Why AI could make every event feel the same

Thanks, Laura. Great to be here.

I am ready.

That is a big question just to kick things off. I'm a huge music fan. And I love going to concerts. I love seeing seeing production and shows. and I've seen some really good ones recently. So Lady Gaga was in region.

I went along with my daughter. But what really got me about that was it was theater. The production, the thematics throughout the show was more than just her songs. The choreography, the visuals, That was that was fantastic.

One hundred percent.

I drop her name and where we've been quite often because I do take inspiration from those, whether it's business or consumer shows or a concert or whatever it is, whatever experience I attend, but in particular concerts, I look at the production and think, how can we bring that into a business event?, I still haven't managed to get lasers over the line, but I have tried over the years. But I do, I talk about Whether it is security experiences, arrival experiences, crowd control, crowd movement, which is a relevant one for us. We our large event is 10,000 people. So not a small task to move that volume of people. And you learn from those venues that host 20,000 people, 30,000 people, So that's where I'll I'll bring up concerts and experiences that I've seen that I've learned from. And we bring that into our day to day.

Matchmaking via apps is something that I have never seen work very well in a B2B context. So the, put your profile up and people can discover you and arrange a meeting with you. I've never seen that work really, really well. there have been trends that have come and gone, particularly in person events, but a lot of them have merit, whether it is those networking, birds of a feather type sessions, interactive polls, sometimes works extremely well, other times less so, depends on your your content But most of them have the seeds of something good. So I wouldn't want to dismiss a whole bunch of these trends. it all depends on your audience, the experience, how long the event is, do you have time to do all those things or not?

Yes, technology obviously is a big part of what we do. We have tried a number of things. Every year we experiment. And for technology's sake, not a big fan. Data and capturing, unless you're going to do something with it, also not a big fan. being deliberate with how you use technology and how that improves that. engagement and experience in the moment. So unless it's a really important piece of data gathering for the moment that you need to use in the content, let's not distract people would be would be my feeling. But other than that, technology has, I think, a very important part to play in the broader event experience and shouldn't be dismissed. a really solid, simple event app, the information they need, so the content, the maps, who's around, so they can just navigate for us five levels of a building.

We have a global app, so Salesforce Events app that is the same app around the world. So all the World Tour, Dreamforce, Connections use the same platform. It is a third-party application at the moment that is changing shortly. built-in-house solution is in the pipe.

there was one in particular, which was from memory, I think it may have been for L'Oréal, in Greater China. And the entry experience for This event, and it's more of an influencer program, was a huge elevator shaft. And I think it was a 90-minute journey from ground to where the experience was. And they programmed the content for the exact time that elevator took to get to the top. So the experience didn't start when the doors open at the top, they started at the bottom as soon as the attendees started moving. So I thought that was really, really clever. But the variety of work in the submissions that I saw was phenomenal. Some of it really simple and budget restricted, but incredibly clever, through to very, very high, high production value programs. And there's something in all of those. So the really simple but effective. And also Budget doesn't always mean it's going to be perfect. The work behind some of those large-scale programs is immense. And money doesn't fix everything. It helps, but you still need to really craft that experience and bring it back to the individual. That there's a person at the middle of all of this. And how grand it is doesn't matter. It is one person's experience that counts.

Well, the origin story goes back a bit further than that. And it's not

it's not something you'll see on LinkedIn, but it really is my origin story. back in the early nineties, fresh out of school, I was spending my weekends in dirty warehouses across Sydney. as part of the underground rave scene. So that was that was my weekend fun. as you do, Sunday morning hatching plans with friends, we're like, we can we can do better. So we did. We started, we became promoters and started putting on our own events. we did that for a couple of years, and again. Had a great time, learned a great deal. So this was walking into empty shell venues, bringing in your sound lighting DJs and people. so we did that for a while, but the pivotal moment for me, 22nd of July 1995. 6 a.m., a warehouse on Parramatta Road in Sydney. Sun's coming up, it's getting light, and we, so my mates and I who put the party on, we're up on stage for the final set. looking at a sea at a sea of people that we created that experience for them. Smiling faces, absolute moment. And that was the moment I went, how do I turn this into a real job? And that really was the moment that I changed paths. I was working at the time in a kind of marketing assistant role And it was that job that led to the World Food Expo.

