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Dreamforce 2026 - the whole damn thing!
Well, that was Dreamforce, wasn't it? A busy week in San Francisco, a lot to unpack, and 20 pieces of coverage on the diginomica event hub. If you missed the live event or you've been playing catch-up on the reading pile, here's our handy round-up - with links to each of the pieces so you can dig into whatever catches your eye. |
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Before we headed out to Moscone, we set out what we were watching for at this year's Dreamforce - the "SaaSpocalypse" myth finally being put to bed, some clarity on tokenomics, the future of the Trailblazer community as agents come for the roles it trains, and whether Salesforce would remember its bread-and-butter Sales, Service and Marketing users alongside the AI story. And all four duly turned up over the next three days. |
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Living interfaces? What's one of those? |
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That was the question the night before Dreamforce kicked off. Salesforce had teased something called AIforce as a "live interface layer". Patrick Stokes, President of Applications and Marketing, walked us through it before the doors opened, using a helpful chocolate chip cookie analogy: Headless 360 is the raw ingredients, AIforce is the cookie coming out of the oven. The deeper point was:
"The UI is not actually our product. The value of Salesforce has never been in the UI. It's been in the platform that stores the way our customers encode their business."
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By Monday, Marc Benioff was on hand to drill down further into what a "living interface" actually is, explaining a four-layer stack: Data 360 at the bottom, then an Application Layer now recast as intelligence for the AI, then Agentforce, and the new AIforce interface layer on top. Three aspects got the demo treatment - Slackforce, Agentforce Coworker, and the Anthropic-powered Claudeforce. Benioff noted:
"The interface customers will choose their religion here. We're agnostic."
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On pricing, Salesforce is basically saying yes to everything. Per-user, per-agent, consumption, transaction-outcome, business-outcome - all on the menu. Or in Benioff's words:
"We've had to throw away our price book, basically." |
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A very timely bit of scheduling |
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The week Salesforce chose to unveil its living-interface pitch was, by pure coincidence, the same week AI safety re-erupted in the mainstream media. So when Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang walked on stage on day one for what was nominally a bit of vendor-love, Benioff asked the important questions. Amodei stuck to his slow-down essay: "Let's look at our own record...let's re-commit to transparency." Altman, more layered than his previous Dreamforce outing, agreed: "The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing." Huang on the other hand: "We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations." No mean feat to have three of the industry's most argued-about AI executives sat on your keynote stage. |
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Show me the money |
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Nothing catches Wall Street's eye quite like a new pricing model, and this year's Dreamforce brought several. Chief Operating and Finance Officer Robin Washington walked us through the tokenomics of AI as an operational cost inside Salesforce itself - the policy and pricing work Finance now owns. The Agentic Work Units (AWU) experiment is the licensing arm of the same conversation - a new metric for agentic consumption, and one that's going to take some proving in the market. Meanwhile, IBM Consulting's annual State of Salesforce took the temperature on where users actually are with agentic deployment - as ever, useful ballast against any keynote's more energetic claims.
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Never mind the decor, mind the plumbing |
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A layer cake is only as good as what's underneath, and this year the delivery side of the ecosystem was properly present. Deloitte Digital was explicit about investing in the plumbing as well as the decor, building on the Salesforce Data Foundation and echoing Benioff's line about "trapped value" locked in metadata. Forward Deployed Engineers were the phrase du jour - one FDE partner talked us through the role and what it actually delivers at the coalface, and PwC, Salesforce's Consulting Partner of the Year, presented its alliance as a workforce dividend at the customer edge.
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The people bit |
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Because none of this adopts itself, does it? Franny Hsiao, Chief AI Advisor and Head of the Graduate AI Builder Program at Salesforce, made a very good case for what the actual adoption number is, and it turns out it isn't the license count – it's how many teams are quietly routing around the tool. Pallavi Sebastian, SVP of Agentic Enterprise Experiences, walked us through how Salesforce is re-designing its own talent and learning to meet the demands of the agentic enterprise. The Trailblazer Community had its own moment too, with 23 million members celebrated and Gordon Lee's 20-year Trailblazer tale showing what a proper career in the ecosystem looks like from the inside. Supermums founder Heather Black used the week to set out the stall for the Supermums Business Hub for female AI entrepreneurs. And with DEI turned into a political battlefront in the US, we came back to why representation and inclusion still matter - because outside the US, it remains a competitive superpower.
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Meanwhile in Blighty... |
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Benioff couldn't find a Waymo in Europe, but Salesforce UKI CEO Zahra Bahraloloumi isn't losing any sleep over the tech-lag narrative. And two years in, UKI CTO Paul O'Sullivan told us the London AI Center – immersive AI golf included – has become a properly effective piece of agentic evangelism.
And that's a wrap.
In his exit conversation, Benioff emphasized the brief:
"You have to realize, number one, the most important thing for our company is we must be the number one CRM. Nothing is more important than that."
The living interface, the layer cake, AIforce, Claudeforce and all – it all sits on top of that promise, not instead of it. Whether the Ohana buys the whole thing is next year's Dreamforce.
Onwards!
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