Dreamforce 25 - the wrap! Last word to Benioff...of course

This week saw the 23rd Dreamforce. It came at a critical time for Salesforce - and the wider tech sector - as the potential agentic future takes shape and the stakes couldn’t be higher. A lot has changed since the first conference, as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff reflects:

Go back 23 years ago to the slide deck, it's not the same show, it's not the same product line, it's not the same set of customers. It has gone forward. The key thing for us is we're constantly bringing this new technology in and then adapting it for our customers so that they can be successful.

Customers are what it’s all about, he affirms. In my preview of this year’s conference I said that this was likely to be a year of ‘prove it’ around what agentic AI has to offer. I also repeated diginomica’s eternal refrain that the single best validation for any vendor’s strategy comes from its customers. Benioff preaches the same gospel:

We've been in front of hundreds and hundreds of customers previewing this. The keynote is really linked to one fundamental thing that happened about three months ago, which [is when it] just became incredibly clear to us what customers want to hear is that other customers are adopting...They want to speak to other customers, and they want to hear from other customers. They know that what we have to say doesn't bear as much [weight] as the customers.

You saw the moment in the keynote when I said, 'How many of you are already adopting Agentforce?’, and you saw how many hands went up. It was a significant number. They want that validation, to hear from an Athena [Kanioura, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer] at Pepsi or a [CEO] Richard Smith at FedEx, or a Michael Dell or a Laura Alber [CEO of Williams Sonoma] or whoever it is.

Appetite

Some of the largest and most important companies - and CEOs - are highly enthused by the idea of agentics, insists Benioff, and they need what Salesforce has to offer:

They need to consume it through these applications. They need to consume it through this technology. They can't just kind of build their own model, or do all this and think that they're going to all of a sudden become this quote, unquote, Agentic Enterprise. They need a fundamental application platform, and that power is what we're trying to demonstrate.

There's never been a more exciting time. You saw it in the keynote. You can see it in the eyes of the customers - they're lit up. It doesn't have the same kind of confusion three years ago that we all had when we first saw this [generative AI] technology. 'What does this mean?' - who didn't have that thought? Now we're like, 'Oh, this is exactly how I'm going to make money with this. This is how I'm going to improve my business with this. Here's exactly how to do it. Here are the proof points, and I can follow this model.' That is a different level.

Organizations now need to explore the next steps, says Benioff:

For all of these customers who want to now achieve this next level of capability in their company, how are they going to do it? How will they achieve this if they don't use this platform? Maybe there's some other things they can do. We're not operating on productivity levels now. We're operating at the core, fundamental, enterprise mission-critical layer, so that these companies can deliver this capability. They all want to get to this next level. We are showing them here is exactly what to do. They want to know what it is. They want to know why it's important, and they want to know exactly how it works.

Salesforce’s job

Salesforce has its role to play, he adds:

There's something that we can do for all of our customers to help them to get to the next level.  Remember, we have 150,000 core customers on the Salesforce platform, and about a million on Slack. For all of those customers, we're trying to bring them to a whole new level.

But:

There's only two things that we do. One is building that product. Second thing is now selling it.

Mind you:

We have a lot to sell them. We have a deep, enriched product line. It's updated, it's modern. It lets them bring in the best of the Large Language Models, the best of AI. It's at the top of what the vision is of what you can build in terms of the next level of capability. And I hope we can deliver it to them as their technical partner....I don't know any other company that is as well positioned, from a brand, personnel and also technology perspective, to be that trusted partner. That is our goal.

Don’t listen to the naysayers, he goes on:

[Customers] have kind of, in some areas, been on pause on buying because they've been confused. There's certain people in our industry - we won't go through names -  that have said, 'Oh, well, this is changing, that is changing, we don't know about this..’. There's a certain amount of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) that's out there. This is actually your opportunity and you can really kick ass if you do this. And by the way, look at us, we're doing it. Why don't you want to do it too?