I was a membership officer originally and then pivoted across to conferencing and that was Being proactive, putting up my hand, showing interest in getting involved in that conference. And eventually I think someone else came in as as membership because I was on the conference path. Then we had an end date. So that World Congress was a once-off in this region at that scale. And then it was a case of what is that next step?

it was the kind of background that is very hard to get. I had managed to get involved in all of the back end admin. Through to expo production, through to content, And so speaker preparation. the exhibition was largely bespoke, all custom built. Managing Food for attendees from 70 countries. That was that was interesting. the cultural nuance of bringing audience in into Australia and making sure that we were bringing that flavor to the event. So I came out with a with a CV and a skill set that was really rare to have. And that set me up really, really well for the next phase.

Most definitely. allowing the space and the trust for innovation and ideas is where some of your best ideas come from. Stifling innovation is where ideas got to die. So I always look to that. I want those diverse ideas. we're dealing with a big generational shift in the industry and in the workplace. as a whole at the moment with Gen Z priorities, Millennial priorities, Gen X, Boomers, they're all there with different ideas. And all those ideas are valid. So building on that, listening to that, I'm a big advocate for listening in a variety of formats.

So I think it would have been 2016. So my second year at Salesforce, second world tour, and we really wanted to have a village vibe to our exhibition. so part of this brainstorming session was like what what does a village have usually? It's got a main street. It's got a pool. It's got a playground. And that concept with a variety of inputs, we had a we had our event agency and we had the broader marketing team that morphed into the end result, which was on the expo floor, we had a swimming pool, we had a swing set and seesaw, adult-sized. And load rated and tested. we had a main street. We had street markings down the middle of the expo. And that was designed in a big, I think it was big X, as you would normally have in a s in a small town. You've got Main Street going one way and then high street going the other way. And really changed that dynamic of, no more grid expos. And we haven't done that ever since. So we haven't brought the pool back. That was a one once off down in Melbourne. It wasn't very deep, but it was it was a big pool of water in the middle of an exhibition hall. that swing set has been at public events, it has been back in our expo a few times over the years, just for some some fun, surprise and delight moments.

Yeah, I did. I went I went freelance. I'd done a couple of years on the Microsoft account. So agency side for Microsoft with a previous agency, so the incumbent, and then I moved across to Jack Morton, continued work on that account. incredible volume of events we were doing back then. And I was a producer on the account and I kinda reached the end of the natural end of that. I did did a couple of big programs over a couple of years and then went, okay, I think I need a bit of a break, bit of a reset. And I made the decision to move on and I didn't technically have anything to go to. I was taking a leap of faith. And as soon as I did that, I had a few people asking me, Well, are you Available. And I said, well, depends, depends what for. And very quickly I realized that there I had a network out there that I'd worked with in different organizations, client side, agency side, who had short-term needs. And I thought, okay, cool, let's give this a go. So I picked up a couple of gigs here and there for a few different agencies. circling around the usual suspects. So HP were in there, Intel were in there. I did some Microsoft stuff as well. And then got a three-week gig for Gartner. working on Gartner Symposium, which was their large annual conference, And that turned into five years. So I did three-week freelance, turned around, went to China with them, and then turned around, went full-time, and ultimately led that team and led Symposium for a number of years. That was the switch to client side. And that's where I've been ever since,

I felt very calm. I found my place. Now I loved agency. I credit that with a huge amount of learning about this industry. But client side was where I felt most comfortable. but it is very different. And you a lot depends on the relationship that you have between client and agency. the best relationships are those partnerships and built on trust. The master servant relationship I don't like. I don't do that with my agencies. It has to be a partnership. And I think having worked so long on agency side and then moving across to client, I know both sides of the coin. And not everyone has that dual experience. But it worked for me. as I said, I loved love technology and I've been in technology organizations since then. And understand the audience. That's a big part of what I was doing agency side for Microsoft was Understanding my audiences and designing experience for them. I was dealing, I had my main audiences were the developers, so the proper geeky Microsoft developers, K-12 education, and then mobility. And all those audiences have different needs and wants and styles. Developers in particular. So understanding both those skill sets. understanding an audience and listening to the audience and then bringing that into the concept into the reality of a global technology company that was where I really found my mojo of this is cool. Yes it's challenging, especially global organizations working in APAC for US headquarters. That brings with it some interesting challenges. time zone being one of them, but cultural differences across this region are significant. And yeah, the client side is where I found my happy place and haven't looked back.

