We’re live! It’s Dreamforce week here in San Francisco and the SF Ben team is out and about, ready to roll.
We’ll be posting live updates throughout the week as we navigate the Dreampark, catch up with our community, and host one heck of an after party! Stay tuned…
Thursday
9:45 PM – Lauren W | That’s a wrap!
That’s it from the SF Ben team this week. We’ve had a fantastic and jam-packed Dreamforce, and now it’s time for a well-earned break. Thanks so much for joining us and see you next time!
3:45 PM – Tim | A New Cert in the Bag…
Did you know your Dreamforce ticket includes a free Certification exam? I did not! But when I learnt this, I decided to head on down and take the Sharing & Visibility Architect Exam that I had been putting off forever… and passed!
With that final piece in the puzzle, I have also achieved the Certified Application Architect! Super proud. Had no idea when I woke up this morning that I’d be going to bed with two extra certs.
1:30 PM – Peter | LWC Roadmap Breakout Session
As I learned earlier, LWC Live Preview is a cool new feature. One note/correction from earlier, this is slated to be generally available in Spring ‘26 and is not yet available.
Most web frameworks have a way to manage complex state, like Redux. LWC has not had a state manager. Currently Beta, this is also coming Spring ‘26, Salesforce plan to launch a state manager. The design cues they’ve taken have been to try to make the API similar to Redux.
I’ve also been hearing about an upcoming feature that would permit writing of LWC that could include ReactJS and components from other web frameworks. Details are sketchy but expect a developer preview or pilot as early as Spring ‘26.
11:45 AM – Lauren W | In Conversation With Google’s CEO
Part biography and origin story. Part catch-up between old friends. The discussion between Benioff and Pichai wandered from the latter’s early years growing up in South India and his mission to make technology universally accessible, to Google’s strategic shift to being an AI-first company, and then on to long-term predictions about quantum computing. It’s clear these two go way back. A fascinating snapshot and an entertaining conversation to observe.
11:30 AM – Peter | Data 360 Extensions Booth
I had heard talk of a new feature in Data Cloud: the ability to write and run Python that runs on Data Cloud. The role of this Python is to be able to do data transformations that are more complex than Data Cloud’s 360’s point-and-click UI. This is a pre-beta feature at the moment. So the story around deployment is still being polished, but when this comes to beta, this should be interesting to try out and will be great for existing typically Python-oriented data professionals.
11:15 AM – Peter | Scale Center Booth
What’s “Scale Center”, I hear you ask. For as long as I’ve worked with Salesforce, Salesforce has had very good internal capabilities to track and monitor execution times and errors, and to understand transaction profiles. Scale Center takes this data and surfaces it to implementation teams to understand, triage, diagnose, and fix performance problems themselves. It is a full-fledged observability tool, including Apex Guru, an Apex-specific analysis tool. I’ve thought it just short of criminal that this was only available to Unlimited Edition. Well… as of now, it is available to all paid orgs, including Sandboxes. Because of its lack of availability, Scale Center has flown under the radar. I hope we see a lot more talk about it now that every customer has access to it.
11:00 AM – Peter | LWC Booth
While we’ve been talking about LWC local dev, the LWC “Live Preview” is next level. Local dev for the fully composed UI is still awesome. But the local dev for single component seemed underwhelming. Live preview takes the idea and completely removes the need to deploy your LWC to preview. Write and run your UI component completely locally, see live updates, test out your work, or debug live. Once you know it works… then deploy! I was in a workshop that attempted to show this earlier in the week, but it was broken. This is another item I’m excited to try out.
10:50 AM – Peter | Apex Booth
I saw the Apex roadmap yesterday. It was good to catch up with the PMs and engineers on the Apex team. Not a whole lot to report just now, but be sure to check out my post from yesterday to learn about the Apex news.
10:45 AM – Peter | Agentforce Vibes Booth
There are few who are as experienced as Jeff Douglas. He’s kind of done everything with Salesforce, including growing a Salesforce family, I’ve learned. When Jeff tipped me off that he would be taking over product management for Agentforce Vibes, I was immediately excited. He’s one of the best people I could think to entrust the roadmap and direction for Salesforce’s native AI assisted coding tool. Look for great things.
