And with that we're wrapping things up now during the opening day keynote at Dreamforce 2026.
We'll be back tomorrow with more live coverage from the event here in San Francisco.
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We're back to customer use cases now with Adecco Group CEO Denis Machuel. Adecco Group has been 'agentifying the business' by integrating agents across core workflows.
Machuel says he wanted AI to be a "growth engine" for the business, but that was in the early days of generative AI. With agents, the company is unlocking siginificant productivity and efficiency gains, particularly in time savings for recruiters.
"We have placed 20,000 more people this year to date" thanks to AI productivity boosts, he says.
Machuel says the company's approach is that AI has to "happen with people, not to people" - it's a technology that is helping to guide employees and clients. Core business reinvention is critical, but it's also about "bringing people along".
We're going through topics quicker than mastermind here, but landed on closed and open source models. Huang says that the rise of open models has been unprecedented, going from roughly 30% of the market to around 70% in the last year.
Token consumption rates for closed models have also surged 25x over that period.
"What that basically says is that people are adopting closed models at exponential rates, but also people are building their own custom AIs, because every single software company is an AI company," he says.
On the topic of AI's impact on the software market and the jobs market, Huang says both these so-called issues are vastly overblown. Particularly with regard to software, Huang has been outspoken on the topic.
AI isn't going to destroy software, he says, but essentially act as a layer on top of it. That's exactly what Salesforce is doing with AIforce, adding that interface layer on top of core products.
Huang says he wants to "agentforce every company" - and by that meaning that ramping up deployment of agentic AI in the enterprise. Those who fail to keep up with this trend will be left behind, he insists.
On the topic of frontier model pacing, Huang says “safety is paramount”, but it’s also an “engineering problems”. Huang says creating the test environments for assessing AI systems is critical.
Companies have to build products that they’re confident in functionality, capability, and safety. If they can’t, then they need to pace themselves before putting them to market.
Regulation isn’t entirely necessary in this regard, despite what some industry executives have claimed. This is about responsible development in the hands of developers.
Another big guest here this morning to discuss Koa, as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joins Benioff on stage...or at least a walk around the keynote theatre. Huang tells Benioff to follow him...
"Jensen we're all following you, bro," Benioff replies.
We've moved onto Koa now, a new dedicated CRM-focused reasoning model launched today following a partnership involving Salesforce and Nvidia.
Koa was built using Nvidia Nemotron, relying on the chipmaker's open weight model family.
We've moved onto Customer 360 now with new agents for Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud. A new agent for the latter "builds campaigns by itself".
With Commerce Cloud, there's a new shopper agent and Field Service Cloud agent. The latter here involves voice-to-text capabilities for professionals operating in the field.
Roland Busch, CEO and President of Siemens, has joined Benioff on stage for a quick chat now on how Siemens is using Agentforce.
"We're building the real stuff. Every third manufacturing line in the world is automated using Siemens technology," Busch says, noting that industrial AI is an extremely promising front for the company.
Salesforce is the "backbone" for how the company interacts with customers and more than 100,000 suppliers.
AI is helping Siemens redesign and "redefine" products, from CTR scanners to manufacturing processes. In healthcare in particular, this is helping supercharge and streamline patient care.
Marshall was trained on how to learn processes using an SAP sandbox environment to understand business rules and onboarding processes.
"This process of onboarding, this is what would take an employee weeks to learn. Marshall just learned it in 90 minutes."
Agents are also helping streamline supplier onboarding for Siemens. This has traditionally been a laborious process, and botched onboarding can have huge financial ramifications.
Marshall, another agent available through Agentforce, can help simplify onboarding processes for suppliers.
We're back with a demo of how Siemens is using Agentforce agents.
Siemens used Piper, an inbound pipeline sales agent, with one simple mission: convert leads into concrete sales.
Piper can be interacted with using voice-based natural language queries and prompts, generating insights on customers, commercial models, and even engaging with Siemens representatives.
The pace of AI development in recent years has "surprised" Amodei, both from a business and economic perspective.
"I think that 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," he says.
Amodei notes that they're not calling for "freezing the frontier" in terms of the pace of AI deployment, albeit just taking a more cautious approach.
Benioff is back now and joined by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to discuss Claudeforce and the two companies forging closer ties.
Amodei hit the headlines recently after making a call for AI labs to slow down frontier AI development due to safety concerns. Amodei says the industry has to question how it can introduce standards to bolster responsible AI development and deployment.
"That is a UI that I personally created for myself by just asking," Stokes says, showcasing a few prompts and how he pulled together the UI and tweaked it.
Stokes built a custom interface using Claudeforce, skipping between multiple accounts seamlessly and consolidating everything through a single pane. Integration with Slack also streamlines communication with colleagues and teams across the business, flagging issues and helping to keep tabs on accounts.