Back then, the workload on agency side was a lot. And that working in a few different environments it varied. but at times it was incredibly high expectations, long hours, hard graft, lots of travel at times, and that is something I'm conscious of now, trying to watch out for on agency side, because your job as an agency produ agency producer or an associate or TD, whatever it is, is to keep the client happy. I don't want that to mean that people are working around the clock just to keep me and my team happy. We do want to be happy. We want a good result. We don't want to break people in the process. And I did get that at times when I was agency side. I do think a lot has changed for the better. now in terms of expectations and workload and work life balance. There's definitely been periods of my career where there was no work life balance. It was work, work, work, sleep a bit and then work. So I'm better for being through that experience because I think that makes me a better client. Cause I'll I'll pick it up pretty quick if someone is a bit broken. and I will raise that on their behalf because I know what it's like when they need to get the job done, yes, we all do, but we're not saving lives.

Working for large organizations, there is a lot of change that comes with that. But change, particularly in the technology sector, is a constant and I've worked in organizations where there's a re-org every year without fail. You come back to work in January, and this division is split, and then the next year this division, we're bringing them together. that happens, it happened at Dell, it's happened at Gartner, it's it happens at Salesforce. We're an incredibly agile company and with that comes change. Not everyone is comfortable with change. So navigating teams through change. And I think this particular era we're in now is probably the biggest change and rapid change era I've seen for a long time with AI. and guiding people through that and trying to instill a sense of calm is really important. Because it is unsettling with What you hear in the headlines about what technology can do with respect to this revolution we're in, another industrial revolution. The reality is we've had all those industrial revolutions before, and society has had a lot of the same fears that you're taking away the horse and cart, what's gonna happen? motor cars, machinery replacing manual work. And the fears that it's going to displace everyone's lives and jobs. The reality over history is that people have pivoted and changed their focus and we've all been okay. I do think that is the case moving forward, but that is really hard to take, and particularly the generations that are and it I date myself as a Gen Xer, but The generations coming through that haven't really been through the seismic change we have, it is scary because it's very, very unknown. So yes, challenging is, guiding through change.

I like to think that I just roll with it. Now behind the scenes, there's a lot of thought that'll go into that attitude. But I've been around enough organizations now and been through huge changes, whether it's acquisitions, restructures, reorgs, layoffs, acquisitions and more people coming in. been through a lot of it and getting hung up on it there's not much point because when when you're in a company with 85,000 people, resisting change is not going to get you anywhere. It may send you backwards. So you're not going to stop the change. There's not much point resisting it. You can object and discuss, that's fine. But the change is coming. And in some ways it's the get on board mentality because it's here, it's happening. You can choose to embrace, tolerate, or resist. And resistance isn't really going to pan out that well. And the other side of it is next quarter, next year, it might all change back. So roll with it.

Nuance. So what I mean by that is I've had the incredible fortune of working, a lot in Australia and New Zealand, but throughout Asia, into Greater China, a lot of work in India. And the worst mistake that can be made is to try and do the exact same thing in every location. You need to understand the audience and how they operate. really good example is India, Mumbai, we used to run a program there every single year. And traffic in Mumbai is terrible. That's part and parcel of a city with that many people. Now, while in Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland. We may start registration eight, 8:30 a.m. and then move into a breakout or a keynote session at nine. That is not going to cut it in Mumbai. You need to shift everything later. And okay, there's another version of the agenda and it's mismatched in a spreadsheet, but that's the reality because regardless of whether you say 8:30 for registration, nine o'clock session starts, the audience will roll in at 10. Once they're through that journey. And then likewise, different habits in Singapore. Singapore also not a great early morning crew. Fantastic public transport, incredibly prompt, all those things. It's just not the way they roll. So don't go with an early, early start. end of the day, in Australia, New Zealand we'll have drinks and nibbles and people will stick around for. A chat and networking over a glass of a beer or wine, not the same vibe in Singapore. So you've got to listen to the audience, appreciate how they like to consume that experience. lunch in India, you need 90 minutes. That's just the way it works. Whereas here in Sydney we feed 10,000 people in The space of an hour. In India you need to draw out lunch. It is much more of an important part of the day compared to us grabbing grabbing a baguette and a drink and then continuing on our way.

