Welcome to the seventh annual The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026. I'm Patrick Moorhead, Founder and CEO of Moor Insights & Strategy, joined by my bestie, Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group. Over the next three days, we're going to dig deep on where enterprise AI is actually today, what's working, what's real, and where the industry is going next. Daniel, last year the conversation was all about the promise of AI, copilots, foundation models, big potential. This year, agents token maxing to token efficiency, models escaping into the wild causing security concerns, Chinese and open model debates, the unending need for more compute, of course, rocket emoji up and to the right, the AI backlash, and finally, in the end, showing real business value.
Yeah, I think we're still fighting that battle. I still think the enthusiasm's there, the demand is there. I don't think anyone's even arguing with that anymore. I think we've seen bottlenecks and constraints rise up and down the stack. Started with compute, really GPUs, then there was custom accelerators, then we had CPUs.
Yeah.
Had a renaissance this year. We've got the memory constraints, then we got the optics and the optics bros. Is optics going to replace the memory trade? Then we've got capital, and of course, the flow of capital has become a huge topic of debate now because it's extraordinarily expensive. By the way, we didn't even throw in energy into this large list.
Right.
Of potential things that are all causing a constraint. But at the end, I always say it's great that the semiconductor companies are making money, the equipment, the foundry, the energy, the systems companies, but in the end, Pat, it really does begin to be a ll about when do insurance companies make money? When do pharmaceutical companies?
That is right.
When do manufacturing? I think that is the inflection that we are starting to see here in 2026, and it is very, very exciting.
Day one sets the stage. We are kicking off with Marc Benioff from Salesforce on the state of the industry, and then Sridhar Ramaswamy from Snowflake on why data is the enterprise AI moat. Then across three tracks: AI infrastructure, data and observability, AI platforms, ops, and models. We are going to hear from companies actually operationalizing AI at scale. Let us kick things off with our show opener, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce. Enjoy the summit.
Welcome everyone to day one. Let's go.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to The Six Five Summit 2026. I'm Patrick Moorhead, and I'm joined by Daniel Newman. We are thrilled to have Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, joining us for our opening keynote. Marc, it's great to have you on for our seventh summit.
Always great to be with you and great to see you online, though I did prefer to see you in person.
Yeah. We 100% agree with that. Schedules are crazy this time, but I did hear that there was a random running into somewhere in the U.K. with Patrick and Marc not too long ago.
Oh, we did.
We will meet again in person. It is just this time we are going to make it work. Marc, I would love to start out talking about just the macro picture of what you are seeing. You have been building Salesforce for multiple decades now. You have hundreds of thousands of customers. You talk across the political regulatory landscape, of course, and CEOs across the world in every industry. I guess just your read on the tech industry as a whole. This change has gone parabolic. It has never looked like this before. It feels like what you know on Friday can be different by Monday. How are you sort of just seeing the whole tech ecosystem right now?
Well, it is a tale of two cities, and you are right. We were over in Wimbledon together, and that was part of eight weeks that I just spent in Europe. While I was there, I met with probably more than, I would say more than 200 customers one on one. I will tell you that when I say it is a tale of two cities, what I mean by that is that on one side, we are all here, we are online, we are listening to the podcast, we are hearing about the change to this model. We are hearing about the singularity. We are hearing about all these things. Then back in reality, we are talking with customers who said, "Hey, I have got my Salesforce, I have Microsoft, I have SAP, maybe I have got my data lake.
I am using Teams or I am using Slack and a hyperscaler, and I still have not really started my AI transformation." I think that is the two worlds. It is a world where, yes, all of us are enjoying using consumer-facing AI, which is kind of Reddit with these very cool models on top of them that can do these cool things, draw pictures, answer questions, summarize things, give us advice, do therapy with us. Then on the other side, we keep asking the question, well, how is this going to impact our business? The vast majority of customers are still at the beginning of their AI journey, not just in Europe, really all over the world.
I think we have to keep this in mind that these are large companies that have enterprise systems with the securities, control, governance, compliance, and trust with their information systems that has to be preserved as we move into this new AI world. That is the two worlds. Listen, I think we are moving into an exciting new world. There is no question. I think that for a lot of us, one, we were all there at our ChatGPT moment three or four years ago now, where we looked at the prompt and we said, "Wow, I can kind of query this data set and get this amazing answer.