10:30 AM – Peter | Moscone West – Trailblazer Forest
This is the time in a conference where I like to spend a moment walking around trying to connect with as many of the product managers, engineers, and architects who build Salesforce’s developer and admin features. Follow along while I reflect back.
10:50 AM – Tim | Tech Keynote Continued…
I must admit, I’ve been very intrigued by what Agentforce Voice offers. I’m old fashioned, I’ll quite often pick up the phone to talk to support, hoping for a clearer and quicker resolution. Agentforce Voice revolutionizes that experience for customers completely, or so is the claim. Really keen to test this one out and experience it for myself.
10:15 AM – Lauren W | Ready for Day 3
Ice cream for breakfast in the media lounge! Henry and I are ready for the final day of Dreamforce, with lots still to cover. Stick around for live insights from the brains of our brilliant tech team. I’m also looking forward to hearing from Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, later this morning – in conversation with Marc Benioff.
10:10 AM – Tim | Tech Keynote: Revenue and Retention
Another day, another busy agenda! Just sat down at the Revenue and Retention Tech Keynote where we’re going to hear from Salesforce, Reddit, and Workday. Stay tuned!
9:40 AM – Tim | Familiar Faces
Look who I ran into this morning! The one and only Lauren Westwood! We shared a few thoughts about our favorite moments so far at Dreamforce before parting ways and heading on to our next sessions. It’s been so great to see so many familiar faces in person!
9:30 AM – Christine | Cybersecurity for Admins
I was really impressed by the turnout for my session on cybersecurity! Because a) it was about cybersecurity and b) Dreamfest fatigue! Cybersecurity is more important than ever, and it was great to upskill fellow admins on the key principles.
9:20 AM – Peter | Day 3 Begins
Finally rolling into the conference along with a lot of others after a late night. Good morning, Dreamforce!
8:00 AM – Peter | SF Ben Breakfast Blend
Amazing conversation at the SF Ben Breakfast Blend event with our partners, Copado. Marisa Taylor and Gloria Ramchandani brought decades of experience in DevOps, deployment, and leadership to break down how to succeed with blended teams or “Fusion” teams. In our upcoming developer survey we found that 75% of developers work in a blended team. And with AI, how to align these teams around innovation, stability, and governance is posing greater problems than ever. So much shared in this half hour, but bottom line: build communication and create a space to build success from failure.
Wednesday
11:00 PM – Lauren W | Dreamfest!
We didn’t quite make it down to the mosh pit, but it was still a pretty good view from where we were sitting. Plus, sound was never going to be an issue, was it! Another cracking Dreamfest. Did you know that Metallica have been ‘metaling’ for almost 50 years now? Not bad going!
4:15 PM – Peter | Beta for Spring ’26
Sure enough, there is a new test feature planned to be in Beta for Spring ‘26 that is worth a shoutout. The “runRelevantTests” test level will now allow you to reduce the number of tests that have to run for a deployment. Salesforce will have some mechanisms they use (like dependency graphs) in order to determine what might be relevant. You can also specifically tag classes from test annotations. Finally, you can also mark any test as critical so it will always run when you run tests. This could save developers and DevOps teams loads of time for incremental changes.
3:45 PM – Peter | Apex Roadmap
Apex sits at the core of developer work with Salesforce. Looking forward to a download, especially of things to come. We reported about Apex features for Winter ‘26. But I’m especially excited to see if there are any sneak peeks of what’s to come further down the product roadmap.
3:15 PM – Peter | Developer Keynote Debrief
Walking out of the developer keynote I bumped into the who’s who of developer and admin luminaries. Mike Gerholdt, Daniel Peter, Mitch Spano, Daniel Ballinger, Stephanie Foerst, Skip Sauls, Rob Cowell, Leah McGowen-Hare, Philip Southern, and Josh Birk. Some must have been leaving the keynote. I’m sure a few were getting ready for the True-to-the-Core session which is to follow. In any case, it was great to catch up with a few people of note and some of the smartest people I’ve known and worked with.
