Dreamforce ‘26 is now fully underway, with the biggest names in the Salesforce ecosystem gathering in San Francisco for the three-day conference for sessions, networking, and product demos.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff kicked the conference off in typical style by leading the keynote speech, talking about the company’s latest innovations like Claudeforce, Slackforce Surfaces, and AIforce, while having some interesting conversations with the biggest names in AI. Here are some key takeaways.
AIforce: The Top Takeaway
The biggest announcement from Dreamforce so far is AIforce – Salesforce’s latest way of cutting down context-switching by making CRM accessible in as many places as possible.
AIforce means that Salesforce effectively comes to you in Claude, Slack, Lightning, or wherever someone prefers to work – instead of just in the Salesforce user interface (UI). This means that those who have never opened the Salesforce app can now update records, trigger workflows, and ask questions without ever entering the Salesforce UI.
AIforce allows agents anywhere to reason and take action across data, logic, and workflows inside Salesforce, where company knowledge lives. Agents can read across records they have access to, pull in connected systems, reason, and take action with a full view of the business.
The AIforce package consists of:
- Claudeforce: The extended partnership between Salesforce and Anthropic
- Slackforce: Which brings Salesforce context into visualizations in Slack.
- Agentforce Coworker: An AI teammate in the Lightning interface
- The Headless Toolkit: The architecture that provides builders and developers with MCPs, APIs, plug-ins, skills, and developer tools
Salesforce is positioning AIforce as an “AI replacing the UI” framework, with businesses still maintaining a system of record in Salesforce CRM but never having to leave Slack, Claude, or wherever else to access, change, and create visualizations of data inside the CRM.
AIforce effectively enables anyone to “build their own UI”, Salesforce says, with a personalized element instead of having to navigate using the default Salesforce UI.
Open Beta for Claudeforce
Patrick Stokes, President, Applications and Marketing at Salesforce, played a somewhat famous recent clip of Parker Harris saying people might “never” log into Salesforce again.
Stokes then told Dreamforce attendees that Salesforce’s product is not just a user interface, adding: “At Salesforce our product is the trust that all of you, our customers, put in us to hold your data, to hold your workflows, your business processes, your security rules.”
He said Salesforce asked what it would look like to plug that into a new, agentic interface, and that’s what they did with Anthropic.
“Everything that you are about to see is something that I asked Claude to do for me,” Stokes said. But he added that there would be a ‘tiny little bit’ of Lightning within it.
He then demonstrated his own Salesforce user interface, created by Claude, including a digital version of Parker Harris – acting as something of a Clippy-style assistant – who popped up in the corner of the screen to tell him what was going on.
Stokes tells the audience how a brand new plugin, Salesforce for Claude, “solves all the hard problems” with MCP servers, enabling zero data retention and writing skills for Claude.
He adds that he created the UI by having a conversation with Claude, iterating back and forth over a few days.
Stokes then says the last question he wants to answer is ‘how on Earth do I get this thing?’, and the answer: “For the time being, everything that you just saw is in open beta, any one of you can go, you jump over to the AppExchange… look for this plugin within the AppExchange, fill out the form, give us your org ID, and we will turn you on today.”
He said that for people who are not at Dreamforce today, there is a Trailhead. For those who are at Dreamforce, he said to go to the Moscone West building across the street where there is an “ocean of laptops” in the AI learning labs with Claudeforce set up, where attendees can build their own command center.
Salesforce Doesn’t Use Your Data
Benioff was eager to stress that Salesforce has a zero data retention policy, clearly spelling out what that means.
He said: “When you’re working in Salesforce apps, and when you’re working on our platforms, your data is your data. It does not go in the models. We‘ve audited it, we’ve tested it, we’ve tried it. Regardless of what you’ve heard on media or from other vendors, let me assure you that Salesforce models are built with zero data retention, tested over and over again by our security teams.”
Trust is Salesforce’s number one value, and Benioff went out of his way to stress that “your data is your data – you’re not training any other model when you’re using our products”.
In the AIforce announcement, Salesforce stressed there was zero data retention, with business data used to answer questions but not kept by the model provider.
It’s (Really) Not a SaaSpocalypse
A video of Matthew McConaughey started the keynote off, as it often does, building hype for the three-day conference – and the future of agentic AI and Salesforce beyond it.
But this time round, there was a pointed remark. In the pre-recorded clip, the actor told Dreamforce attendees: “It’s not the end of software… it’s the end of software which makes humans do all the work.”
For anyone who has been keeping up with the headlines around Salesforce – and enterprise software generally – in 2026, it’s clear what the team who wrote this script meant by this.
Salesforce has throughout the year been battling narratives of a ‘SaaSpocalypse’ – a supposed end of traditional software industries as AI steps in to provide cheaper, quicker, perhaps vibe-coded solutions to their products.
The CRM company has, for obvious reasons, been fighting this narrative – and somewhat successfully, too, with the latest quarterly results showing strong performance.
Twenty minutes into the keynote, CEO Marc Benioff himself addressed the issue, calling ideas of a SaaSpocalypse “crazy nonsense”.
