Bland AI Recreates Salesforce's Iconic Marketing Stunt

San Francisco, USA - On a crisp San Francisco morning in February 2000, protesters gathered outside Oracle’s Siebel User Conference carrying massive signs that read "No Software." 

25 years after Salesforce protested at Oracle’s event, a new AI company gives Salesforce a taste of its own medicine.

While chanting anti-software slogans at bewildered conference attendees, a local news crew rushed to cover the chaos.

Here's the twist: the news crew was fake. So were the protesters.

The entire spectacle was a marketing stunt orchestrated by Marc Benioff, then-CEO of a scrappy one-year-old startup called Salesforce. It was Silicon Valley's first purely theatrical protest, and it worked. That single stunt put Salesforce on the map and helped kickstart its journey to becoming a $250 billion empire and the world's #1 CRM.

Twenty-five years later, the script has flipped.

David Becomes Goliath

This week at Dreamforce 2025, a bright red phone car pulled up outside the Moscone conference center. Protesters emerged holding signs that read things like “Your vaporway must ship eventually" and “You can’t rebrand your way into AI” — a direct parody of Salesforce's original protestors messaging. 

The group chanted and waved signs at Dreamforce attendees streaming past.

The company behind the stunt? Bland AI, an enterprise voice AI infrastructure startup that's taking a page straight out of Benioff's playbook.

"Twenty-five years ago, Salesforce disrupted the industry by “protesting” Oracle," says Ethan Clouser, Head of Marketing at Bland AI. "Now we're giving them a taste of their own medicine. If it worked for them, why can't it work for us?"

The stunt is bold, theatrical, and exactly the kind of unorthodox marketing move that put Salesforce on the map decades ago. But this time, Salesforce isn't David at the battlefield — they're Galioth.

Why Voice AI Needs Its Own Benioff Moment

Just like Salesforce faced CRM giants Oracle and Siebel in 2000, Bland AI is participating in a voice AI market full of companies relying on rented APIs from frontier model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. But Bland is betting that a fundamentally different approach — fully self-hosted infrastructure — is what enterprise businesses actually want.

Bland operates its entire voice AI stack in-house. That means transcription, inference, and text-to-speech all happen on their own servers, never touching third-party providers. For industries like healthcare, finance, and logistics where data privacy isn't negotiable, this architecture offers something competitors (and even salesforce’s newest voice agent) can't match: complete security and control.

But having superior technology isn't enough. Bland knows what Benioff knew in 2000: if no one can see your product through all the noise, it doesn't matter how good it is.

Court Attention At All Costs

The Dreamforce protest isn't just nostalgia marketing. It's a calculated move to position Bland as the challenger brand willing to fight directly with industry titans.

"This is more than a marketing stunt," Clouser explains. "It's a statement about our approach to AI infrastructure. We're not renting someone else's models. We're building the foundation. And we want everyone to know it."

The "No Rebrands" signs reference Salesforce's recently announced AI rebrand, Agentforce, which intends to position Salesforce as leader in the AI race. By staging the protest at Salesforce's own conference, Bland AI is manufacturing their own David and Goliath story, just like Benioff did 25 years ago.

Whether this stunt will capture the same lightning-in-a-bottle moment that launched Salesforce remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: Bland understands that in a crowded market, you can't play it safe.

You need to be aggressive. You need to think outside the box. You need to do what is unorthodox.

Marc Benioff proved that a well-executed spectacle could turn a one-year-old startup into a household name. Now Bland AI is betting that history can repeat itself — even when you're protesting the company that wrote the original playbook.

The world is watching.

Media Contact

Ethan Clouser
Head of Marketing
Bland AI
Email: ethan@bland.ai
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