October 16, 2025
It’s All Over But the Rideshare to the Airport
Dreamforce 2025 is wrapped (except for the inevitable afterparties, new LinkedIn connections, and sore feet). From the conversation between Marc Benioff and Sundar Pichai to the final sessions across Moscone, we’ve covered a lot of ground — roughly 15K steps per day per attendee, along with agentic AI, hackathon winners, patient care revolutions, small business strategies, and multiple rock concerts.
So let this last post (which you may well be reading from the back of a car headed to SFO, chafing at the surge pricing) be a refresher for anything you have already forgotten (there were a lot of sessions) or anything you missed.
We’re grateful to the attendees and to San Francisco for making this the best Dreamforce yet. And thank you Cyclone Priscilla for leaving the party early.
Safe travels, rest up, and see you next September for Dreamforce 2026.
Parting Words
Paula Goldman, Salesforce Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer, argues that the key to trust isn’t just the technology, but empowering the people who use it with confidence and AI literacy.
Dreamforce Day 3, the Final Countdown
What happens when you put AI to work? Customers shared their perspective on a stroll through Agentforce City.
Salesforce News
Another news-heavy day at Dreamforce as the company announced another high-profile partnership and progress from its Ventures arm.
- Salesforce Ventures announced it has deployed over $850 million of its $1 billion AI fund, backing 35 AI-first companies with combined valuations topping $270 billion. The portfolio includes heavy hitters like Anthropic, Cohere, ElevenLabs, and newcomers like fal AI and World Labs. “We believe AI is the most profound platform shift of our time, and its ripple effects will transform industries we care deeply about,” said Paul Drews, Managing Partner at Salesforce Ventures.
- Salesforce and Google are expanding their partnership, bringing Google’s Gemini models into the Agentforce 360 Platform. The integration introduces hybrid reasoning through Salesforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine, combining AI creativity with the reliability of business processes. The partnership also brings Agentforce 360 across Google Workspace — meaning users can access Salesforce capabilities from Gmail, Meet, Sheets, and more.
Two snippets about Slack
Were you today years old when you heard what SLACK stands for? We were. Slack’s Chief Marketing Officer Ryan Gavin fills us in.
And here’s the news about how Slack just got better.
Session Recaps and Outtakes
Commercially available quantum computing is coming soon, to crypto’s peril. And Google Glass might come back (really).
These were two of the predictions Google & Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai made during a sit-down with Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff on the final day of Salesforce. The insights from Pichai came fast and furious:
- “We are definitely going to have digital superintelligence as a collaborator for all. That is going to be a reality.”
- “The 10 years quantum [computing being widely available likelihood] is real. I’m very, very bullish and confident on it.”
- “Three- to five-year thing, we will have that moment where, from a cryptographic standpoint, we have to adapt to quantum for sure. And that creates a moment of vulnerability for all of these currencies. I think as a society, it’ll also create an opportunity for people to come and provide new solutions.”
- “We all have to be good stewards of [new technologies]. Technology is going to progress. We should embrace and innovate with it. The benefits are going to be profound, but our responsibility as leaders is to make sure we are leaving the world in a better position for the next generation.”
- “There were many things we worked on where the AI wasn’t fully there, right? But now that you truly have seamless AI with intuitive interfaces…Google Glass is going to be back, and I think it’s going to be great. People with real disabilities will be able to communicate again.”
- “These models are really going to be intelligent agents. There are going to be more robust agents. You [Salesforce] want us to be safe, secure, the governance to work, and ultimately, you’re trying to unlock the data in your enterprise and solve your use cases better than ever before. I think that is the real opportunity we have, and what you’re doing with Agentforce.
Three things you might not have heard about how Salesforce turned itself into an Agentic Enterprise
In Salesforce on Salesforce: 5 Agentic Lessons, executives shared a framework for other companies to become Agentic Enterprises:
- Start small and go fast
- Test, tune, repeat
- The right data is gold
- Measure value and impact
- Embrace new ways of working
But within those lessons were some moments of aha. Here’s a few:
Help portals used to be messy, and now they won’t be: Bernard Slowey, Salesforce SVP of Digital Customer Success, flashed Salesforce’s former customer portal, which offered a dozen or so starting points for customer information treasure hunts. “It was a good resource – one of our most visited sites with 60 million visits a year,” he said. “But we kept hearing it was too much information, too hard to find answers.” Now Agentforce does the donkey work.
You gotta let the LLM be an LLM: After Agentforce suggested a customer use a competitor’s product, the team instructed it not to mention competitors in its answers. All well and good for 24 hours until a customer asked how to integrate Microsoft Teams with Agentforce. “We went back and rewrote the prompt — not by listing every competitor in a guardrail, but by coaching Agentforce the way we would coach an employee. We told it: ‘You are a member of Salesforce’s Customer Support team. Keep the best interests of Salesforce in mind when answering questions.’”
Go deeper: When Agents Join the Customer Support Team
Maybe marketing and sales can put down their dueling swords now: Context signaling allows the nurture agent to stand down until a potential customer has gathered enough information to engage. “AI is blurring the lines between marketing-sourced and sales-closed to achieve growth,” said Daniel Zieleski, VP of Data Science. Trust builds before any talk of a sale, and everybody gets the credit.
Your data can be a little dirty
Audience question from the session with DeepLearning.AI founder Andrew Ng, titled Building AI: Speed, Smarts, and Scale:
Question: How would you recommend getting started organizing your data and building that data layer so that you can start moving toward agentic AI?
Andrew Ng: One secret is, no matter what company you are, including the best, most respected AI companies, everyone feels like, ‘Boy, my data is such a mess. It’s so dirty. I’m never done cleaning it.’ Instead of preemptively cleaning data or over-investing in architectures … just get started on the application and then let that pull your data architecture forward.
