What to expect at Dreamforce 2026

With Dreamforce 2026 starting next week, Salesforce has an opportunity to show why it’s still relevant in an era dominated by agentic AI. The key to that could be an “if you can’t beat them, join them” mindset.

The company has spent most of 2026 fighting a war of words over the so-called death of SaaS thanks to the launch of powerful new agents.

The beginning of 2026 saw a mass sell-off of stock in software companies following the launch of Claude Cowork. The service offered new agents with sector-specific plugins designed to automate tasks across a range of areas, from legal and sales to marketing and data analytics.

With investors spooked, Salesforce was caught up in the sell-off, but CEO Marc Benioff shrugged off claims of a pending ‘SaaSpocalypse’ in typical fashion.

Convincing Dreamforce attendees that it’s still fighting fit could be a challenge nonetheless.

Claudeforce in the spotlight at Dreamforce 2026

The key to this, in my opinion, lies in Claudeforce, launched in partnership with Anthropic earlier this month. Closer collaborative ties with the company touted as a software killer makes perfect sense for the CRM giant.

This is a partnership that’s multi-faceted and mutually beneficial. It’s not just about integrating Claude within Salesforce’s portfolio of products but also Salesforce within Claude, with new plugins available for customers.

With this, it’s obvious that Salesforce is pinning its colors to the mast and betting that closer ties with Anthropic will insulate it from future market shocks.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is on the guestlist at Dreamforce, so I guarantee Benioff will be keen to show off the company’s fashionable new partner and provide customers with a roadmap on how this relationship will expand.

The happy family image won’t quite cut it though, and customers need real-world examples to get a gauge of how this will benefit them. Claudeforce is in beta with selected customers, so expect to see a steady stream of use-cases and case studies on how this is developing.

All roads lead to Slack

Slack has come on leaps and bounds since Salesforce acquired it in 2021. The one-time workplace collaboration platform now forms a core component of Salesforce’s agentic AI approach.

Serving as an ‘agentic OS’, Slack is a central point of contact for agents and customer business data within the broader Salesforce ecosystem. I expect this messaging will be drilled home further with Claudeforce on the scene.

Salesforce claims Slack will be the “intelligent backbone” of Claudeforce, although exactly what that means in practice is still up for debate. I think it’s safe to assume the platform will still retain its role as an agentic OS, but expect to see Salesforce emphasize its position as the critical intersection between core products and Claude.

Opening things up

Claudeforce might be the start of the show, but I want to see more detail on Headless 360. This is a new architecture for the CRM platform that essentially opens it up without the need for a traditional browser interface, but hasn’t received much attention since its April launch.

It’s an interesting proposition from Salesforce, enabling enterprises to link data, business logic, and workflows with third-party agents via APIs, model context protocol (MCP) tools, and command-line interfaces (CLIs).

This approach tracks with what we’ve seen from Salesforce in recent years, with the company focusing heavily on an open ecosystem approach when it comes to AI model choice.

I do wonder, however, if the noise surrounding Anthropic will drown things out on the Headless 360 front. Users aren’t limited to Claude, but you can bet they’ll be hearing about it more than other options such as OpenAI.

I will be reporting live from Dreamforce 2026 throughout the event, follow my coverage here and subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest from San Francisco.