2:55 PM – Peter | Another Golden Hoodie Gets a New Home
Congratulations to Maham Hassan for her earning of the Golden Hoodie at the Developer keynote! Maham is active across the middle east and runs the developer community group in Dubai and is one of the founders of Dubai Dreamin’.
2:50 PM – Tim | AI Setup and Agentforce Vibes Session
Isn’t it interesting that 99% of LLM tools/AI natural language processors share the same layout, which now includes the Setup Menu?
A “Hey, Welcome to XYZ tool” message in the top-center, followed by a large text box ready to capture your written text. Underneath that, usually some suggestions about what you can do. Curious!
2:35 PM – Peter | Agent Script
Gary Marcus, famed AI realist, has often spoken of the need to build hybrid AI models which mix probabilistic machine learning with deterministic logic. Agent Script seems to be heading in this direction: the creativity of an agent to be inventive in which processes to attempt, but once started, keeping the processes deterministic.
2:25 PM – Peter | Breaking: Scale Center Coming to ALL Customer Orgs
Huge news! Scale Center is going to be coming to all customer orgs. This is huge news. For a long time, the best of observability tooling has only been accessible to Unlimited Edition orgs. Giving access to this to all customers is the right move. And the agent UI attached to it to help find and fix performance problems seems well executed.
2:25 PM – Christine | Intro to Hybrid Reasoning: How to Build Reliable Agents
This session was a fast-paced, deep dive into Agent Script and the new Agent Builder canvas. Agent Script offers far more powerful ways to create agents and the logic that controls them – but I can’t help thinking that “with great power comes great responsibility.” I’m also unsure how I feel about the new canvas – frequently described as similar to a document generation canvas. Which is accurate, it feels a bit like Quip has been embedded in an app. I don’t love it… yet! But perhaps it will grow on me. Like users, I’m also resistant to change!
2:25 PM – Tim | Technical Difficulties
I’m not a super fan of the Events app audio streaming… anyone else? Great in theory, but often cuts out due to the interference from however many thousand devices are running in each building.
2:20 PM – Peter | Developer Keynote Continued
Relief! Jay Hurst, introducing MCP servers, didn’t rely on the hackneyed worn out analogy of MCP-servers-are-like-USB-cables. Well done!
2:15 PM – Peter | Developer Keynote Updates
Sure enough, Agentforce Vibes is a key feature in the first chapter of the developer keynote. And also sure enough, we’ve gotten an announcement (which to be fair was in the Vibe Code session yesterday)… They’ve announced standard web frameworks (like ReactJS) on platform. This will be one to watch in the coming months.
2:00 AM – Henry | News Team Update
Gained a lot of insight from back-to-back briefings with Salesforce leaders this morning. I hope they didn’t mind me asking the same question about AI hallucinations a few times!
1:45 PM – Peter | Getting a Seat at the Developer Keynote
As usual, a cattle call for a big keynote – although, the developer keynote is maybe not quite as crushed as some of the others, we devs being a more niche audience. But at least I got here on time for this one and got a seat! This has been my spiritual keynote at Dreamforce for years. I’m curious whether there will be any well-kept surprises. So many new developer features have already been announced. Agentforce Vibes and Agent Script will for sure be covered. I’ve heard hints, but now’s the time to see what they deliver…
1:00 PM – Tim | AI Personalization Session
One thing I’m learning that many businesses actually using Agentforce successfully are finding that they are able to leverage the tool to do things like marketing much quicker than before (by generating campaigns) and in a more personalized way (by having interconnected data through Data 360).
It really is Data <> AI partnership, not to replace staff or teams but to empower them to do more, and do better, and do faster. Rapid iteration, rapid innovation – think of the Agentforce methodology as ‘superagile’.