Patrick Stokes, president of applications and marketing is up on stage now with the first demo session of the day.
We've moved onto Claudeforce now. Salesforce and Anthropic unveiled the new service earlier this month as part of a huge strategic partnership. The deal will see Salesforce embed Claude capabilities deeper into Salesforce's core product ranges.
Slack is playing a key role in Claudeforce, Benioff says. The collaboration platform is also getting a sprucing up with the launch of Slackforce. More AI capabilities, more agents.
The platform is now a huge focus for Salesforce, according to Benioff. It's the hub for agents and it's the company's fastest growing product.
"Slack is where AI works," he says. "We bough this company six years ago, we have invested a ton in this company, transformed it. It's done amazing. It's become our fastest-growing product."
Benioff notes that "so many companies" in Silicon Valley are using Slack, largely because of its agent orchestration capabilities. Reports earlier this month revealed Meta has shifted away from Google Chat to Slack for exactly that reason.
The layers involved for Salesforce users now are changing. You've got the data, apps, and semantics, but AIforce is essentially adding a new interface.
We're onto the big interface changes here. Benioff says we've seen a lot of interface revolutions, but the "interface is alive" in the age of AI.
We've gone from command-land interfaces, to graphical user interfaces, to web and mobile interfaces, now we're in the AI interface era.
Salesforce's big contention here is that it's removing the rigid traditional interfaces used by Salesforce customers. You're not switching between different interfaces and scrambling around.
A big issue enterprises are experiencing lies in how AI interacts with data sources, business logic and workflows, Benioff says.
Getting your data right and opening that up to AI and agents is crucial, and it's an area businesses are focusing on heavily right now.
That same dynamic is playing out in the enterprise world. Companies are dabbling in AI, or individual workers are dabbling in the technology, but business-wide uptake isn't quite there and not accelerating at expected pace.
Benioff is comparing AI innovation on a global scale now. During a recent trip to Europe he claims he didn't see a single autonomous vehicle. Compare that to the US and China, for example, and there's "a lot of unevenness when it comes to AI" adoption.
"The AI door is opening, but not everyone has gone through it yet," he says.
“We’ve been hearing all this crazy stuff about the SaaSpocalypse, especially over the last six months,” Benioff says.
He isn’t fazed about these claims, however. AI doesnt herald the end of software, just the end of software that “makes the humans do all the work”.
AIforce will play a big role in this. Removing rigid UI systems and setups and allowing enterprises to build their own custom UIs will streamline things for users.
This is one of the biggest Dreamforce's ever, according to Benioff. The guestlist reflects that. Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang are all expected to make an appearance today.
The first big talking point today is, as expected, AIforce, with a little nod to Claudeforce.
Benioff says AIforce is the "most empowering piece of technology we've seen" for trailblazers and admins.
We've got some real-world use cases coming soon.
And here we go! Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has entered the building to the usual rapturous applause. What a start to the week. A teaser ahead of Dreamfest by Gwen Stefani and now down to the nitty gritty of product announcements.
Gwen Stefani is kicking things off with a song now...
One particular trailblazer has answered over 82,000 questions for the Salesforce community. Bonkers numbers.
We're minutes out from the keynote now, and Matthew McConaughey is on screen hyping up the Salesforce 'Trailblazers' on the 20th anniversary. Some 23 million spanning 90 counties across the globe.
Not long until the keynote kicks off here at Dreamforce, and we have the customary Akaka family blessing.
The mascots, as always, are very popular in the keynote theatre. Brandy the Fox with a queue of attendees taking selfies.
There's a steady flow of attendees pouring into the Moscone Center now as we approach the opening keynote.
A great atmosphere in the Dreamforce village and in the venue.
Elsewhere today, Salesforce unveiled Koa, a new dedicated CRM reasoning model built in collaboration with Nvidia using the chipmaker’s open weight Nemotron model family.
Salesforce has described this as a “game changer” for enterprises, so expect to hear a lot about this in Benioff’s keynote.
You can learn more about the announcement here: https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/salesforce-teams-up-with-nvidia-to-launch-koa-a-dedicated-crm-reasoning-model
While we’re still waiting on the opening keynote to kick off, you can keep tabs on all our on the ground updates across day one here.
The opening keynote with CEO Marc Benioff will begin at 10am PST (6pm UK), but we’ve already had some big announcements from the company ahead of the Salesforce chief’s comments.
Indeed, Salesforce has today unveiled AIforce, a new ‘live interface layer’ designed to help enterprises “break free” from the traditional user interface.
AIforce is designed to help enterprises streamline access to data across the Salesforce product estate for agents, allowing users to build their own custom UI’s and bolster ease of use when it comes to third-party agents.
You can learn more about the announcement here: https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/salesforce-wants-enterprises-to-break-free-of-a-shared-user-interface-with-aiforce