Salesforce is trying a pricing model in which it builds a customer's system for nothing and takes a percentage of the profit, the revenue or the amount it saves them. Marc Benioff says the company has never done that before.
Enterprise software has been sold by the seat for two decades, and the industry's newer AI pricing runs on named agents, usage, consumption or completed transactions. Benioff listed all of those on stage at Dreamforce and then described one more that puts Salesforce's own revenue behind the customer's result.
"We have to be more flexible now in our pricing than ever."
Benioff co-founded Salesforce, has now hosted 24 Dreamforce conferences, and paid $26 billion for Slack in a deal he calls the greatest acquisition in the history of software.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 10 insights that matter.
👤 Guest: Marc Benioff, Co-founder, Chairman & CEO of Salesforce
🎙️ Host: Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money and manager of the CNBC Investing Club's charitable trust
🧩 Other segments: Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Sarah Friar of OpenAI
📰 Published: 15 September 2026 on the Mad Money podcast (CNBC)
🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 14 min
Key Takeaways
Salesforce is offering to build the system for nothing and take a percentage of the customer's outcome
It can be a share of the profit, the revenue or the amount saved, and Benioff says it has never done it before
He calls the $26 billion Slack purchase the greatest acquisition in the history of software
Bookings grew triple digits last quarter, and Nvidia, Anthropic and OpenAI all run on it
A new Salesforce search product took SharkNinja's failed product searches from 22% to almost zero
Salesforce will start selling its own models, beginning with one built on Nvidia's Nemotron
He bought $25 billion of Salesforce stock when it traded at nine times earnings
The Anthropic position was described in the same exchange as about $25 billion, and he says it will be a huge win
The revenue path he reaffirmed is three years in the $30 billions, two in the $40 billions, then the $50 billions
Guidance went up $300 million to $400 million against a foreign-exchange headwind of roughly the same size
The "SaaS-pocalypse" was a trade, not a thesis
His explanation is that people in the stock market wanted it to be true for long enough to act on it
His warning to the AI industry is the one he says social media ignored
"A lot of kids got hurt"
1. 50K People, 10M Online
Cramer opened by asking whether this was the 24th Dreamforce and what to call an event that is not a trade show — he has been calling it an extravaganza.
Benioff's answer was a mission statement rather than a description. "Well, Jim, we're trying to empower every trailblazer."
The scale he gave: about 50,000 people in person and 10 million online
What he says the company is doing with them is positional — showing where the technology industry is now, where it is going, and how they can be part of it, which he described as something Salesforce has done for decades
Cramer's framing for the week was that Dreamforce is where the people building the future and the companies spending billions on it are in the same place
2. SharkNinja's 22% to Zero
Cramer said he wanted to start with a company people recognize, and named SharkNinja as a favorite he cannot believe is taking the country by storm despite tariffs.
Benioff's first response was the smoothie recipe, and an instruction to put jello in it, which he offered to send over
The product claim came next. "We have an amazing new search technology called Simulate"
The number came from SharkNinja's own chief executive over the weekend. Benioff said the company cut what he called its no-ops rate — people arriving on the site, trying to find a product and saying they cannot find it — from 22% to almost zero
His stated reason for caring about that metric is the experience rather than the license. He said Salesforce wants to help every SharkNinja, and every company, have a good experience with technology and especially with AI
Cramer's reading was commercial: a customer who can find the product buys it, and a company that sells more can price lower
3. The SaaS-pocalypse Grave
Cramer said he had been to a cemetery and seen a gravestone reading "SaaS-pocalypse did it" with no date on it, and asked when Benioff killed it.
Benioff put the idea in somebody else's industry. He said there are a lot of people out there in the industry, maybe in Cramer's industry and not his
His explanation is a trading motive rather than an analytical one: "In the financial services industry, the stock market industry. Who wants certain things to be true for a little while so they can make a trade."