It is actually useful to put in place principles of governance: the security, the accessibility, deciding what to store, what to index. But then I find that the actual work of deciding which pieces of data to clean, I tend to not preemptively work on that ahead of the application.
Healthcare’s big shift: from processing patients to co-piloting their journey
Patient services are no longer just a cost center — they’re a strategic capability driving growth through better patient experience. That was the message from experts at ZS, Genentech (Roche), and Amgen during a session on the future of patient care.
The panelists explored how agentic AI and automation act as digital co-workers for case managers, handling routine tasks so humans can focus on high-value patient interactions. But technology alone isn’t the answer: the future of patient care requires breaking down organizational silos, establishing patient-centric KPIs, and taming “data chaos” by owning and integrating information for real business insights.
One critical takeaway? Bring compliance and legal teams into innovation projects from day one, not as an afterthought.
Hackathon champions build an app that never leaves Slack (because why would you?)
Team Vector Studios took home the top prize at this year’s Dreamforce Hackathon with an end-to-end creative project management app that lives entirely in Slack. The production company’s solution uses Agentforce to handle everything from project setup to approvals to analytics — no tab-switching required.
Judges evaluated teams on user experience, agent capabilities, platform usage, and demo delivery.
Winner: Team Vector Studios — Creative project management, soup to nuts, all in Slack
Runners-up:
- Team ACT — AI-powered Crisis Response Command Center for disaster relief coordination
- Team What I Do? — ITSM tool that cuts Salesforce troubleshooting time by 90%+
Spotlight Awards:
- Best Use of Data 360: Team Fleurby
- Best Use of Tableau: Team ACT
The SMB secret: no red tape, just AI
“For every business that’s out there, there’s a finite amount of capital and a finite amount of resources,” said Camping World CEO Marcus Lemonis at Wednesday’s SMB & Startup Keynote: Grow Faster with Data and AI Agents session. “You need to augment that with a lot of technology that’s going to make it bigger.”
The catch? It has to be technology people can understand — tools that empower employees, not replace them.
That’s where small and mid-sized businesses have an edge, according to Kyle Norton of Owner.com. Smaller teams, like his, can adopt new technology quickly, without the analysis paralysis that bogs down larger organizations.
“The secret sauce to having such robust implementations that we can move at a pace that is quite unique,” said Norton.
Lend me your ears
Support for a quarter-million constituents? No problem, with AI
The Barcelona City Council’s Municipal Institute of Social Services (IMSS) delivers social care to more than 260,000 people, or about 15% of the city’s population. Marta Fabà Ortega, Director for Strategy and New Projects at the IMSS, sees this massive (and critical) scope as an opportunity to tap in some extra support — AI agents.
Fabà Ortega sees agents as an equality builder, she told the crowd at Wednesday’s Revolutionizing Public Service with Agentic AI keynote: “It’s a message to the city, it’s a message of equality, of dignity, and making sure that our most vulnerable citizens are going to benefit first from innovation.”
Jamison Braun, VP Global Public Sector at Salesforce, outlined a four-step plan to help government agencies like IMSS adopt agentic AI:
- Identify high-impact wins: Focus on outcomes and target specific goals.
- Unlock and harmonize data: Build a unified data foundation.
- Leverage a unified platform: Bring agents, data, and apps together.
- Deploy agents and measure impact: Multiply the impact of your people and track ROI.
How Claude became Claude
At the session AI Agents: Powering the Future Enterprise, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny explained that the breakthrough with Claude Code came when the model was given real tools — and safe limits — to act in the world. Within two weeks, 88% of the team became daily users, a signal that trust and usability fuel adoption. Salesforce’s Kaylin Voss summed it up; the future enterprise won’t rely on one “super-agent,” but on an ecosystem where agents collaborate with each other and humans safely and intelligently.
Behind the Scenes
Hats off to our on-camera talent! Here’s Ashley Alebiosu, Strategic Events Manager at Salesforce anchoring our on-site camera crew.
Spotted: Attendees build their very own agents in Moscone West with the help of Salesforce’s Forward Deployed Engineers team. Senior Director Product Marketing Vikram Mediratta gets the post-build report.
Dreamforce Day 3 Dawns
Sometimes in life you have to make tough choices. Do you like your milk whole or oat? Do you check out Benson Boone or Metallica? Listen to the Conversation with Sundar Pichai and Marc Benioff session later today? Or hear from DeepLearning.ai’s Andrew Ng on how to build AI startups?
No FOMO for you, whatever you choose: We’ll be here covering highlights throughout the day and probably grab one (three?) more coffee(s) before heading home.
If you need a break, brush off your Sicilian Defense opening and play a round of chess. Computers have been beating humans at chess for a while now, but at least we could still pick up a handful of pawns and fling them at the computer screen with our dextrous fingers. Now robots can physically move that knight into a checkmate just as easily as a human can.
Your day-three moment of zen
October 15, 2025
Breaking News: At Dreamforce, Salesforce Announces New FY30 Revenue Target of $60B+, 10% Organic FY26-FY30 CAGR
At this afternoon’s Investor Day presentation, Salesforce President and COFO Robin Washington announced a new FY30 revenue target of $60 billion (excluding any revenue from the pending Informatica acquisition), and 10% organic FY26-30 compound annual growth rate. Six members of the leadership team — including Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff — presented the strategic vision and answered analyst questions.
Here are some highlights:
“As we look out over the next five years, we’re excited about the opportunity that we have to return to double-digit growth,” said Washington.