We all know Sam Altman was the CEO of Reddit, and while he was there, he had this revelation that he would be able to use this huge data set, scoop it up, drop it into these algorithms, known as models, and be able to provide what we call intelligence. That has gone incredibly well, and we have, of course now, so many amazing new models, all kinds of things from not only U.S., from China, even where I was in Europe.
There are French models, Mistral AI, there are Japanese models, Sakana AI. It is kind of an amazing moment. Now, let us also think that we moved pretty fast from AI 1.0, which was the prompt and the model, and the public data set, to agents. This idea now we can actually almost program these prompts and give them intelligence to go and do work for us. Salesforce has Agentforce.
There is a lot of companies who have different agent platforms now. It is cool. Even at Salesforce, we have our agent, Casey. Casey has gone out and resolved 5 million customer service issues for us on help.salesforce.com. It is so cool. We have another agent called Slackbot, and Slackbot works with me or with millions, tens of millions, of Slack customers who are trying to make sense of all their Slack data and the world around it.
We have Marshall, our supply chain agent that goes out and tries to help us rationalize our relationship with all of our suppliers. So we have lots of new things as we have moved from AI 1.0 to 2.0, and then when I was in Europe, it just became really clear to me that we are moving rapidly into the third phase already. That is what is exciting is this is moving fast.
We started in that prompt world, call it the ChatGPT moment. We moved into the second world, which is the agentic enterprise, we call it. But we are moving fast into this third world, which is the interface. This is where I think enterprises are going to get extremely excited. So a lot of us are using Claude Cowork from Anthropic, or maybe you are using even Slack or some other user interface that now is kind of a dynamic view on your data. All of a sudden, these systems are corporate systems, they are very deterministic. They know who they are. They are known entities. They are very secure. They are control-oriented. Then you take these probabilistic AI-based systems and you kind of put them on top, and they do not know who they are, and they do not have controls, and they do not have the governance.
But when you combine them together, a deterministic system and a non-deterministic system, or maybe a probabilistic system like an AI system, and you start to move the interface forward, it's pretty awesome what we're seeing, which is this era of very dynamic user interfaces and releasing all this trapped value in the enterprise where these companies have spent billions, bajillions, not even billions, bajillions of dollars with vendors, not just Salesforce, but so many. A lot of data is trapped in there in the workflow, in the governance, in the user models, in the sharing models, in the data sets, and the AI is able to find it, still preserving all of the security and controls, but delivering these highly customized user interfaces.
And for us, it's cool because Salesforce is delivered now as a fully headless system where we have these APIs, but all of the apps that have ever been built in Salesforce, like everything ever built in Lightning, people forget Lightning is a design environment and a runtime environment. It's all in there. So then it all gets revealed into the new UI. This is, I think, the AI transformation customers are really going to groove with and get excited about. That's why I am pretty jacked after my trip to Europe. I spent 8 weeks there. It was exhaustive, but as we started to show customers what the opportunity is, I think that we saw this is going to be an incredible new moment, and I think we're going to see that really open up over the next 12 -1 8 months.
Yeah, Marc, the learning curve here is amazing, and I'm so glad we've come a long way. I feel like if we started off as kindergartners doing recipe LLMs and we migrated, I think we're maybe in the second grade at this point. I am glad that we are out of this notion that I'm going to sit in an afternoon in Vibe Code and any enterprise app, I'm going to stand it up, I'm going to scale it to 50,000 users, governance, data, I'm going to get good answers back, and then I never have to update it. I'm glad we're not having that debate anymore, but maybe there are new debates out there.
I think that in some cases you will vibe code your app. Let's just take that apart what you said, because I think it's so important what you said. There's kind of this idea that you either have the vibe coding of the apps over here, or you have the prepackaged apps over here. I don't agree with this, that it's kind of either/or. I think what you're going to find is the happy middle. Let me explain to you again the happy middle. You have your deterministic systems, call them your core, enterprise core. Then you have these next gen AIs over here kind of doing their thing. But they've mostly been doing their thing maybe in coding, and we have these awesome new capabilities in coding. We even have now Slack Code, like Slack can code, Claude can code, Replit can code.
