Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff offers up this reminder to investors before his big birthday

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I think I have fully processed my time spent at Salesforce's (CRM) annual extravaganza in San Francisco, known as Dreamforce.

This was my fourth Dreamforce, and it was fascinating per usual — including a dinner at the top of the 61-floor Salesforce Tower with Matthew McConaughey (a longtime friend and pitchman for the SaaS giant), Will.i.Am, Metallica lead drummer Lars Ulrich, one of Nvidia's (NVDA) founding GPU creators, and Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei (who gave some great brief remarks on artificial intelligence).

This dinner ended with an acoustic performance by Alanis Morissette, who sang four songs that reminded me that, at one point over the last 42 years, I did have a personal life (filled with the teenage heartbreak that only fed my appetite for sappy Alanis songs on Myspace).

I digress.

Now that I've digested this latest West Coast tech swing, I'm here to say it's good to see Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff back to being Marc Benioff.

I realize that as a journalist, I'm supposed to be critical, and I am. Salesforce shocked the hell out of the market in late May with a weak outlook, and the stock got hammered. Not a lovely look.

But I can't completely turn off the analyst DNA in me that still exists deep down.

And on that score, I liked what I saw from Benioff at Dreamforce from a few different perspectives.

I saw a founder pull thousands of employees into his vision of an AI future during a keynote. The room full of "trailblazers" — as Salesforce employees are called — was hanging on to his every word. The group was ready to run through a wall for Benioff, essential when you are trying to deploy a billion autonomous AI agents and deliver for Wall Street each quarter.

It was also significant that Benioff mostly did the keynote himself, only yielding the mic a few times.

"The reason is I think he feels that this is a very pivotal moment for his company, for the industry, and for the technology," Goldman Sachs analyst Kash Rangan — who was also in attendance — told me.

"When these entrepreneurs like Marc and Oracle's Larry Ellison that have founded their companies and have this deep sense of connection to the companies, and they understand those pivotal moments, it is like they kick into high gear and all they can think about is getting the company to be on the right side of technology."