I was very deliberate in landing at Salesforce.

So the role I had before Salesforce was incredibly demanding from a travel standpoint. So the majority of the events I was running were in India, Asia, Greater China, not actually much local. and it was difficult. I was okay there, but I wanted the next step to be the right one. So I drew up a list of organizations, started doing my research on each of them. where this decision came from was. I need to be be involved in a company with great products. That's a that's a given. But it was values. I wanted to go somewhere that was very aligned with my own values. And that was where the other organizations were crossed off the list and Salesforce was left with one. So it took it took nine months from initial intro t introduction to the marketing leader at the time. Initial conversations. They did not have an in-house event person. So they were running what what was actually now World Tour, about a thousand plus people. And that was done by the marketing team. So it was people wearing two hats and running running the event in conjunction with agencies. So I was the first event hire, specific event hire in region. I walked in, I think it was eight weeks out from World Tour, and the team were like, Cool, we've been waiting for you. Boom. Here you

go. And not much had been done. which now in hindsight is scary but also exciting. and that was really the beginnings and it's just grown from there. And the values are still there, still aligned with mine, and I still bring them into every event that we run.

Heavily reliant on the agency. I think when I joined APAC Marketing, the entire APAC marketing team was 18 people. We were a seven billion dollar company with five products. now Asia Pacific Marketing's probably 150 people. big enough that we've now carved into regions. So we've got ANZ and then South Asia as two distinct marketing teams now. We've gone from five products to a wide range of products. So it everything has grown. The team, the scope, the products, I think the first World Tour, I looking back at this recently. The first World Tour I ran, we had 33 sessions. For World Tour this year in Sydney, it was over 150 sessions. And we went from a couple of thousand people to now I only have a very small team. I have myself and two dedicated team members on What we call our strategic events, which is just the large Salesforce proprietary events, and then it's agency. And agency is the arms and legs. And that's the way we can scale, because three of us producing that event, the math doesn't work on that one.

Frequent flyer miles.

so we would run those roadshows, and as as I mentioned, we've now carved into regions, but previously we'd run the APAC roadshows. and you have a local marketing team, and then we were an Asia Pacific team. So you would run that as three events, one program. And run your WIP for the APAC program and bring everyone along that journey. it is a very, very complex exercise of where am I, what day is it, where are we going next? And

trying to keep the energy up is difficult at times. But having local teams and leaning on those teams. The worst situations I've been in is where an HQ team, this has not happened at Salesforce, an HQ team parachute into a region. And expect it to operate as it does at home. That is certainly not the case in India. The working style is very, very different. It takes a lot of adjustment the way that we expect things to happen is not the way it happens, and you need to respect that when you're walking into someone else's house rather than trying to. change the way that an industry works. And again, I've worked in India since 2008. and it has its own rhythm. And it's different. And it's exciting. I miss it actually, because I'm not not doing India at the moment, but it's it is a region that challenges you like few others. And I do like a challenge.

Trying to impress. That probably is the crux. the best relationship when I was agency side was with Microsoft and this complete partnership that we had with them. And it was trust both ways. And I learn a lot from that and I bring that to client side. I want an agency to challenge me. I want them to say no. If it's a bad idea, I want someone to tell me that's a bad idea. Just taking what the client says and going and doing it because they said so, even though it's a stupid idea? No. Not great. So they need to feel that they have permission to do so. And I like to try and give them that permission. I will tell them. Tell me if that's a really stupid idea, or if that's physically not possible, or it's going to break your entire team to make that happen. Tell me. If I really, really want it, or one of our stakeholders really, really wants it, how do we get there? So partnership and trust. Absolutely. To me, the secret sauce to an excellent result. You can't get to that perfection. There's no such thing as perfection, but you can't get to that ultimate result if you're not all on the same page.