“We want to make sure that we build a platform where probabilistic reasoning lives together with deterministic execution — the apps, the workflows that we have been building for years,” said Miguel Milano, President and Chief Revenue Officer. “People think the LLMs are becoming the new CRM applications and it’s the end of SaaS. Well, just in the last year [LLM companies] tripled their spend in our CRM applications — sales, services, marketing, Slack, analytics … It’s not the end of SaaS, it’s a new chapter of SaaS.”
Steve Fisher, President and Chief Product Officer, said, “[There’s been] a reconceptualization, a reimagination of our entire product suite — very, very different from where we were a year ago and dramatically different from where we were four years ago …. The data layer, the agentic layer, and all the applications built on top of that platform, all working together seamlessly and synergistically. These are not silos. … And that’s really to the benefit of our customers and especially their customers because now they can be treated as individuals, and not siloed off by the particular department they happened to talk to. It’s the dream of CRM and now through the data layer and agentic layer, we’re on the verge of being able to deliver those incredible experiences that have been so challenging in the past.
Fisher continued, “Ultimately, that’s what we mean by the Agentic Enterprise. Having this agentic layer, powered by data, that infuses all the applications, all the touchpoints, everything the employees are working with, all the engagement that customers have, they’re elevated by agents or engage directly with agents, and it all works seamlessly together. Humans and agents working together to drive customer success. That’s really our core strategy. Our advantage is this all comes together on one platform, putting the customer at the center, deepening trust, elevating employees, building enduring customer relationships.”
The key thing for us is, we’re constantly bringing new tech in and adapting it for our customers so they can be successful.
Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce
Marc Benioff, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, said, “Look, technology marches forward. Innovation marches forward. Everything is getting lower cost and easier to use. The show we’re doing this year is not the show we did last year or the year before. … Go back 23 years ago to the slide deck, it’s not the same show, product line, customers. The key thing for us is, we’re constantly bringing new tech in and adapting it for our customers so they can be successful.”
Benioff continued, “I think that we want that infrastructure and we want that capability to bring more value to our customers, because we’re going to sell it. We want to be that partner in the companies. We want to help those customers to achieve that value and the promise of this technology.”
Need an End-of-Day Robot Smooch?
Mwah to you and see you back here tomorrow where we’ll kick off the day with a recap of Marc Benioff’s conversation with Figure.AI CEO Brett Adcock.
Session Recaps and Outtakes
Starbucks and LIV Golf Leaders on Shakeups and Turnarounds
At Leading with Purpose: Starbucks & LIV Golf Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol and LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil shared surprisingly frank lessons they’re using to engineer turnarounds at their organizations. Moderator Heather Ruden, Salesforce EVP Global Field Marketing, uncovered some tough truths.
- Lesson 1: Sometimes You Have to Be More Directive Than You Expected
O’Neil said he had initially planned to be collaborative and calm when he took the helm at LIV Golf in January. “My style throughout my career has been much more Knights of the Round Table than king and court. But when you’re engineering a hard turnaround, that patient, humble approach doesn’t always cut it. I’ve had to be more directive than I usually feel comfortable being.” It seems to be working — in 10 months LIV has attracted half a billion dollars in sponsorships, up from zero.
- Lesson 2: Listen … But Show People the Door When You Need To
Niccol said he has had to shake up the Starbucks leadership team to achieve his objectives for the company. “When you decide to go down a path, you want to have listened first. You’ll get a lot of things you’ll have to say no to. Then the job of a leader is to take that information and make a decision and be comfortable moving forward. People who aren’t comfortable, you need to ask them to go somewhere else because it becomes a cancer on your culture.” Niccol’s new leadership team has a long road ahead as it attempts to get “Back to Starbucks” – meaning back to being the corner coffee shop where every barista knows your name.
A 360-Degree View of Agentforce
In a Wednesday keynote, Salesforce officially unveiled Agentforce 360 Platform, positioning it as the platform for every employee to become an agent builder.
- Speakers showed off Agentforce Builder’s easy creation methods, like natural language and dove into Agent Script canvas, a new scripting language for controlling agents. Agent Script combines the flexibility of AI with the rigor of business workflows so that agents perform the exact way you want them to, every time.
- Agent Observability, which will be available in November, scores every agent in real time, allowing users to quickly identify the root cause of issues and instantly initiate remediation workflows via Agentforce Grid.
- Madhav Thattai, CEO, Salesforce AI, explained that Agentforce deeply indexes unstructured content, turning a company’s wisdom (that’s data) into actionable context.
- Speakers also demonstrated new voice capabilities and success with partners like Williams-Sonoma and its “Olive” agent, which can help customers plan, shop for, and execute meals.
Not all Heroes Wear Capes
At Agentforce for Financial Services, Ben Altom (aka “The Best Mohawk in Banking,” per Kelly Utley, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Salesforce) had a great way of describing the retail bankers at ABSA, a South African bank. “ABSA is really viewing their retail bankers as superheroes. And superheroes don’t want to be superheroes. A force comes in where that superhero has to step in and save the world. They don’t know how to do it, but there’s a guide that helps them along the way. And what ABSA has done to put together their implementation of Agentforce is they are using that agent as the guide to help their heroes.”
Thato Matolong, Chief Information Officer, Personal & Private Bank, ABSA Bank shared the ROI the bank expects to see from one of the agents helping those superheros: 4,000 monthly debit order reversals end to end — a potential savings of more than $600,000 — by implementing Agentforce.
Go deeper
A new voice on the scene
AI-powered voice assistants are transforming call centers with natural-sounding and cost-effective customer support that makes wait times disappear — bye bye, dreaded hold music. This feature reveals how Agentforce Voice uses real-time data to personalize these futuristic interactions for growing customers like Engine.