Salesforce has led the way, argues Benioff:

When we look at other enterprise software companies...we're farther ahead. I think that it's only going to accelerate us. I think it's very exciting. Also we're not having to take back a lot of the things we've said over the last three years, I think we have been mostly on point and point accurate in predicting the future. That is, everything is tied together, hopefully over the last 26 years [since Salesforce was founded] but especially  the last three years of AI and how things are going. We've said, 'This is where we're going, and we have now kind of put A and B and C [in place], and we're working to deliver D now, and on and on and on.

And in a message delivered to analysts, but just as applicable to customers, he concludes:

There's a lot of folks who are trying to be very prophetic and visionary and aggressive in what they're saying about a lot of this technology and trying to position themselves. Some of them are prophets, and some of them are false prophets. It's going to be up to you to separate the wheat from the chaff.

And with 23 Dreamforces in the rear view mirror, Benioff permits himself a peek ahead to number 24:

A year from now, my dream is that we'll just have more acceleration of these core products, of this agentic [AI], that we will not have to take back the Agentic Enterprise. and say, 'Well, no, we didn't get it right, no-one became an agentic enterprise. Sorry, everybody, we’re now onto this new thing'. I think that we're going to go forward.

My take

This week’s Dreamforce proceeded pretty much as I had expected it to. Last year saw the dramatic pivot to ‘betting the farm’ on agentic tech, following by 12 months of unceasing evangelism to get buy-in for the idea from the Salesforce faithful. There’s been a concerted effort to get testimonials from ‘Agent-blazing’ enterprises out into the public domain and that’s been successful. I suspected that Dreamforce 2025 would be something of a beauty parade of such firms and so it turned out to be, with five on show in Benioff’s hour-long keynote alone. (We dodged a bullet there, folks - originally there were going to be 12! We’d have been sat there for hours watching them all go by one-by-one!)

I heard a couple of people complaining that they found a lot of this year’s conference “confusing” and “complicated”. I have to disagree. OK, there’s some new terminology to get your heads around - and some new job roles to contemplate. (Forward Deployment Engineer appeal as a career move to any of you?)

But at the heart of the event was a very small set of messages that were repeated over and over in varying forms, but were consistent in the gospel they preached. Keep on keeping on would be my advice, if my advice were needed - and I’m not sure it is. What happens next? More of the same I expect. By the time we all gather for Dreamforce 2026, we can expect the number of Agentforce users to have shot up (and not only because we’re going to start counting Slack users in that total).

This has been an informative Dreamforce with lots of good customer action, as the sheer number of use cases you’ll find on our dedicated event hub should indicate. More, more, more please. Show, don’t tell is a winning formula that too many other enterprise firms fail to deliver upon.

Onwards!

This has been Dreamforce 2025.

And that’s a wrap! 
 

Addendum - one last, rather personal note. I was at the very first Dreamforce and I’ve attended all of them, bar the COVID-hit mini-version, ever since. At the end of all of them, I’m usually so knackered that I leave San Francisco wondering if that year will be my last. Last year it nearly was - in fact, it was very nearly the last of, well, everything as I fell life-threateningly ill at the end of the conference. I won’t bother you with the details, and it wasn’t due to Dreamforce itself, but suffice to say, my life was about to be changed forever by what ensued.

The recovery plan that my medical consultants put in place a year ago involved a number of goals and targets, ranging from the most basic - get out of bed! - through to more challenging - re-learn how to walk! To my surprise, one of the targets my main consultant encouraged me to set at the start was to go back to Dreamforce this year and prove to myself it could be done. As the months progressed and I did recover bit-by-bit, that goal remained in place. Attending Dreamforce 2025 has been an incredibly important personal milestone for me and I need to recognise various people at Salesforce for their support in helping me to achieve it. So, to Dominique, Fiona, the splendid Accessibility Team staffers at the conference, and to Marc B himself, my thanks and appreciation for kind words, concern and assistance in making this week work for me.

Now, as I am wont to say on occasion, onwards! (Oh and...same time, same place next year?)

Check out our dedicated Dreamforce event hub here.