I've had one genuine disaster but we averted it. running a medical conference in Western Australia there was a cyclone tracking towards the coast. this was a cyclone in Broome. that was approaching the coast and it was meant to make landfall and then die out. It made landfall and then it turned around and came back. this was yeah, 2001 probably, 2002, mobile phones weren't massive. And we had to contact every single attendee and say, don't travel. Because no one no one was local. They were all traveling from mostly the eastern states. And that was not easy. That was a lot of landlines, that was just trying to track down as many people as we could. We managed to have everyone change their plans. We had a truck currently going across the Nullarbor with all our exhibition, our bags, our badges, all that sort of stuff. So we pulled that back, ran the conference in Sydney. So that was that one. We had we had a typhoon, and this was at Salesforce back in eighteen, nineteen. we had a typhoon the day before our event. schools were closed, stock market was closed, we were all locked in hotels. That was our setup day. So trucks, again, this was it was coming. So we got stuff in the night before our normal bump in day. We got everything set up.

Great suppliers. So I don't think we incurred significant costs on top. I think it was in their best interest to get their trucks out and in time ahead of it because the next day Hong Kong shut down. I've never seen anything like it. The stock market, all schools, all hotels, all restaurants, everything was closed. So it was a red red alert, I think, was the terminology. so there was that one. And I think the best example of crisis averted was our COVID pivot.

on the sixteenth of February in twenty twenty. It was a Sunday morning. I had a phone call with our chief legal officer, our chief product officer, I think chief medical officer was on there as well. And we made a decision On that call to cancel World Tour. World Tour was scheduled for the 4th of March. Australia was not in lockdown or any major problems at that date. But we made the call. We are not proceeding with this event. In the same conversation, we made the call that we will proceed on the 4th of March with a virtual event. Now, at the beginning of 2020, platforms didn't really exist. Zoom was little-known, conferencing tool. all of the Eventex platforms that we now have available and virtual solutions didn't really exist. And we had 10 business days to do this. So we had the convention center booked, we had a lot of content, we had thousands of people registered for this event, and We then had to go out to market and say what we were doing. At a time where there weren't lockdowns, there weren't that many cases, but bringing together ten thousand people was irresponsible. And by the time 4th of March rolled around, things had changed significantly We ran a virtual event. We had 11 live studios at the convention center. We worked with all of our suppliers. From the physical event to pivot to virtual. So our keynote supplier also happened to do a lot of television work. TDC. They do a lot of broadcast television. So we created studios. We had to also create a platform for this. So we had streaming solutions. But we didn't necessarily have a platform for a virtual event. So it was a four-tab experience in your browser. There was videos in one, and then there were demo rooms in another one. There was community in another one. And at that point in time, audiences were tolerant of this. That changed over the next couple of years. and we had 85,000 people tune in. So I'm incredibly proud that kind of case study what you can do in 10 days with the right people around you. the blessing there was Nigel, the CEO, has a theater background, so tends to hire people like that. So A number of our event producers had come from broadcast or come from stage. And changing that skill set wasn't overly difficult for some of them. It was difficult for us all, particularly our presenters who had to now work to camera, not to an audience, and all those things that everyone went through in that era. But that was that was a potential disaster because that is a The biggest thing we do in a year as a marketing program. It has the biggest impact on our business. And deleting it is also disappointing customers who had, we'd made a commitment to them. We wanted to honor that commitment. So we did. very, very proud of that. And then then we had the next couple of years of challenging but very rewarding times. I would not want to ever do it again, but what we have learned through that is something that I don't think we ever would have learned otherwise.