The Agentic Enterprise Has a New Address
For all the collectors out there, the Pin Hunt is on. Grab a map and navigate through the city to collect all 17 unique Agentforce pins. Winners get the gold (pin). Game on!
For sparkle-seekers, the Pandora booth is a must. The team there is giving out special Dreamforce-edition charms to certain lucky demo-watchers that you can even get engraved (while supplies last, of course). It’s a dreamy way to remember your time here and add a little something special to your collection.
Huge shout-out to UChicago Medicine for taking care of us. That booth’s “Astro’s Pharmacy” is stocked with survival kits: mints, Liquid IV, and other Dreamforce necessaries you need to stay energized and curious. Thank you UChicago Medicine!
Vocabulary Trailblazers
Dreamforce is a source of technological innovation, yes, but it’s a source of linguistic innovation, too. Here are the buzzwords and catch-phrases we’re hearing at Moscone.
Donkey Work: Michael Dell used this term for repetitive processes that can be automated, freeing humans to do more valuable work. (Well, what the Dell CEO said on stage at the main keynote was that donkey work is “a lot of people emailing, gathering information, writing spreadsheets, running after approvals, basically doing a lot of work that nobody likes.”) Ryan Teeples, CTO at 1-800-Accountant, called back to the term later that day in an interview with the Newsroom team.
Influencer Pink: We overheard Dreamforce attendees describe the decor of the Content Studio, where creators and influencers can have 1:1s with their sources, as “influencer pink.” Judge for yourself!
Temperature Violation: Used by Jumana Al Hashal, Co-Founder & CEO of voltair.ai, to describe the temperature fluctuations goods experience during their journey to the consumer, being taken on and off the trucks, getting stuck in traffic, and so on. Berries, she told the crowd, are sensitive to quarter-degree variances in temperature and each temperature violation comes with a reduction in shelf life.
Seen and Heard
Roving Rover
We don’t know what robot dogs want, but we have a guess as to where this pupper is headed: the humanoid robots session. The theater is likely to be full, but you can watch it online at 1:30 p.m.
Slack CEO sees the future
“Our customers showed us the future,” said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack, at a panel with Salesforce President & Chief People Officer Nathalie Scardino. “What they wanted was an agentic operating system. They wanted this platform to be the place, and it had to be the place, to get all work done. Because AI is showing us that you can’t just apply AI into siloed applications and siloed processes and really think you’re going to transform, because you just end up with more siloed chaos.”
Speaking of Slack … OpenAI Is Very Much a Slack Shop
“OpenAI started on Slack,” said Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at Open AI during Tuesday’s keynote. “And I think one of the really special things about Slack is it that it moves as fast as the company does. It’s this really rich picture of all the projects we have going on. It brings all the right people together at exactly the right time, and it allows us to organize and reorganize. It’s the way modern companies work. And I think open AI is a modern company.”
Session Recaps and Outtakes
Turning Sludge into Gold (and Prizes)
Barinder Rasode, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Tersa Earth Innovations, won the Dreampitch competition, taking home $200,000. (It was a profitable session — two runner-ups got $100,000 each as well). Tersa has developed a process for taking contaminated water from mine tailings and other icky sources, drawing out contaminants like arsenic and cyanide and producing clean water and valuable minerals like gold and lithium.
Agents as (Non-Judgmental) Pitch Coaches
Check out Guy Raz, podcast uber-host, and Salesforce Co-Founder and Slack CTO Parker Harris talking about how Salesforce and Slack use agents to onboard new employees and train salespeople. “That kind of thing is amazing,” said Harris. “I don’t want you judging me about my pitch as a salesperson. Especially if I’m a new employee, and I want to impress you. But if I’m working with AI, it’s like my private little tutor.”
Future-Proofing Education with will.i.am and ASU
On Tuesday, will.i.am, CEO of FYI.AI, and Lev Gonick, CIO of Arizona State University, discussed their “The Agentic Self” course at ASU. A few takeaways:
- Don’t Surrender
will.i.am emphasized the importance of students learning how machines work rather than simply “surrendering” to them. Students, he said, must be able to contribute, dive into technical details, and use technology to solve problems in communities that are often ignored.
- An Educational Renaissance
Gonick views AI as a remarkable opportunity to amplify educational access universally, not just for those with privilege. This push focuses on achieving impact at scale and unleashing human agency everywhere. AI, will.i.am added, is creating a “new renaissance.”
- It’s a Push-Pull
will.i.am believes that AI is simultaneously taking jobs and pushing humans to be more loving, collaborative, and fundamentally more human: AIs are reasoning, humans are unreasonable. His long-term goal for the ASU partnership is for students to create companies and new industries that solve ignored problems.
Salesforce Asks: Does Your Data Need a Clean Room?
“What if the gap between understanding and acting on our data disappeared? That’s the future Salesforce is going toward,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP at Salesforce at Tuesday’s Data 360: Activate Trusted Data Everywhere session. To make activating data easier than ever, Salesforce has revealed two new Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) innovations:
- Data Clean Rooms are designed to give companies a way to collaborate safely with partners using shared data.
- Intelligent Context enables organizations to extract the right business context using AI, test and tune for accuracy continuously, and apply insights anywhere without clicks.
Found in the Wild
Dreamforce 2030
Evan Kirstel made a Sora video of Dreamforce five years from now (complete with digital twin of San Francisco).
Humans and AI Working Together
Parker Harris, CTO of Slack and the Co-Founder of Salesforce, joined Alex Kantrowitz on the Big Technology podcast to discuss the future of software in the age of AI.