Jensen Huang, President and CEO of the world’s most valuable company NVIDIA, was also on-message when he spoke to Benioff later on. “The end of software is nonsense… this is going to be a layer on top of software,” Huang said, after a rather chaotic session with the Salesforce CEO. Speaking of which…
The Jensen Huang Show and ‘No New Regulation’
This year’s Dreamforce keynote had a few more comedic elements than is typical. First, we had Patrick Stokes showing off an airhorn sound he quite enjoys to the crowd, along with an animated AI version of Salesforce Co-Founder Parker Harris, who provides him with pipeline updates.
But it was Jensen Huang who arguably upstaged Benioff at his own keynote, with a somewhat chaotic back-and-forth between the two tech CEOs walking through the crowd.
Huang and Benioff were both wise-cracking, but it wasn’t all laughs. Of all the tech CEOs gathered in San Francisco for Dreamforce, Huang definitely seemed to have the most aggressive stance on pursuing AI.
“First of all, as you know, we’re going through a new industrial revolution,” Huang said. “Just as a few hundred years ago with electricity, we can power everything. With the internet we can find anything. And now with artificial intelligence as an infrastructure layer across the planet, we can know everything and do anything.”
Benioff said that there has been some debate surrounding ‘pacing’ and ‘safety’ and the future, asking Huang what he thought about that.
Huang said safety is paramount, but it was “an engineering problem”, adding: “If you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability or safety, then don’t release it. That’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something the market would appreciate.”
Huang, who is thought to be worth $162B and whose company has come to dominate the market for chips used in artificial intelligence systems, made a laissez-faire argument about regulation, saying: “The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws, we don’t need any new regulations.”
He added that innovation and speed versus safety in products was a “false choice”, and you can “definitely have both at the same time”.
“So run as fast as you can, but if you feel at any given point in time the company’s out of control, or the company’s not going to be safe, you know, take a pause and make sure you get it right,” Huang said.
The idea that AI is going to destroy jobs is “completely nonsense”, Huang also said, before cracking more jokes about the difference in height between himself and Benioff – who at one point says “this keynote is taking a dramatic turn”.
Anthropic, Dario Amodei, and ‘Salesforce Alumni’
Salesforce and Anthropic recently announced Claudeforce, a partnership between the two companies that brings Claude and Salesforce closer together with Salesforce in Claude – a Plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills.
Salesforce in Claude is powered by ‘AIforce’, Salesforce’s enterprise harness, which brings data and workflows to agents through MCP servers, APIs, and CLI tools.
Dario Amodei, Co-Founder of Anthropic, also spoke to Benioff at the Dreamforce keynote on Tuesday about the state of the AI industry – and it was a stark contrast to Huang’s.
When asked about packing and safety in the AI era, Amodei provided an analogy of someone who runs a car company, who notices that a rival company has something wrong with safety. While you believe you have the safest product in the industry, it would be more “responsible” to examine one’s own record – rather than criticize the rival business – and help to set proper standards for the industry as a whole, with an “international element to it”, Amodei said.
“We had a prediction of just how smart these AI models would be, but I think what we didn’t appreciate is that it would lead to these companies growing so fast, all these incredible products that we’re working together on… and how quickly they would become central to everything that’s going on in the world,” Amodei said.
He later added: “I’ve just been surprised that such a pace is possible in the business world.”
Marc Benioff also said that he noticed a few ‘Salesforce alumni’ over Amodei’s shoulder who were helping him run his company.
“You train ‘em well, Marc,” Amodei joked, and Benioff said he measures himself by how many C-suite people end up in other companies.
“You do a fantastic job of that, truly,” Amodei added.
Earlier this year, it was reported that more than 45 Salesforce employees had joined Anthropic since the start of 2026. According to data from Crustdata API, Salesforce was the number one source of Anthropic’s GTM talent.
Benioff said to Amodei that we do have to keep our eyes on the pace of AI, with interfaces now “truly amazing”, and asked the Anthropic Co-Founder what his recommendation was to Dreamforce attendees.
Amodei said: “When I look at the technology versus how much it has diffused – even if we freeze the technology in place, which we’re not doing, facing the frontier is not doing that at all, the technology will keep getting better, but just suppose we froze it in place – even if that were the case, we’re making use of maybe only five or ten per cent of what the possible value of the technology is.”
He gave an example of an Anthropic executive who talks to Claude using Salesforce’s data to get insights, making use of information fluently with Claude, but the fraction of people who have seen this kind of thing in action is “still small” compared to those who could gain utility from it.
Final Thoughts
This year’s Dreamforce keynote was unusual in some ways – but in other ways a kind of return to normality. While the back-and-forth between Benioff and Huang, along with the interesting comment about Anthropic having a few ‘Salesforce alumni’, stand out as a little unusual, the meat of the keynote was demonstrating new products – none of which stole the entire show.
Dreamforce ‘24 was all about Agentforce, and ‘25 was the reveal of Agentforce 360, following a year of updates. Dreamforce ‘26 has not, so far, been dominated by one product. We’re seeing Salesforce offer a suite of updates with a unified vision in mind: accessing all the benefits of CRM, boosted by AI, in whatever tab you choose to do your work.