respecting people's time. the early phases of COVID where people were stuck at home, virtual events weren't too difficult. They had nowhere to go. So plunking them in front of a screen and delivering content was easier. And at that time people were running full-day virtual events. People were sitting in front of a laptop for hours and hours on end. over the next couple of years, that tolerance got less and less. if you're not capturing me and holding my attention, I'm out. Browser closed, done. So That was a really interesting shift that I think has carried on today. Every audience now is more precious with their time. So whether that's an in-person event, a virtual event, pre COVID our breakout sessions were forty minutes. They are now thirty and we have the theater sessions, which are smaller smaller content, twenty minutes. So people are precious with their time. Needs to be of value to me. So you need to demonstrate that up front with your demand generation campaigns. You really need to sell it. so my first world tour, I joined Salesforce in January 2015, the event was in March, April. We went to market with our first email. First email tends to be the highest performing one. All it said was we are basically we're running World Tour. There was no content. There was some nice invitation language and people registered off the back of that. I was astounded. It's not the way I'd I'd operate where I come from, but Salesforce putting on event, they do it well, I'm gonna come along. Now You really need to demonstrate that value. What's in it for me? What am I gonna get out of it? And really thinking about that. If you're wasting someone's time, then that's not fair on them. So really focus on value and focus on experience and the audience, the customer at the middle of it all, to ensure that you are respecting that they are giving you their day. World tour is a full day. And there are a lot of people who are there for the entire day. That carries to me, that carries weight. That is a day of their time. They could be doing something else. And if they walk away and it hasn't been a good use, then I think you fail.

The other element to that COVID era was we unlocked an audience who would never have come or been able to come to our events otherwise. Whether that's through geography, ability, or other factors, we were able to deliver that experience to them. And that's something that we continue. We still broadcast our Main keynote from World Tour, we record and provide on demand a whole collection of our breakout sessions because there are people who can't get to the event. we looked at, making sure that when you're creating that experience, it is accessible. It is Not a wildly complicated platform that some audiences may not be able engage with. So simplicity, but continuing that virtual access is something that I hope I hope the industry does continue with. I know in person is where it's at, it's high engagement, but I still feel there's a place for hybrid and virtual in the entire event sector if we can.

what we are seeing is virtual is dropping off still. People

wanted to come back in person, continue to come back in person. And we still see an audience engage virtually. We are capped out in terms of the capacity of the event. So we hit that button.

the on-demand piece is a great follow-up for those who couldn't make it in person on the day. the on-demand piece is here's a chance to catch up on what you missed. it is also an additional piece for those who were there. For sessions they missed, because you can't be in two places at once, and we have eight rooms running at any one time. So there's still most definitely a virtual audience need. it is incremental to what we see there on the day. We hit 10,000 in 2018, 19, and then we came back slowly after COVID, but we've been back up at 10,000. That's where we stop. That's the capacity of the venue. And we then have virtual as top up on in addition to those. we continue that through our programs through the year. I actually also run our webinar program for the region, so that sits in my org, and that is a successful program. So if you're thinking about prospects, they're not gonna give us their day. That's not gonna happen. But tuning in for an hour-long keynote where they get the end to end and seeing what they're missing, because we do tend to highlight within that what else is going on at the event. maybe the reason that next time it comes around they're like, I'm gonna go to the in person one this time.

the risk I see in the event space is cookie cutter programs. whether it's agency or client side, filling in prompts to the same agents with the same brief, and we suddenly have a series of events that are identical. Whether that is content, scripting, demand generation, copy, the risk of vanilla every day is out there. The Absolute importance of humans in the mix for events, I don't think can be underestimated, and I don't think it's being said out loud enough. Events really relies on critical thinking, innovation, creativity, and I think experience. You can't train. AI for all of that. You can train AI with your processes. I'm doing a lot of that at the moment. what I used to do in years gone by of manually comparing spreadsheets, I'm now working with AI. So the process hundred percent. And I think that goes for every industry. It's like if it is highly process driven and written down as a step-by-step, cool. we can actually get rid of the grunt work and focus on the big picture, which for me is experience. And that should be created by us using experience, knowledge. Brainstorming among groups, you get great ideas from different people that morph into the end result. I don't think that is going to come out of some of these tools. They're incredibly powerful, incredibly useful. All the tasks that I've done over many, many years can now be taken away. Does that take away from someone's day to day job? I don't think so. I think you redeploy and your efforts go into making the event better. I do have a seventeen year old. Son, very skeptical of AI on an ethical standpoint and a sustain sustainability standpoint. very valid. And I think there is a generation that will inform the next phases. We're having quite a lot of discussion in Australia about. all the new data centers and what that means for power and water. And they're good discussions to have. Will it stop the rollout? Nope. Will it change how? Maybe it will.