Overheard
Catching the SMB and Startup keynote at noon today? Get a head start on some inspiration from Daniel Peter, CTO at Petaluma Creamery. He shared a powerful insight yesterday about how small businesses can use AI to churn out oversized results:
“I think there’s a lot of potential for small businesses to reinvent themselves with AI, to be able to be competitive, be able to get their margins up because they’re able to do way more with a small lean team,” he said. “Historically, [Salesforce] has been built for large enterprises. But it’s actually pretty easy to scale it down … So to be small … but also have something that’s as reliable as what the large enterprises have … it’s worth paying a little more for.”
I think there’s a lot of potential for small businesses to reinvent themselves with AI, to be able to be competitive, be able to get their margins up because they’re able to do way more with a small lean team.
Daniel Peter, CTO at Petaluma Creamery
Yesterday we heard another exec, Linda West, VP, Business Automation at Indeed, talk about the power of AI and data together:
“Salesforce is not the only agentic solution we have access to, but it is the one that is deeply connected to our data. In order to scale it, that’s essential … That’s the difference [with] the Salesforce solution, being able to look at what outcomes are you targeting already with your business, and accelerating things that already exist,” she said.
Captured: Dreamforce Before Dawn
Dreamforce Day 2, It’s All Happening.
After a packed first day, Dreamforce goers were treated to a gem of an unscheduled performance yesterday in the park. (Who doesn’t love a singer-songwriter AND a 90’s throwback?)
And since Dreamforce 🎶 lasts for soooo long … soon you will seeee, you were meant to be 🎶 … watching some robots in action and getting a special tour of Agentforce City, today on the live blog.
We’ll also hear from LIV Golf and Starbucks as they spill the tea (tee?) on leading with purpose. Plus, get the hot takes from a top-billed session later today – Marc Benioff in a fireside chat with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
And oh yeah, Metallica and Benson Boone are performing tonight at the Chase Center. Are you ready to Enter, Sandman, and see some Beautiful Things?
October 14, 2025
Agentic Enterprises Explained
Want a better understanding of what it means to be an Agentic Enterprise? Listen to Matthew McConaughey:
Notes from the Keynote
A Farewell to Jane Goodall
At the start of the keynote session, Benioff gave a short tribute to primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, moving on to chide the audience gently for not adopting their local public schools.
“A couple of weeks ago, one of my closest personal friends died. She’s been here for the last several years to talk to us about sustainability. Jane was here every year because she believed, as we all believe, that business can be the greatest platform for change … Twenty six years ago, we put 1% of our equity, our profit, our time, into a 501(c)(3) foundation. (It was easy at the time because we had no equity, profit, or time.) Now we’ve given away almost a billion dollars. We also have given over $300 million in reskilling training, and $150 million for San Francisco and Oakland public schools. How many of you have already adopted a public school in your neighborhood? Raise your hands. Oh, that’s not enough. Not enough.”
How to Get AI Systems Right
We believe that AI systems are going to unlock potential for humanity at levels that we today can’t even comprehend. How does that happen? One: we’ve got to integrate it with the systems and tools that people use. Two: We’ve got to be able to create new experiences for people to do more. And three: It’s all got to be trust-based, and we’ve got to get that right.
Brad Lightcap, COO, Open AI, Dreamforce Main Keynote
Crossing the Agentic Divide to Get to the Agentic Enterprise
In his main keynote, Benioff focused on the agentic divide – the state where people use AI at home, but enterprises still struggle with adoption. To become truly agentic enterprises, he said, “You have got to get your data right. You have got to get to more integrated solutions. You have got to get the priorities right. You have to get the governance right.” He mentioned a recent MIT study that showed that generative AI pilot projects tend to fail. “We all saw that just making our own models or rolling it ourselves, or DIYing it, isn’t going to do it. We need to be doing our work at Salesforce for you, and we need to all be on this journey together to get to this Better Place. That in our vision, is the Agentic Enterprise.”
Humans and agents have to drive customer success together, he said, “so that we can get the customer loyalty we want, to get the trust that we want, to get the ability to have a leading organization possible with this technology. We call that the Agentic Enterprise.”
A Full Plate Approach
Before teeing up five stories of customers’ agentic transformation, Benioff introduced Agentforce 360, the fourth edition of Agentforce, and now the platform that powers everything Salesforce does. It connects employees, operations, customers, and agents, all powered by trusted enterprise data (Data 360, there at the center of the “plate” on the slide). The key is context. “You don’t have your data, then you don’t have your context, you need that deep data integration,” said Benioff. The interface for the platform is Slack — the surface through which users can access an entire business’s intelligence, data, and processes in natural language in the flow of work. “We do 11 trillion emails a year in Salesforce, but each of those emails, it’s a one-way conversation,” continued Benioff. “What if they were all two-way conversations? That is a vision for what it would look like when I use Slack. Today, I’ve got dozens of agents that are helping me to make my Slack environment better, more efficient, renew my customers, sell more effectively. Slack has become an agentic OS. Pretty awesome.”
Customer Focus
In the second half of the Dreamforce Main Keynote, five customers shared their stories of agentic transformation and some advice for other organizations on their agentic journey.
Michael Dell’s Mentoring Advice for Becoming an Agentic Enterprise
“It’s really important to understand what the major processes are inside the company. It’s tempting to sort of say, ‘Oh, let’s go do an AI project. Let’s go do an agentic project.’ We like to start with the things that really move the needle, and there’s so much opportunity here. Start with the big things. We go through this process of simplifying the process, standardizing it, then reimagining it, and then applying the technology. And that’s what we’ve done in supply chain. Ultimately to give more time back to those people that are doing things that are super valuable to us as a company.” — Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies
PepsiCo’s Plan to Be Agentic AI-First by the End of 2026
Marc Benioff: Athina, what’s your vision for the future?