His verdict was flat. "But I think everybody can see that SaaS-pocalypse was nonsense. And I think you can see it at Dreamforce. There's no such thing. It's total nonsense."
Cramer agreed and moved the point to partnerships, saying the breadth of Salesforce's revenue-generating partnerships is what struck him about the quarter, and that the partnerships get copied by others. He named Michael Dell and FedEx as two he checks back on a year later and finds still making money
4. Paid on Your Outcome
Benioff's stated priority in a partnership is trust, then results. Nothing is more important than the trust Salesforce has with its customers, he said, and the technology has to actually be making money for people
He then listed the pricing models the industry is now using: user pricing, named agent pricing, usage pricing, consumption pricing, and what is called outcome pricing, where the customer pays when a transaction completes
The new one goes further than any of those. "But we're even trying a new model, which is we're willing to kind of come in, we'll build the system for nothing and we'll take a percentage of your business outcome really." Asked whether Salesforce had ever done that, he said no, never
What the percentage is taken from is flexible. He said it can be the profit, the revenue, or the amount Salesforce saves the customer
The reason he gave is a demand from customers rather than an idea of his own. "We have to be more flexible now in our pricing than ever." In AI, he said, customers want all of us to have a little more skin in the game, and Salesforce is willing to do that
Cramer said that in his previous life he had a 30% lift every time he used Salesforce, and told viewers their own numbers could go up by that much
5. Coa, Built on Nemotron
Cramer asked about Coa, a product from the largest company on earth by his description, and whether he should be using it.
Benioff's answer was that Coa is Salesforce's own model, built on Nvidia's open-source Nemotron. "Coa is actually a Salesforce model that we have built on Nemotron."
The change is that Salesforce will now sell models, not only use them. He said the company has always offered models to customers and has a research team that built prompt engineering itself at Salesforce, and that it is going to start offering models too
The name is an in-house joke he made sure Cramer got — Coa is also Salesforce's chief love officer, a dog Cramer had met
6. Slack Was Worth the $26B
Cramer said he had gone back over what was written when Salesforce paid $26 billion for Slack, and that some people thought it had destroyed the company.
Benioff's answer left no room. "The greatest acquisition in the history of software, Jim, is Slack." He said Salesforce said so when it bought the company, and knew it would trade once for it
Six years on, it is the fastest-growing product Salesforce has, with triple-digit growth in bookings last quarter
The customer list he read out is the AI industry itself. Nvidia is a big customer of Slack; Anthropic runs its company on it; so does OpenAI
The product line has spread into the rest of the stack. He named Slack CRM, which runs Salesforce from inside Slack; Slackbot, which runs the AI; and Slackforce, a new user interface built in Slack using Anthropic that he described as a front end for the whole company
Coding is the newest use. He said a company can run a multiplayer, multi-channel environment in Slack with all of its coding agents
Benioff added that everyone uses Slack, including Salesforce itself, and said plainly that the competing product is not as good — before allowing that Salesforce has to work with it, as Cramer said he does
7. Buying Back at 9x
The conversation turned to the period when Salesforce stock traded at nine times earnings, which Benioff called a curious time.
What he says he did about it was buy: "Well, what I said to myself was, wow, the stock is so low. We'll come in, buy 25 billion of Salesforce."
The criticism at the time was about the balance sheet. The exchange described people saying Benioff had wrecked it, against an Anthropic position put at about $25 billion
He was explicit that the stake is not a long-term holding. Salesforce is not going to hold the Anthropic position for long, he said, because that is not its business
His expectation for it is unambiguous. "But this Anthropic will be a huge win for us."
Cramer's assessment of the venture arm was that its record puts it in the industry's top ten. The multiple, by the same exchange, is now about 15 times
8. From the 30s to the 50s
Cramer asked whether the second-half acceleration can continue, and noted that the 2030 goal had been reaffirmed at the analyst meeting.