Bigger, yes, bigger is not always better. Bigger and flashier is not all that matters. do they make them better? Yes, in some ways. So if I think about our keynote. That's 4,000 people, flat floor, in the round, live demos. from a technology standpoint, that experience is wonderful. Big LED screens, we have nice lighting in the room, we have incredible connectivity for our demos to run seamlessly. So that does improve. You couldn't do that without the right. tools and technology and people in the room. When it comes to our exhibition, there are experiential elements in there that we create to allow our audience to touch and feel the product. And again, that requires some investment in platforms and technologies to make that happen. But the idea is to engage the sensors and tell a product story. Could you have a static laptop to do that? Sure. Does it land and engage those multiple budget does help, but you can do a lot of things. without needing to invest heavily. being deliberate in your thought and planning and listening to make it happen requires the effort, not necessarily dollars.

Yes. So as our products get more and more complex, as does the technology infrastructure required to showcase them. it gets bigger and more more complex every year. we are expected to innovate. We are expected to deliver a different experience. Every time people walk back in those doors and they do come year in, year out. The year that someone walks in and it's same as last year. No, not doing my job right.

we can't. That is very rare that something really, really can't be done. and now that's not saying I want to bring a lion on stage. Not not things that are totally out of the realms. But if it is we can't afford it, we haven't got the time, do we? Can't we?, questioning questioning that. it will vary by that relationship I've spoken about before. I won't say that we get that now. in the past, I have witnessed I won't say which side I was on, situations where, that's gonna cost X as a way to have the client not do it. And it's not going to cost that much. Or we don't have the time when the reality is we don't want to do that. I want to hear the facts. Don't don't try and dress it up as a way to get around and have the client turn around and go, okay, well, sure, we haven't got the time or we haven't got the budget. More, more a case of that's hard, we don't want to do it. Tell me that.

Number one, do what you say you're going to do. That tripped me up early on in the industry, and I did get pulled up by a couple of people on that. so if you can't do it. Tell me. Don't hide it. Now this was more about tasks I was given as a coordinator

that I was not keeping up on. I'm like, yeah, everything's fine. And it wasn't fine. And it wasn't done. So that was that was that one. the other really important is all of the work that I've created. I'm very, very proud of. But there's two elements that I'm probably more proud of than others. And that's sustainability and accessibility. So on sustainability, that world expo that I worked on, I vividly remember walking into the expo hall at the end of it. Our conference chairman was in tears standing there, because he'd worked for decades to bring this thing to the country and it was done. And was never coming back. So he was in tears on one side. The other side was a humongous pile of landfill. A lot of that expo was all bespoke, custom build, and it was going to landfill. And that waste bugged me, and I carried that through to where I could impact change. we have reused our exhibition structures for a long, long time. So Next year for World Tour, I think some of our booths will be celebrating their eleventh birthday.