You can do all this coding. We even have our own core vibe coding products as well, and you can vibe code, but you can vibe code in two ways. One, you can vibe code all by yourself over here with no controls and no security and no sharing models and operate it and manage it and all that on your own. Or you can vibe code on top of one of these deterministic systems. Again, if you take a non-deterministic system like these vibe coders or the models or whatever, and you apply it over here to the deterministic model, this is going to be the happy middle where I think the blossom of the lotus is going to happen because that's where customers are going to see for the first time, I'm not going to throw everything away that I have. I'm not throwing away my SAP.
I'm not throwing away my Microsoft. I'm not throwing away my Salesforce. I'm not throwing away my data lake. I've made these huge investments, but I'm going to make them better. I'm going to amplify them. I'm going to build new composite interfaces on them. There's going to be a new level of dynamism on top of them, and that is going to be the awesome part of AI over the next, as I said, 12 - 18 months as people see this, I think for the first time. Just six months ago, the AI could not render a dynamic interface. So we were only on the structured interfaces. Now, it can. This is the big breakthrough. We are using Claude Cowork. We can see it.
Are you saying that the world is guilty of hyperbole and that we are zero summers? I'm literally listening to you talk, and I started hearing it in Patrick, and I started hearing it in you as like, so wait, we're going to end up with hybrid? Like remember when every infrastructure company that sold infrastructure said we're going on-prem, and every cloud company said every workload's going to the cloud. Then, you had Dario who, you're an investor in Anthropic, so to you, to some extent, that company becomes worth $100 trillion, that's great. You kind of win. But coming out and saying every industry, every kind of technology was going to just be consumed by Claude. Then you saw the cybersecurity industry got its biggest gains in years on the back of Claude Mythos.
You saw a massive pivot back towards people going, "Holy crap, we need rules and rails of business. We need our deterministic systems with" So you're basically saying we are just zero sum, hyperbolist press media, and sensational [fin-exers], and then the reality ends up being somewhere in between.
Here is what I think. We are all at the AI amusement park, okay? We are all on the rollercoaster, and it is one hell of a fucking good ride. You guys and I, we have been in this industry a long time.
Long time.
This is a moment of extreme innovation, and we all love it, and we loved reading about it. A lot of the stuff that we read is so cool, and a lot of it is true, and a lot of it is not true. That is okay because the history of our industry, as you guys know, we have got the stories, have been about what is true and what is not true. Ultimately what gets true is it is about customer success. Either the customer is successful or they are not, and that is the truth. That is what I am really seeing. When I am with our super large customers all over the world, or even us, look at us as customer zero, for example. I gave you help.salesforce.com.
If you go there right now, you will see this help agent, and it will help you, and it will resolve your issue, and if it cannot, it will auto-escalate you to our call center. If you just go to salesforce.com, you will meet a whole another agent built on the same platform called Piper. Piper is a little person that comes up and is talking to you, and it is an avatar, and it is very cool, and you can talk to Piper, and that is another world. They are running on top of deterministic systems. That is, you still have to log in to Salesforce Support for Casey, the help agent, to work. When you log in, it gets authenticated through your phone and this and that. Now you are in, and then it is auto-escalated to you.
Well, by the time it gets to a support agent, they can see a whole screen like I have in front of me of everything that's going on with you. This is now where we're getting this amplification through AI of our enterprise systems. Are all enterprise systems going to get replaced? No. Will some get replaced? Yes. Will some get hybrid or amplified? Absolutely. Can that happen maybe faster than we anticipated? Without a doubt. Why is it? It's because we're moving into AI 3.0. We're moving into not just the prompt and the model, not just the agent, but in the interface. If you haven't used Cowork, really, I think everyone should get on Cowork. Look, I was with a very large customer of mine in Europe. They're a very, very large tire manufacturer.
I won't go through the names, because I don't want to embarrass anybody. They're amazing. They use us for everything, their dealers, we have all their CRM data, we've got all their competitive data and their dealer network. I'm with the CEO and the COO, and they're saying, "We're addicted to Cowork because every day we're hand-feeding in our supply chain information, and we're doing scenario planning." I'm like, "But guys, now through CLI and MCP," that is the command line interface and the basically Model Context Protocol. Look, we had REST protocols. We had XML protocols. We had the SOAP protocols. We had all the different APIs to get into our systems for decades. Now we have the new APIs, fine.