Athina Kanioura, PepsiCo Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer (after offering Doritos to a few people in the audience): We want every employee to do what is possible and reach their full potential. That is why we have been working with you — this whole gamut and spectrum of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Sales, Service, Field. And of course, as you know very well, through your newest acquisition, connect the system through Slack and maybe even Supply Chain.
Benioff: It’s Pepsi being a whole agentic enterprise!
Kanioura: We are the first company that will be agentic AI-first, by the end of 2026, in every part of the business, connecting all operations, connecting all our processes, the way we think of the business and strategize the business, the way we do innovation, commercialization, execution, and making sure that every employee in the company has a sales and growth mindset.
Olive the AI Sous Chef
This agent went live on the Williams-Sonoma website this weekend after taking only 30 days to build. It will serve up (!) personalized recipes and tutorials based on products a particular customer has just purchased.
Boxes on the Belt
“FedEx owns one of the richest logistics intelligence assets on the planet Earth. We have networks that span over 220 countries and territories around the world, which is virtually all of them. We connect 99% of the world’s GDP, moving more than $2 trillion worth of critical commerce around the world, connecting millions of shippers with hundreds of millions of consumers. So we’re sitting on a very, very rich data set, two petabytes of data, 100 billion transactions across various applications daily. So we had to have a partner with scale to help us with these challenges. [Salesforce is] that perfect partner, and what you really do, what it boils down to is, every day your tools allow our salespeople to convert more opportunities into closed business, what we call ‘boxes on the belt,’ in our operations. You make us more productive as an enterprise and much more conversion in our salesforce.” — Richard Smith, COO of International & CEO of Airline, FedEx
Gemma the Personal Shopper Agent
When customers shop online they can miss the personal attention of being in a store. Gemma (powered by Agentforce Commerce) has access to all of a customer’s information and can help them choose a piece of jewelry through a simple conversational interface. Gemma’s voice capabilities, seamlessly integrated with customer context and data, mean that shoppers can also call with questions and requests.
Spending on AI Is Increasing
- 82% of companies are increasing their spending on AI.
- 86% of companies report that humans and AI are working together to serve customers.
- AI agents will be largely autonomous and are expected to resolve 60% of customer issues by 2029 – nearly double today’s rate.
- 38% of companies are replacing traditional Interactive Voice Response systems with AI triage agents
- 83% of organizations see value in a unified platform combining CRM, AI agents, and analytics.
— Heard at 2030 Contact Centers: Analyst Insight on Service’s Future
Marc Benioff Speaks with Journalists
After his keynote address, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff spoke to media about the rapid pace of AI innovation. He was joined on stage by PepsiCo, Williams-Sonoma, SmartSheet, Accenture, and Pandora.
Benioff began by calling the event “extraordinary,” noting it is San Francisco’s largest conference and now the number one AI conference, drawing twice as many attendees as the next.
His main theme was the pace of innovation, especially the rapid development of Agentforce over the previous year. “A year ago, Agentforce was a product,” he said. “Now it’s a platform.”
Our job is to get those customers into adoption mode by showing them customers that are frontrunners.
Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce
But that rapid evolution presents a challenge: “Today in the tech industry, the rate of technology acceleration, innovation far exceeds the rate of technology adoption,” Benioff said. To inspire more customers to begin their agentic journey, he prioritizes showcasing success stories from leaders like Williams-Sonoma and PepsiCo. “Our job is to get those customers into adoption mode by showing them customers that are frontrunners,” he said. “They are making it happen. Their stories are so critical and compelling. Each one is a light on customer adoption.”
“The reason enterprise AI is hard is because it’s not what you experience everyday summarizing your emails, creating new PowerPoints,” said Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture. “It’s about actually rewiring the way that you do work, your processes, and understanding where you get value.”
Athina Kanioura, EVP, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at PepsiCo, demonstrated the ROI that she’s already seeing with Agentforce 360: “We generated twenty-five to thirty percent efficiency. We have already rolled out Agentforce in more than 1.5 million stores globally. Our target is 5 million stores by the end of 2026.”
Behind the Scenes
And the Golden Hoodie Goes To …
At the start of an employee town hall yesterday, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff shared a video of Salesforce partnerships principal Brooke Eby who was diagnosed with ALS at 33 years old. (Follow her incredible, wrenching, and somehow uplifting story on Instagram.)
The Salesforce Golden Hoodie recognizes one person each year who is doing well by doing good. (Candidates don’t have to be Salesforce staffers, and often are not: Trailblazers can be relatively new to the ecosystem, seasoned community change-makers, or anything in between.) The Golden Hoodie is a gift of gratitude for Trailblazers who are beacons of inspiration and motivation.
Salesforce Announcements and Insights
New Partnerships
Salesforce announced several new partnerships this morning, including:
- An expansion of its partnership with Anthropic to bring enterprise-grade AI to regulated industries. Anthropic’s Claude is a foundational model for Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 Platform. Now Claude can be used as a preferred AI model for industries like financial services, healthcare, cybersecurity, and life sciences, keeping sensitive data and workloads secure within Salesforce’s trusted environment.
- An expansion of its partnership with OpenAI. Now companies can access Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 platform directly in ChatGPT, allowing users to query sales records, review customer conversations, or build Tableau visualizations, simply by typing in a query. They can also use OpenAI’s latest frontier models, including GPT-5, to build AI agents and prompts within the Salesforce Platform. Agentforce Commerce will also now integrate with the Agentic Commerce Protocol, the standard that powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, giving merchants a new way to reach hundreds of millions of potential customers; and the ChatGPT app for Slack now brings ChatGPT directly into Slack.