We built them deliberately to build, use, store, reuse throughout the year. So at other events that we run, we roll them out, and we bring them back for world tours. So we have exhibition pods that are, yeah, they're coming up on 11 years old. that is one step in minimizing waste that we've been able to take of reusing as much as we can. we look across sustainability in everything we do. It is now a company value. When I joined Trust, Customer Success, Innovation and Equality were the four values. Sustainability was added a couple of years ago. we run a very large event and the potential for horrible waste is there. We have Fabric signage that we reuse. We don't put the year on any of our signage. So what we had in Sydney in February, we've just rolled out in Melbourne in June for our event down there. so we look at we look at that, we look at the food waste, we look at waste diversion. So that's one thing that I like to instill. When I have time in front of students, I do highlight sustainability. And then accessibility is another real Passion point for myself. We run an accessible event that starts before we have an accessible version of the website, screen reader-friendly. It is designed to prepare attendees for the event, explaining so that screen reader can read out to them what happens from the moment they arrive in their transport outside the building. Once inside, we have Abilityforce, which is our employee resource group. We have Abilityforce ambassadors to assist. The entire event is flat floor. There's no steps. there's no barriers. We have Auslan or American Sign Language, so ASL interpreted the keynote. We have closed captions. We have a Sensory room or a quiet room for our neurodiverse attendees. We trying to think what else we do. We put a lot of attention on that. The only thing out of those that costs money is the interpreters. The rest, the only thing it costs is listening and paying attention and looking at the event and looking, is there a barrier to someone participating? Whether that is, there's nothing worse than having a great exhibition display that's surrounded by, 50 mil, two-inch steps, that a chair can't get up, or someone with mobility aids is it's gonna present a risk for them. If I make the event accessible to one person who couldn't come before, That makes me proud, makes me happy. So we look at that and it just requires listening and thought. It does not require investment outside of interpreters, which are people, and that is that is something we do in our keynote and definitely has made a difference. And the other thing is that while we ask the question during registration. For any accessibility needs? Not everyone will ask. I know one of our one person in our ecosystem who has cochlea implants. She won't ever ask for interpreters. But in the room, I know she will use them. So whether or not we have a request for sign language. I'm still having them in the room. And if that is just an A for one person, fantastic. The I think the fact is now a lot of people watch their Netflix and their streaming services with captions turned on. So there's a lot of people who are now used to that. That's how they're engaging with content. They're reading along. So we have that in there. That is for me a non-negotiable. and then there's a third one, which is people power. We when we gather with a huge group of people, giving back is a huge part of our company DNA, the 1-1-1 model, which we pioneered back in '99. We've got 10,000 people in a room. What can we do with that? We can make a difference. And this year at World Tour, we had an Australian not-for-profit DV safe phone. They put mobile devices in the hands of domestic violence victims as a mean of as means of escape and saving lives. To do that, they have donated devices given to them. Those phones need to be tested, checked, reset. That requires people. We have people. We brought them in to the event. They are a Salesforce customer as well. We set up a special zone for them. And during the day of World Tour. 2000 phones were tested and prepared for DV victims. We actually got a Guinness World Record for that at the same time. But that's just harnessing people power to make a difference and truly save lives. Again, doesn't require a huge amount of budget. It just requires thought and planning. And they're the moments that make me really proud. The event makes me proud. I love what we do, what we create is. I think industry leading and I love it, but it's those moments that bring me the most satisfaction and proud moments

People's faces. really logistics the basics of logistics and planning if if things are feeling very uneasy you can, usually tell pretty quickly. I've seen some situations where everything is bad, but the people are smiling 'cause it's kinda comical that it's that bad and we're all in it together and everyone's trying to cope. That's great. If the audience turns, you got no.

Not really. I think, the converse of that, and I was not there for this one, but many years ago at Dreamforce, we Dreamforce is our annual customer conference in San Francisco. It's 50,000 people, phenomenal speakers, but there is a DreamFest, which is a charity benefit concert. So all the Dreamforce attendees go to that. There is also a very strong philanthropic effort and audience there. Raises millions of dollars for UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. And there is top talent there every year. prior to my joining Salesforce, Green Day were the band, they were playing, I think they were playing at the ballpark in San Francisco, and it was pouring. To the point where they I believe they lost power and therefore lost PA. And they continued in the pouring rain with an acoustic set with the crowd singing along. That's that moment where the crowd's on your side. then it's it's gonna go well. I seem to remember I don't know. who it was, but there was a very poor performance at Big Day Out, which is was our kind of Coachella music festival, grunge festival, twenty something years ago. And there was one set I remember going to where the talent were awful and the crowd the crowd turned. And you've just got to get off stage at that point in time.

I do think that the industry has a bit of a resurgence ahead of us. In the AI era where what we're seeing online is difficult to discern what is real. And they are now getting so clever, That you don't know what's real. And that is where I think those face-to-face events have a real opportunity. That people want to connect in person and they want to trust what they're seeing. you can't AI a human on stage. So that is where I think we have an opportunity for the next wave of events to really engage with humans AI will be part of that. AI will be one hundred percent behind the scenes and integral in the production of those experiences. But in-person experiences are important and they're gonna need to be good. that's definitely one of those areas that we need to focus on as an industry, making sure that we're not delivering an experience that's just okay. It must be good. It must be useful use of someone's time.

What I keep meaning to do is book a holiday. I'm I have another screen here which has a lovely photo I took on the Amalfi coast this time last year, and I have not booked a holiday this year. So actually planning out a holiday. I have lots of leave up my sleeve and not getting around to actually booking it in.

Thank you so much. It's been a total pleasure. Really enjoyed the discussion.