Benioff said the year is going well and pointed at the guidance raise, which he put at $300 million to $400 million
The headwind he named against it was currency: "I mean, we've had an enormous headwind from foreign exchange, like 300 something million dollars."
The revenue ladder is how he framed the trajectory: "Well, you saw we spent three years in the 30s, right. And we're going to spend two years in the 40s. And now we're going to go right into the 50s."
His comparison was to the rest of enterprise software. "Oh, by the way, no enterprise software has grown at that speed. Not Oracle." Cramer added SAP to the list
9. Don't Repeat Social Media
Asked what Benioff is scared of, in the way Dario Amodei has named his own fears, the answer was not about models.
The precedent he reached for is one he and Cramer have argued about for years. The number one thing, he said, is social media, and how disappointed they both were that the social media companies were not really taking care of themselves
The damage he named was to children. "A lot of kids got hurt." He added that a lot of companies and a lot of individuals were hurt through social media
The conclusion is a demand on his own industry. "We don't want that to happen in AI." He wants AI to be held responsible for its actions and to be ethical
His definition of the word: "And the heart of ethics is responsibility."
The credential he offered for it is an outside ranking. Salesforce has been named by Ethisphere as one of the most, or the most, ethical company in the world for 14 years
He addressed the request directly to the companies around him in San Francisco and worldwide, on the grounds that the technology is very powerful
10. $150M to the Schools
Cramer said the reason he thinks so much of Benioff is how he got him involved in children's charities, and Benioff pointed out that Cramer built a playground at the new children's hospital in San Francisco and does not talk about it.
The day's donation: "We're giving another $18 million today to our local San Francisco and Oakland public schools, 24 million, including Indianapolis and New York, where we have huge communities."
The running total he gave: "We've given now more than $150 million to our local public schools, $300 million just to our local San Francisco schools, hospitals and parks."
The wider figures were grants and time. More than $1 billion in grants and 11 million hours of volunteering, on his numbers
The free-software commitment is the part that is not cash. He said Salesforce runs 65,000 non-profits and NGOs for free on its service
His summary of why: "We feel that business is the greatest platform for change, that we have to give back." And then, to Cramer: "Jim, this is what business is all about."
Bonus Insights
Benioff's 87-year-old mother was sitting in the room during the interview, and he interrupted a serious answer to say so
He said people regularly mistake her for Billie Jean King, and called the resemblance a doppelganger
Cramer noted that he had spoken this week to Jensen Huang, who has a deal with Salesforce, and to Anthropic's Dario Amodei, whose deal with Salesforce he called a bit of a shocker
Cramer's parting line was about the relationship rather than the stock. He said he always tells viewers it is not about friends, it is about money — but that with some people it is friends
Benioff's bottom line is that the market's fear of AI destroying software companies was a trade rather than an argument, and that Salesforce's answer to it is to sell on the customer's outcome — building the system for nothing where it has to, and taking a share of what the customer earns or saves.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Salesforce (His own company, whose Dreamforce conference the interview was recorded at, and whose revenue he expects to move from the $40 billions into the $50 billions)
Slack (Bought for $26 billion, now the fastest-growing product Salesforce has, with triple-digit bookings growth last quarter and Nvidia, Anthropic and OpenAI as customers)
SharkNinja (The customer whose failed product searches fell from 22% to almost zero using Salesforce's Simulate search technology)
Nvidia Nemotron (The open-source model Salesforce's own Coa model is built on)
Anthropic (A Salesforce Ventures position described in the interview as about $25 billion, which he says will be a huge win and is not a long-term holding, and the model behind the Slackforce interface)
OpenAI (Named as a Slack customer)
Oracle and SAP (The enterprise software comparisons — he says neither has grown at Salesforce's speed)
Dell Technologies and FedEx (The two partnerships Cramer says he checks a year later and finds still making money)
Ethisphere (The body that has named Salesforce one of the most ethical companies in the world for 14 years)
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