- To meet and scale the demand for 24/7 personalized support without compromising quality, Williams-Sonoma, Inc. is deploying Agentforce 360 Platform, which seamlessly integrates AI agents with human experts, across its brand websites. In addition, the company is using Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), Salesforce’s hyperscale data engine, to unify and harmonize data across its portfolios and customer touchpoints. This gives AI agents the complete, real-time customer and product information they need to deliver accurate, personalized responses without human intervention.
Dreamforce Day 1, Let’s Go!
Welcome to Tuesday, the first day of Dreamforce. Today started early — sessions kicked off at 8 a.m., but the big moment this morning was Marc Benioff’s keynote speech. The Salesforce Chair and CEO spoke about crossing the agentic divide, the transformation into the Agentic Enterprise, and the late Jane Goodall. (Also, one demo sent a mascot scooting out of the auditorium to a new post elsewhere on campus; check out the full video coming soon on the Salesforce Newsroom.) He went on to introduce five customers who shared their successes using Agentforce 360: “We got the cellophane off the software in January, and it worked straight out of the box. That’s what blew me away,” said David Walmsey, Chief Digital & Technology Officer at Pandora, about getting started with Agentforce. “There’s a lot of snake oil out there. This works straight away.”
Live or online, attendees will have plenty of opportunities to engage for the next three days, so pull up your real or virtual seat.
October 13, 2025
Behind the Scenes
Godzilla Sighting at 00:27
Marc Benioff’s behind-the-scenes clip posted on X earlier today.
DIGITal Augmentation
Calling out all #nailforce members, post your manis here.
Salesforce in the Wild
Salesforce CMO Ariel Kelman Previews Dreamforce 2025 on the Scratch podcast
“We put a little preview out of bringing vibe coding to the Salesforce developer ecosystem. We think it’s pretty interesting. The fact that we have this context layer of metadata that describes your customers and describes your business process really lends itself to asking an LLM to write code for you. Because it understands we have the metadata database to let people understand everything about your configuration. And so we think this is going to be really exciting for our developer community, too.”
More Announcements and Insights
Salesforce Is Investing $15B in World’s AI Capital
Salesforce investing $15 billion in San Francisco over the next five years. The investment will support a new AI Incubator Hub on the Salesforce San Francisco campus, grow the AI ecosystem by investing in workforce development and training, and help companies transform into Agentic Enterprises.
“This $15 billion investment reflects our deep commitment to our hometown — advancing AI innovation, creating jobs, and helping companies and our communities thrive in this incredible new era.” — Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce
The All-New Slackbot
Agentforce 360 will enable every business to become an agentic enterprise, and Slack sits at the center of this transformation as an agentic operating system. Today the company is releasing two major upgrades: An all-new Slackbot that acts as a personal AI companion — able to reason through complex, conversational tasks — and enterprise search, which uses natural language questions to retrieve company knowledge and turn it into action.
As the conversational interface for Salesforce, Slack can turn every dashboard, report, and customer record into the center of a conversation you can have with your team and agents. The new Slack experience delivers an entirely new way of working — faster, simpler, more connected, and agent-based.
Why CIOs Must Architect for the Agentic Enterprise
The dynamic, non-deterministic nature of AI agents will require a fundamentally new IT architecture, one that folds four new layers into the traditional seven. This architectural transformation can happen in phases, but it isn’t just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic journey that helps enterprises truly harness the power of autonomous agents.
What’s Happening Tomorrow
Live blog coverage tomorrow will kick off with a recap of the highlights of the main keynote featuring Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff and leaders from OpenAI, Accenture, Williams-Sonoma, and more. (It bears repeating: Get there early to be sure of a seat.) Activate Trusted Data Everywhere will explore how to overcome the fragmented data landscape that holds businesses back, and the session on voice will show how to bring AI-powered voice agents to every channel — from phone to web to mobile — to deliver faster, more personalized, and more consistent customer experiences. The team will also report back from sessions on future-proofing education and building trusted, enterprise-grade AI infrastructure. We’ll swing by the hackathon, too.
Found in the Wild
A big deep breath from Tristan Lombard on LinkedIn. Your anxiety before a big event may manifest like a “bag of over-eager squirrels,” but don’t forget to bring joy, curiosity, and bright eyes because “you are going to have a good time. No, better. You will have an amazing time.”
Salesforce Announcements and Insights
Agentforce 360 Announcement
Today Salesforce announced the general availability of Agentforce 360, which brings together the four ingredients of the Agentic Enterprise:
- Agentforce 360 Platform: The foundation for enterprise-grade AI agents. It now features a new conversational builder, hybrid reasoning for greater control and accuracy, and voice capabilities.
- Data 360: The trusted, unified data layer that gives every agent context. Thanks to innovations like Intelligent Context and Tableau Semantics, companies can turn unstructured data and analytics into rich context and understanding for AI.
- Customer 360 Apps: The business logic and institutional memory of every enterprise — capturing how it sells, serves, markets, and operates — is now brought to life through AI agents that deeply understand every customer and process.
- Slack: The conversational interface for humans and agents to work together, connecting knowledge, actions, and data in real time.
The Agentic Enterprise represents a new model for work — where AI elevates people rather than replacing them. In an Agentic Enterprise, every team operates with 24/7 intelligence: sales leads are never missed, service never sleeps, and every employee has an AI partner that helps them move faster and make smarter decisions.