Now, if you take that interface and apply it, wham, all that investment you've made is going to appear right in Cowork. That has never really been true of anything before, where all your metadata and your data and your application data all magically starts to render on the screen. Awesome.
If I hear you right, though, then the phraseology of headless, I'm kind of following you here because you could say that some of your peers across the enterprise software are probably somewhere between where you are, which I would say is progressive, and on the other side of it, in complete denial about the fact that this stuff is going to be disruptive. If I heard you right here, you're kind of saying that Salesforce is going to show up in Cowork. Salesforce is going to show up in tons of different. Basically wherever you work. It could be Slack, it could be Microsoft Teams, it could be-
It is already. It is today. It has to, and we have to do this. Look, we're not going to stop innovation. We're going to amp it. You have to understand my position is this. One, of course, I'm expanding distribution worldwide because I believe so heavily in this model, number one. Number two, you've seen I've bought some really cool companies. Like this company Piper, it's a bunch of Salesforce alumni have this company called Qualified that helps you qualify your prospects on your website. We bought it, we built it into our core platform. We bought that company Regrello that became the heart of the supply chain. We built also some things, like Agentforce. We built Slackbot. We're buying, we're building, but we're going to amplify this movement to kind of take all three phases are happening simultaneously, number one.
Number two, the amount of innovation that you can have in your enterprise today is extreme. You have to preserve, though, security, control, governance, and compliance. This is the heart of how enterprise systems run. This is what is going to happen, and this is the next phase of AI, and this idea of a dynamic UI, it's just awesome. For us, we're excited because we've always been headless. Headless is not something that just happened. There never was a head on Salesforce. All those apps were always being generated dynamically out of our platforms. It wasn't fixed client server application where we had a fixed client and a fixed server, you know that. We have this new API, which is an application API that just renders inside Cowork or other interfaces.
I think Cowork is maybe the first and the best right now, but within 12 months, we'll have ours. You'll be able to use Slack. I'm sure there'll be 100 of them, because like there are 100 models now, there's also 100 agent platforms, and there'll be 100 interfaces. This then will sit on top of our core systems, our deterministic systems. That is what will create the intelligent enterprise, because the deterministic and non-deterministic systems will merge, and they're going to get married and have a baby. That is going to be what we're talking about. We should be getting pretty pumped right now that we're all going to witness this as the next step of enterprise, and we're not going to toss all this stuff away. We're going to use what we have to make it all happen.
Yeah, Marc, it is an exciting time. The benefits, I think somehow I've seen the conversation move to more negativity in AI, and I understand how we got here, and I think I understand what we have to do to get us out of here. One of the discussions was this notion that our young people would not be able to get jobs. You doubled down, right? Hiring thousands of new grads.
I have.
What is the vision for your-
Oh, God. Well, you know the story. I was sitting there in Massachusetts Institute of Technology with 25 kids who are, "Well, should we change our major?" "What are you guys doing?" "Computer science." "Isn't it over? I read about it on X. It's over, right?" I am like, "No.
I believe.
I'll hire you all right now. Let me explain to you that we need you to put all these things together. Who's going to put this together?
Yeah.
Who's going to create these highly governed systems for governments and enterprises? There's so many exciting pieces to talk about, but who is going to put it all together? Who is going to make all that magic happen?
Right.
This idea that, look, number one, what are the four pieces? One, you've got to get your data right, everybody. You got to get your data right to get your AI right. That's why we bought Informatica, to harmonize the data. That's why we bought MuleSoft, to integrate the data. That's why we have Data 360, to have our own data lake, and we federate and integrate that data out into every other data lake as well, so you can bring in your Databricks or your Snowflake, or your BigQuery or your Redshift or whatever it is. Because phase one, get your damn data right. Phase two is now you take your application and semantic layers. Yes, we have our sales app and our service app and our marketing app and collaboration and analytics, Tableau.