12:30 PM – Peter | Security Panel
At the SF Ben Hub, I was excited to be joined by James Burgess from Application Perfection, Daniel Faruggia of Orion Global Solutions, and Vivek Narayan from Kyvi. We talked through the technology, training, awareness, and culture that are all needed today to combat compromises like the ongoing data breach. My takeaway: good security is a good user experience.
12:25 PM – Christine | Introduction to Vibe Coding with Agentforce Vibes (continued)
Can confirm that this was an excellent session and helped hugely to clarify what vibe coding is and who it’s for. A few key takeaways include: it’s free! It does require some development knowledge. It does need human oversight to avoid mistake and hallucinations. With vibe coding, you never need to write another SOQL query again!
12:20 PM – Tim | Agentforce Grid
Just had a look at Agentforce Grid, a powerful new method of viewing and managing AI at scale. Designed to be familiar like a spreadsheet (which we’ve been staring at and have known intimately for years), but with powerful tools such as Conditional Runs.
12:10 PM – Sasha | Connecting in the Press Room
The Press Room at Dreamforce has been buzzing since the beginning of the week, and it’s been great to catch up with the likes of Vernon Keenan and Chris Pearson here to talk all things Agentforce Vibes, keynote announcements, and the future of AI in work.
12:00 PM – Christine | Introduction to Vibe Coding with Agentforce Vibes
Burning question… Will this session be too advanced for me?! Quite possibly. But I want to understand what on earth vibe coding even is. Will report back shortly on my level of success at understanding a single word of this session. On a different note, the music at Basecamp Theatre is pure vibes… pun intended.
11:10 AM – Tim | Don’t Die with Bryan Johnson
Something a little different today, got to listen to the one and only Bryan Johnson as he spent 30 minutes explaining to me why my sleep habits are killing me. Lots of learnings! Very humbling session. There’s more to life than Agentforce it turns out!
11:00 AM – Henry | Terrific Headwear…
Having an interesting briefing with Shibani Ahuja and Joe Inzerillo about Customer Zero, AI hallucinations, and security. Also, a terrific choice of headwear.
10:15 AM – Peter | Exploring Agentforce City
This has become my favorite experience at Dreamforce this year. I recommend a visit. We’ve all been asking ourselves “what’s the use case?” Agentforce City seeks to answer that with real customer examples from across the world. The Heathrow Airport agent caught my eye. I was able to talk to one of the services implementers who told me about this Agentforce-to-WhatsApp agent. I’ve now connected with the WhatsApp account for Heathrow. I’ll definitely be trying it out on my way home to the UK.
10:00 AM – Peter | Agentforce Keynote
…or not! Good reminder: plan ahead and get there early for keynotes! Sadly it was full when I got there. Instead of finding an overflow room I decided to have a wander through the Moscone South and North Expo…
9:00 AM – Lauren W | Filming Fun
News just in! We’re in the Podcast Studio talking about Agentforce 360. Starring Henry Martin – SF Ben tech reporter and hat enthusiast!
8:00 AM – Peter | ALM and Agentforce Vibes
On my tour of Agentforce Vibes sessions, this is my final one: focused specifically on application lifecycle management (ALM). More is coming into focus. Vibes gives every org 50 inference calls to their best in class agent (today it’s GPT5). After that it falls back to an “also pretty good” open weights agent that’s self-hosted by Salesforce (today that’s Qwen 3). But you can burn through those 50 premium calls quickly.
Imagine asking to run a soql query, the agent verifies the user to use, asks you to validate the query, then produces a summary of actions taken. That’s four calls. This is neither good, nor bad. Just something we all need to know to manage agent model calls.
7:00 AM – Christine | Unmissable Admin Announcements
I’m up extra early today to write my Admin keynote round-up covering all the exciting admin announcements you won’t want to miss! Keep your eyes peeled for it, coming soon…
Tuesday
1:30 PM – Henry | Marc Benioff Addresses National Guard Comments
During a Q&A session with the media, Marc Benioff is asked about his recent comments calling for the National Guard to be deployed to San Francisco. Watch his reply here.