New Contributions to Healthcare and Education from Salesforce and Marc and Lynne Benioff
- Marc and Lynne Benioff will gift $100 million to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals
- Salesforce will gift an additional $39 million:
- $13 million to public schools
- $17 million to nonprofits at the forefront of AI readiness
- Up to $9 million to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, to be raised through a pop-a-shot basketball challenge featuring Golden State Warriors player Festus Ezeli at Dreamforce. For every basket scored, Salesforce will donate $5 to the Golden State Community Foundation and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals.
“As a fourth-generation San Franciscan, I’ve always believed in our responsibility to invest deeply in our local community. The San Francisco Bay Area is the AI capital of the world. With that leadership comes a responsibility not only to innovate, but to secure the future of our community – ensuring that every child has access to world-class healthcare, safe and welcoming public parks and spaces, and a great education to flourish in the AI era.”
— Marc Benioff, Chair, CEO and Cofounder of Salesforce
How Much Free Will Should Your AI Agents Have?
It’s a tricky balance: Unchecked autonomy can result in AI agents that deliver brand-damaging results, but too-tight fetters reduce potentially powerful agents to glorified chatbots. This is the core paradox shaping the future of AI, and companies on the path to becoming agentic enterprises have learned that an effective AI deployment requires hybrid reasoning to strike that balance. They will have to deliberately calibrate agent autonomy to provide true value while maintaining the guardrails that protect what matters most.
The Dreamforce campus is almost complete
It’s Day 0, less than 24 hours before the Dreamforce opening keynote, and Howard Street in San Francisco is humming. Attendees are climbing out of rideshares and checking into their hotels, crews are putting the finishing touches on Dreampark, and thousands of Salesforce employees are being ushered into Moscone for a town hall.
Rain is coming this afternoon, courtesy of Tropical Cyclone Priscilla, but tomorrow might be fairly clear. Still, slot an umbrella into your backpack in case it starts sprinkling while you’re waiting in line at the Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Which you might be: Lines for the most popular sessions can be long, so get to those early.)
The Dreamforce campus is about 2 million square feet this year, and the event will feature nearly 2,000 sessions, from workshops and certifications to conversations with luminaries from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. A key theme for 2025 is how companies can build the Agentic Enterprise. Because over the next several years, every company in every industry will become an Agentic Enterprise — a fundamental shift that is not simply about automating existing processes. It’s about creating entirely new capabilities, revenue streams, and ways of working.
October 9, 2025
Get ready for Dreamforce 2025
From coverage of Marc Benioff’s keynote to customer interviews to exclusive behind-the-scenes moments, the Dreamforce Live Blog will deliver curated reporting on what promises to be the world’s most epic AI conference. Starting Monday and throughout the week, the Salesforce news team will be updating this page with the latest insights and surprises.
- Onsite attendees: Check in here for recaps of sessions you may have missed.
- Remote followers: Join us to get a sense of what it’s like on the ground.
One of the Salesforce news team’s first stops is Agentforce City, a massive installation modeled on the American Main Street that will showcase how top brands are progressing on their Agentic Enterprise journey.
Over the next several years, every company in every industry will become an Agentic Enterprise, operating with boundless capacity, precision, and speed by pairing human expertise with AI-powered agents. This fundamental shift isn’t about simply automating existing processes. It’s about creating entirely new capabilities, revenue streams, and ways of working.
For now, get up to speed with the latest news and these recent stories from the Salesforce news team.
Customers Transforming into Agentic Enterprises
How a Small Biotech Firm Is Using Agentic AI to Take on Industry Giants
AUM BioTech is using Agentforce, Salesforce’s platform for building and deploying AI agents, for lead generation, customer support, and sales development, enabling it to compete with larger industry players.
Meet Eva, Engine’s Agentic Concierge
Last year, Engine, a travel booking platform, launched its Engine Virtual Agent, or EVA, powered by Agentforce. Today, nearly half of its hotel booking cancellations are handled automatically by EVA, which uses natural language processing to understand each request, validates customers’ identities, and uses API integrations to contact the hotel and update the cancellation across all of Engine’s data sources.
EVA has enabled Engine to cut average customer handle time by 15% and improve the productivity of support reps by 10%, allowing them to spend more time on higher-value customer experiences.
How a Texas Boomtown Used AI to Reinvent City Government
The city of Kyle, Texas, paved the way for other municipalities when it implemented an AI-driven 311 system powered by Agentforce. With just a few taps, residents of this rapidly growing Austin suburb can report public safety hazards, broken streetlights, sanitation issues, graffiti, water leaks, and more. They can get an estimate for how long it will take to resolve an issue, track the status of their reports, and view a map showing where other issues have been reported.
Agentforce Takes Flight at Heathrow
This summer, Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest airports, launched Hallie, a digital travel companion that travelers can access through WhatsApp. Powered by Agentforce, Hallie provides instant answers to common questions, helping travelers find their gate, a coffee shop, and even charging stations for their devices so they can get where they’re going on time, every time.
What It Means to Be an Agentic Enterprise
CEOs Are Ready to Get Started with Agents
New research from International Data Corporation (IDC), commissioned by Salesforce, finds that 99% of CEOs say they’re prepared to integrate digital labor into their business — and that most (65%) are looking to AI agents to transform their business model entirely.
From Coders to Crafters: The New Identity of Developers in the Agentic Enterprise
Developers are evolving into “AI artisans” who refine autonomous AI agents for specific business needs, shifting from writing code from scratch to a human-led process of building, iterating, observing, testing, evaluating, and optimizing agents.
In the Agentic Enterprise Era, How Much of Your Business Should Run on Its Own?
Successful organizations in the age of agentic AI will distinguish between tasks entrusted to AI for predictable, routine processes (the “autonomic core”) and those requiring human judgment for strategic decisions.