That's a semantic layer that we badly need to ground this data to create the accuracy in the app. I have a friend of mine who just left. I just had lunch with him, and he has this Claude app, and he's like, "Oh, this app is great. Look what I built." But this number just keeps changing, and it's not accurate. I said, "Because you're trying to run it in the probabilistic system, what you need to do is get that running in a semantic layer. Build it on Tableau, and it'll be the same number every single time.
Yeah.
And then the third layer is the agentic layer, which we've been talking about, building and spawning agents to do work for us. The fourth layer is this interface on top of all this, kind of building the harness on top of these four layers. Then you really have something. The funny thing is, I talk about those four layers, data, apps and semantics, agents, and interface. If there was a hardware person here, they'd be talking about, "There's the LAN, the power, then there's the chip, there's the hardware, then there's the network." I'm like, whoa, I'm from computer systems past. We don't even think about that. We only think about software. We're just trying to get this running in this company. I expect it, the power and all that to be there. So that's where my mind is.
I'm all about the value we're going to create at this application layer, broken into these four core pieces. Does this make sense with you guys? Am I being clear? Because this is the first presentation I've done on this since I got back from Europe. So you're hearing it fresh out of my trip where I was like, this is what is happening and what is going to happen.
Yeah, this definitely echoes the conversations that I've been having as well. I did really appreciate that you summoned the ghost of IT past. That was good. But yeah, no, but Marc, this goes back 35 years. IT doesn't want to throw all their stuff away. They don't want to be locked into a specific vendor. They want their data to be secure and used in the right way, and they want to get great outcomes. Marc, these are very fundamental enterprise constructs.
You're going to get all of those things, and you're going to be able to choose as you build your next generation of IT systems. There's no question that you're going to deliver value. Let's get back to that key point.
Yeah.
We're going to deliver trapped value into actual enterprise value in short order by making this fundamental change to how we actually architect our enterprise IT system. By architecting it at the data, application, semantic, agentic, and then interface layer, we will release the value that has been trapped in all these systems, and that is what is going to be so cool.
Also, first of all, just you kind of went quickly on the topic, but of hiring the young people, I think this is the era of the intellectually curious, and I think there's those that are really playing with the tools that are not rigid.
Right.
They're moving. I think that's
Oh, yeah, you're right.
That's-
Well, I actually hired a bunch of those kids and put them in my office this summer, and they are like, "What?" I am like, "Yeah, I need you to build all this stuff." They built for me Benny, the agent we use to run our office here. I can talk to Benny. I am not running it right now, but if I did, I could say, "Hey, Benny, would you bring up that chart that I have been working on that shows the four layers?" Then in Zoom, that would come up. That is just an example where I have someone who is kind of someone. It is not really a someone.
Long be-
It is a thing.
Long before this, the Einstein thing was always about the genius in your boardroom sitting next to you. You were talking about this long before ChatGPT.
Oh, of course.
We were talking about models. By the way, it is interesting. I would like to get your take on this. This is a totally different direction than I planned to take this, but this is what makes these conversations fun. You are breaking your new go-to-market talk track. The industrial revolutions of the past, historically, the early winners are often the picks and shovel. Everyone talks about that. You are building out the infrastructure, whether it was the fiber and internet era, going back to the cable telephony, all those things. Then eventually that stuff does get settled. You kind of said this in your last answer a little bit. Trust me, I am a semi bull. I love what is going on with chips. I am having a blast. The winners long-term tend to be those that build on top.
It is very interesting because you kind of said that. I was thinking, how are you sort of thinking about that? Because early on, a lot of people might say you were in the wrong spot in the beginning of this AI revolution. Your partners at Nvidia, they are making all the money. Now it is like maybe that is about. Things could look very different in five or 10 years.
Listen, I do not really know. I can just tell you what my customers want. I have been living with my customers. In my life and the way that I work and my advocacy is, listen, you want to be successful? Connect with your customers in new ways. Yes, through agents, fine. Through systems, through your people, through automation, all of those things are important. For our customers, and for me personally, if you are not connected with your customer, you are not going to be successful. These, I think customer will continue to be one of the first things to transform. Also, like supply chain, which is for many of these companies, like that auto supplier, they have to go out and reach out to those suppliers every single day to know that they can maintain the integrity of their supply chain.