1:00 PM – Peter | Agentforce Vibes Developer Breakout Session
After my hands-on experience with Agentforce Vibes, I’d queued up a visit to the breakout session with Greg Whitworth and Raj Sensharma. This gave a much more broad view of what’s available including the ability to toggle safety settings, default and custom rulesets and broader agent instructions including custom objects and other configurations.
Raj, Director of Product Management for Vibes made some pretty sweeping commitments about the quality to expect from agent-generated code. And Greg snuck in an announcement about using ReactJS on Salesforce. Must take a visit to that booth later too.
12:15 PM – Tim | Getting Stuck into Data 360 (Data Cloud)
Getting ready to rock and roll at the Data Cloud keynote room! After the main keynote, my expectations are high, so I decided to get a seat as close to the front as I could!
11:05 AM – Tim | Demos Are Looking Good This Year
Such a powerful set of new tools in the Agentforce 360. There have been some very quick demos that only scratch the surface of what Agentforce 360 offers. Very excited to see more demos throughout Dreamforce!
11:05 AM – Tim | It’s Official…
Agentforce in Microsoft Teams?! *clutches pearls* Salesforce is entering the ITSM space with a bang!
11:00 AM – Sasha | In the Flesh
As per my update yesterday, it is delightful to see Mr Benioff in the flesh! Definitely larger than life – you can see why he’s been the face of Salesforce for over 25 years. I’m just excited to be in the same room as so many cool journalists, visionaries, and Trailblazers… what would the community be without us?
10:50 AM – Tim | Spoiler: The Keynote Is Busy!
Further to Peter’s most recent update.. It is INDEED packed in here! And wow, are the updates exciting! No shock at all – Agentforce is taking center-stage.
10:45 AM – Peter | Every. Single. Room.
I skipped the queues for the main keynote room, but so did a lot of other people… and not by choice. I have to think back to 2017 and 2018 to remember when a main keynote at Dreamforce was this packed. The main keynote room is packed! The secondary keynote room at Moscone West: packed! Every theater and breakout room here at Moscone West: also packed.
10:40 AM – Peter | What’s Going On With Hallucinations?
One of the key challenges with LLMs is that variability is not a bug, it is a feature. So when we say “hallucination” what we’re really talking about is the built in probabilistic variation that comes from transformer-based architecture. Agent Script seeks to rein that in by having deterministic logic intermixed with probabilistic agent activity. Just a taste of that in the main keynote this morning. Expect a whole lot more about this in the Developer Keynote tomorrow!
10:30 AM – Tim | Agentforce Vibes Stuns With Flow Capability
I just watched the new Agentforce Vibes tool write a whole Flow in 10 seconds… looks like the way we work with and build Flow is changing DRASTICALLY in the Agentforce world!
Don’t worry – no one is being replaced! Mastering Flow Builder is still critically important in your business – that is not changing. You’re just being given a REALLY powerful tool to help you do it better.
10:25 AM – Peter | Build a Bear… or Build a Dashboard
Enjoying the “build a dashboard” demo in the keynote. The UI Preview is particularly cool and friction free. This wasn’t working in my hands-on experience earlier. We all know that Main Keynotes at Dreamforce are highly staged, so you’ll forgive me if I hold on to some skepticism. But I’ll be trying to do more with “Vibes” over the coming days to see just how far you can take this new iteration of Agentforce for Developers.
10:00 AM – Liz | The Hub Becomes a Keynote Center
We’re live streaming the keynote from a very busy hub. The latest edition of The Daily Ben has arrived. The hunt for the golden ticket is on!
9:45 AM – Peter | Camp Design
I stopped by Camp Design, partly to see a friend on the team, Alyssa Wong, and partly because I believe we are due a major revolution in user experience. I have to believe the Salesforce UX team are thinking about this. But I don’t see a revolutionary design change here at Dreamforce. My favorite piece of Camp Design is a board where people are sharing their successes and failures with design and Salesforce. This even includes how Agentforce projects have either been successful, or not, and what the blockers were. What a great resource, both for Salesforce, and for customers.
