In my mind, it's learning how to think and it's learning how to solve problems. Uh, probably one of the best pieces of a career advice that I got when I was an early engineer Washington uh, one of my bosses said, hey, um, I would really like, I was trying to decide what should I do? Should I do this or that? And he was like, you should just run towards the hardest problem you can find. Run towards the hardest problem because if you do that, you're going to learn a tremendous amount. You're going to learn how to think, you're going to learn how to solve problems, you're going to learn how to be part of an amazing team and you'll be able to look back on that and say, holy cow, uh, I was part of that. So there's so many great things to do. There's so many great problems to solve out there. Um, I think you and I are super fortunate to be in this industry that is kind of a little bit at the center of attention right now. Um, and our job is to make sure that, uh, we solve a lot of hard problems, uh, as we go through the next ten years.

[00:39:57]  Speaker A 
Well, Lisa, thank you. You're such an inspiration to all of us and you've really become a role model to so many and I'm so glad you could come to Dreamforce and inspire us. Thanks so much for everything you're doing.

[00:40:07]  Speaker B 
Thank you. Thank you.

[00:40:16]  Speaker C 
Dreamforce attendees can receive a complimentary special edition of this year's Time 100 AI issue using the QR code on screen. Time's annual list of the 100 most influential individuals in AIH recognizes the people driving the adoption of artificial intelligence forward, asking the hard questions about what comes next and reshaping the world as we know it.

[00:40:41]  Speaker B 
Mhm.

[00:41:09]  Speaker D 
I am Jaylena Lomenek, manager of Trailblazer engagement programs here at salesforce. And I am here with Trailblazer. Daniel Sanchez.

[00:41:17]  Speaker E 
Nice to be here.

[00:41:18]  Speaker D 
Welcome, Daniel.

[00:41:19]  Speaker B 
How are you doing?

[00:41:19]  Speaker E 
I'm m doing great. Dreamforce has been great so far.

[00:41:22]  Speaker D 
Dick. Daniel, with slack being the intelligent operating system for work, how have you leveraged it to get work done for your clients?

[00:41:29]  Speaker E 
So it fundamentally changed the way we operate our business. We are a Slack consulting company at 21 B. We help companies implement, uh, Slack, optimize Slack. And so using all of Slack's tools together and now with the power of AI, leveraging all of that to make everyone's lives easier and deliver work an even faster pace, completely revolutionized how companies function and companies we work with how they function.

[00:41:50]  Speaker D 
Daniel, now I understand that you are a Slack community group leader in Jacksonville, correct?

[00:41:55]  Speaker E 
Yep. Yep.

[00:41:56]  Speaker D 
What motivated you to become a leader?

[00:41:59]  Speaker E 
So I, uh, grew up in the Salesforce consulting world a lot, and I always went to admin user groups and I got into Slack and realized there was a Slack community. And, you know, Jacksonville has a very well established Salesforce community. And I just saw, you know, all the positivity and learning that was coming out of that. With my love of Slack and that community that existed, I kind of just plugged in and it was natural for me to kind of progress and help people learn a tool that can make their lives easier. It's been really, really, uh, beneficial, I think, for the community in general.

[00:42:26]  Speaker D 
What's one thing that keeps you motivated and inspired in the slack community?

[00:42:32]  Speaker E 
Jacob, uh, the slack leader, I mean, he is inspiring from a community standpoint, from an engagement standpoint. And I mean, all the new features. You know, we've been talking about salesforce being in slack for a long time and I, with that finally coming to fruition here at Dreamforce and really seeing salesforce channels, things like that, I mean, the future is here.

[00:42:49]  Speaker D 
Yes, it is indeed. Thank you so much for being with us today, Daniel.

[00:42:52]  Speaker E 
Absolutely, yeah. Thanks for having me.