Now we can red, yellow, green them. Dell runs this supply chain product from us. It is called Regrello. We reach out to 20,000 Dell suppliers every day on agents. We bring them back. We say, "Red, yellow, green. Here are the ones everything is fine, but here are the ones that there is a problem." The reason that we know that it is a problem, because we are asking them. Then we will say, "Send us a photo of your inventory. Send us a description of everything that is going on with you. Are you in compliance? Are you in govern?" Supplier management has been everybody's nightmare. With agents, with this model, all of a sudden you can have an app running very fast that is giving you a very fast, high-level, accurate, empowering picture of what is going on with your suppliers.
It just wasn't possible even maybe two years ago. Today it is. It is not about just the chip. The chip isn't going to do that for you. It is not about the data center isn't going to do that for you. Power isn't going to do that for you. All those things enable us. Just like if we were doing this conversation before the pandemic and pre-AI, call it, we wouldn't necessarily be hyping up that we are running on Amazon or running on Google or whatever hyperscaler we are on or our own first-party data center. We are just talking about the value that we are delivering to our customer. It is going to come back to that. It is going to come back to what value are you delivering to the customer.
You know it, I know it, we have lived it, we have seen the movie before. We are crossing that bridge together right now. Look, we have 15,000 salespeople, 80-something-thousand employees. We have hundreds of thousands of customers on Core, one million on Slack. We are bringing a lot of people along with us, so we have to show them how to go from point A to point B. As they go from A to B, they are not just going to dump all their stuff off the bridge that they put the last decade into. They are going to want to try to bring that along with them as much as possible.
If you can show them that now Tableau and Salesforce and Slack and everything else is now rendering as a composite dynamic app with their personalized information right inside their browser, that is what is going to be exciting to them.
Well, Marc, there's so much goodness in this. Really appreciate the chance to hear first from you after, what'd you say, 200 customer meetings?
Yeah. Wow.
If I heard one more or two
I couldn't believe how exhausted I. Well, Pat saw me at the end. We were at Wimbledon. This is the second year I went to Wimbledon. It was awesome. We saw some great tennis, incredible.
Amazing.
The men's final was amazing.
I thought you looked relaxed, Marc.
What?
You look relaxed.
Oh, you're so sweet, Pat. Come on. It was exhausting. I was everywhere in Europe. It was awesome, and I just think that, for me, I have to do that. I have to get out with my customers.
Yes.
I have to go talk to them at every level, at the CIO level, at the CEO level, the COO level. I want to meet everybody. I like talking to everybody. I tell everyone, "Text me, email me, call me.
Tell me what's going on." You're trying to put all these pieces together, so that one and one and one make three. Because it is fast-moving, but there is a lot of misinformation, too. When you're listening to all these podcasts, probably including this one, when you are reading online all the news, you have to remember, everybody's trying to make a buck, too.
Yeah.
That is, of course, I'm trying to make a buck, but also, there's a lot of investors out there who are shorting stocks and buying stocks and taking companies public, and they're trying to make a buck. Everybody's trying to make a buck. That's capitalism. Capitalism is great, but misinformation is more a part of capitalism today than ever, and we have to keep our eyes and ears open in the world as we see that all unfold. It's going to all get down to, is this working? Is it not working? Is it great? Do the customers love us? This is what it's ultimately all about, and you know that. That's why you guys call customers all the time and talk to them. That's why they pay attention to these things.
They realize, take everything with a grain of salt, and then try it on your own. That is all true, plus we are at a moment, we're an inflection point for enterprise right now, where we are going to see incredible innovation from AI. Because the vast majority of customers, as I said at the beginning of this, are still at the beginning of their AI journey, and you know that. You're not seeing these full AI transformations. Even Salesforce, yes, we're qualifying all of our customers, we're building pipelines, we're autonomously resolving things in support. We're building marketing. We're doing automated analytics. But still, we're at the beginning of what an automated version of our company looks like.
Three quick things for everyone out there, because we're going to get on to The Six Five Summit here. First of all, thanks to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, for taking the time with us. Second, it's very early. I said we're in the pre-game. I think we've all debated, we're not in the middle of any game, whatever sport you play. Two, I heard Marc say something that's worth it for everyone to hear, which is, everybody's talking their book, so do your own homework. And three, get out and talk to your customers. Gosh, what a great reminder, Marc. Thank you so much for joining us.