9:40 AM – Christine | Fixing the 5 Most Challenging Admin Tasks
I’ve just wrapped up the first of three speaking sessions at Dreamforce ‘25! I kicked off day 1 at 9 AM, delivering my session “Fixing the 5 Most Challenging Salesforce Admin Tasks”. I was expecting very few attendees since the keynote would be starting soon after, but the session was packed and had standing room only! This brand new session is based on results from the SF Ben Salesforce Admin survey – plenty of interesting admin insights. You can download the survey today.
9:30 AM – Henry | The Main Keynote
With half an hour to go until the main keynote, the SF Ben press team have settled into our seats and are awaiting Marc Benioff’s arrival. With so much news already emerging this morning and yesterday, we’ve been very busy – but there’s so much more to come…
8:45 AM – Peter | Getting Hands On With Agentforce Vibes
With the announcement of Agentforce Vibes last week, getting hands on with this new iteration of Agentforce Developers became one of my primary goals for Dreamforce. So with the doors to the Expo at Moscone West open, I made a b-line for the Developer Forest. Agentforce Vibes are a step up from its predecessor, Agentforce for developers. The hands-on exercise included a from scratch one-shot prompt building a To Do app.
Success was mixed. There were some around who succeeded. Mine had two errors. The first was I couldn’t save, which was fixed by sharing the error message with the agent and following its first suggestion. The other (no picklist values) wasn’t so successful and the agent did not come up with a one-shot fix. I could have spent more time but I was conscious of many others wanting to give it a try. So I zipped up my code, AirDropped it to my laptop, and will debrief with it at a later time. The verdict: improved, but I need more work with Agentforce Vibes before I feel confident with it.
7:30 AM – Tim | Happy Hours and Karaoke
Goodness me, what a great night with the team! We started by attending our Happy Hour at SF Ben Hub and then spent a few hours connecting with friends from all over the world. We even went along to karaoke with PepUp Tech which was a lot of fun.
While it makes this morning a little tougher to wake up and get to it, it was well worth it. Ready to seize the day and begin the OFFICIAL Day 1 of Dreamforce!
7:00 AM – Christine | Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame
I’m waking up on day 1 of Dreamforce as a Hall of Fame Salesforce MVP. Yesterday, at the MVP Unconference, I took part in the MVP Hall of Fame ceremony after five consecutive years as a Salesforce MVP. I celebrated at the MVP party at International Smoke. Congratulations to the rest of the class of 2020 MVPs who joined the Hall of Fame with me!
Monday
3:30 PM – Lauren M | Working on The Daily Ben
The first edition of The Daily Ben is hot off the press! We wanted to create something tangible and real, and this project has been a team-wide effort.
If you’re on the ground at Dreamforce be sure to get your copy on Tuesday and Wednesday for exclusive content, insights about the ecosystem, and a fun (and educational) crossword!
3:25 PM – Sasha | First Dreamforce for the Win!
It’s great to be back in San Francisco for another event – and this time, it’s my first Dreamforce! Really looking forward to engaging with the community, delving deep into exciting Salesforce news, and seeing Marc Benioff in the flesh!
2:30 PM – Henry | Dreamforce News: Agentforce 360 is Now Live!
A slew of Salesforce updates, like the big announcement around Agentforce 360, was unveiled this morning, and the SF Ben news team has been hard at work staying on top of it all.
1:40 PM – Tim | Local History Facts in San Francisco
My first time out in San Francisco, and today I learned that Moscone was the name of a former Mayor of San Francisco (George Moscone)! Kudos to The Daily Ben for being full of super relevant information – both Salesforce related and otherwise!
11:30 AM – Liz | The SF Ben Hub Is All Set Up!
Today it’s been all about the set up of The Hub! We’ve been lifting furniture into place, assembling tables and chairs, and sourcing screwdrivers!
We’ve been meeting with our sponsors and doing final prep ready to open the doors tomorrow at 8 AM. We’re at Werqwise – a five-minute walk from Moscone. Pop in and see us!
