Welcome to ITPro's live coverage of Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco. We're up bright and early this morning and it won't be long until we're heading down to the Moscone Center for the opening keynote session.
We've got an action-packed couple of days ahead here at Salesforce's annual conference, and we certainly won't be short of talking points.
Dreamforce 2024 saw the launch of Agentforce, Salesforce's flagship agentic AI service. As ITPro's Ross Kelly noted at the time, this was essentially the starting gun on the agentic AI 'race' – the latest iteration of the generative AI boom.
Salesforce struck an early lead on this front, and it's safe to say the industry has followed. We're utterly swamped with agentic AI solutions and services now, but Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will be keen to emphasize why the CRM giant is still top of the food chain on this front.
While we're waiting for the event to kick off, why not check out my preview of the conference? Hint, agents will be a big theme.
• Why Dreamforce 2025 will be all about agents, agents, agents
"We don't have the luxury of millenia," Goodall explained. "We need innovative thinking here and now – business must be a platform for change and an essential source of innovation."
Benioff is hyping the sheer scale of this year's event, with a huge roster of speakers incluing Sundar Pichai, H.E. Abdullah Alswaha. He also pays tribute to a recently departed friend, asking the audience to "put all of our political situations aside and divisiveness, come together as one ohana". He is referring to Jane Goodall, who we're now hearing from in video form.
"The number one thing we are going to do is thank you," Benioff begins, thanking all Salesforce's partners and customers.
"Welcome to the agentic enterprise", we're told, as Marc Benioff takes to the stage.
"Is AI going to replace us? Or are we going to be in command of it? At Salesforce, we've made our choice. We're building AI that elevates people, agents that handle the busy work, so we can focus on the work that matters," McConaughey says.
And with the preamble finished, we’re off with the keynote in earnest. As is usual for tech keynotes, we’re starting with an opening film. Matthew McConaughey is introducing Agentforce as “the fastest product we’ve ever launched”.
He adds that Slack is most helpful because it moves at the pace of any company and allows workers to organize and come together. Moving onto Salesforce more generally, Lightcap says that SaaS and Salesforce continue to have a huge role to play in the age of AI. He explains that AI can bring context from different systems together and make insights actionable, supplementing existing CRM systems.
Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI, is here to explain in detail.
"OpenAI started on Slack," he says. "It was the first place I logged in at OpenAI, and it was the firehose I was drinking from when I was trying to understand what it meant to build AI and AGI."
Denise Dresser, CEO at Slack, is now giving us more details on how OpenAI is using Slack to scale its operations and improve its productivity.
The keynote itself hasn't yet begun, but we're hearing a little bit about Slackbot. In a live demo, the audience is being shown how the new and improved Slackbot can summarize previous product launches for a user and create a canvas for how to approach an upcoming product launch.
As attendees file in, we're hearing a live rendition of 'The One They Call Hawaii', performed by the family of Daniel Akaka, the former Democratic senator for Hawaii. The performers dedicate the song to Benioff, "who calls Hawaii his home".
The keynote hall is filling fast, with just 35 minutes to go until events kick off in earnest.
Given the fact that Dario Amodei, CEO at Anthropic and Sundar Pichai, CEO at Alphabet are here this week, we'll be listening particularly closely to what Benioff has to say about each company's models in his speech. There's a talk between Benioff and a 'special guest' scheduled for 15:15 today – expect coverage of that later on.
Expect to hear some powerful statements on agentic AI from Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce. In the past few months, Benioff has doubled down on the potential to replace workers with AI agents – and I'd bet he'll continue on this track today.
We're off! The Moscone Center is filling up by the minute, with thousands of attendees already milling about. We're due to enter the keynote hall soon and will be bringing you the latest as it happens.
We've already had a couple of big announcements from Salesforce ahead of the event kicking off, which is a great way to get heads turning and tongues wagging.
Chief among these is the launch of Agentforce 360, a new platform for building, deploying, and managing enterprise AI agents.
The new service is essentially a rebranded Agentforce Builder, but Salesforce hopes to simplify and streamline the creation and testing of agents for enterprise users. You can read more on the announcement below.
• Salesforce just launched a new catch-all platform to build AI agents
Elsewhere, we've had some big news at Slack, which Salesforce is clearly positioning as a key tool in helping build out its agentic AI ecosystem.
Slack will now act as an “agentic OS” for customer data and become a core pillar of the aforementioned Agentforce 360 platform.
So what does this mean? Essentially, CRM data from Salesforce will now be directly accessible within the workplace productivity platform. That means data from Salesforce Sales, HR, and IT, as well as data from the CRM giant's analytics platform Tableau.
You can read more on the big plans for Slack below.