Hi folks, Kylie Robison from the tech team. I just wrapped up a week at Dreamforce, the annual technology conference put on by Salesforce, which this year featured everything from moshing mascots to Matthew McConaughey.
If you’re not familiar with Dreamforce, it's essentially Disneyland for CRM software enthusiasts. This year's star-studded spectacle had about 40,000 attendees and included performances by heavyweights like Dave Matthews, Maggie Rogers, Demi Lovato, and The Foo Fighters. As for why a software company might pay millions for Dave Grohl to sell their products, well, I don’t know. I’m just happy for the free concert.
Upon my arrival, I couldn't help but wonder why I had willingly embarked on a career that involved navigating through a sea of sweaty, Cotopaxi-clad tech bros. When the keynote event reached max capacity and the entrance was locked down, disgruntled attendees voiced their displeasure (some even arguing with security) about missing what was essentially a 2-hour long pitch on Salesforce’s new AI products.
One big difference this year compared to last year's event is that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff no longer has a co-CEO, after Bret Taylor abruptly announced his resignation in November. In a press panel this week, I asked Benioff the burning question of his plans for succession, a move that earned me a scolding from one of the countless PR people present. In true Benioff style, he sidestepped the question entirely, offering a cryptic response about simply having the best time.
While the Taylor-sized hole was certainly felt on stage, Benioff wasn’t kidding about having a great time. Against the backdrop of a rocket ship-riding cartoon Einstein, zipping around giant screens to announce the new “Einstein Copilot" AI assistant, Benioff launched into a spiel about the exciting yet perilous landscape of artificial intelligence.
“These things are good but they’re not great, you know? They have a lot of answers that aren’t exactly true. We call them hallucinations. I call them lies,” Benioff said in his keynote. “These LLMs are very convincing liars. They really are, it’s amazing. And of course, they can turn very toxic very quickly.”
Benioff, along with the aforementioned chorus line of Salesforce PR folks, are on a fervent mission to ensure you're acutely aware of their formidable presence in the AI arena. Benioff claimed in his keynote that Salesforce “is the No. 1 artificial intelligence platform used around the world,” someone on his team called this the “world’s largest AI event.”
The pivot to AI came across as not just forced but completely over the top, though I suppose I shouldn't have anticipated anything less from the company spending $10 million a year on employing Matthew McConaughey. When I expressed these thoughts to Anshu Sharma, a former Salesforce VP and now CEO of data privacy startup Skyflow, he explained that while Salesforce’s pivot to AI is certainly extravagant, it isn’t exactly illogical.
“If there’s been 10 great tech breakthroughs in the last 10 years, Salesforce has been on top of 12 of them,” Sharma told me. “Marc Benioff is a genius, and one thing I learned from him is that betting on a new thing has limited downside if you are wrong and unlimited upside if you are right about something like cloud, mobile, or now maybe AI.”
Certainly, diving headfirst into the realm of AI is far from the worst bandwagon to hop onto, especially when you compare it to some past endeavors (like their Yammer clone, Chatter). This year, Salesforce fully committed to the bit, bringing onstage OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue. Also, Seth Meyers and Kristen Bell for some reason.
Amidst all the AI buzz, the most conspicuous departure from last year's Dreamforce is the fact that this is Benioff's first Dreamforce since laying off 10% of its staff following pressure from activist investors Elliott Management and Starboard Value, which were pushing for major cost-cutting. Salesforce also announced in January it aims to reduce its costs by as much as $3 billion to $5 billion by reducing its number of offices.
When I spoke to my sources about how they feel about this year’s Dreamforce, one explained “the bitter taste” in their mouth that Salesforce would spend buckets of money to hire big acts “when they’re still banging the whole ‘year of efficiency’ BS on Slack.”
Indeed, thanks to the immense cuts mostly at the expense of employees, Salesforce's "Ohana" culture has taken a beating in the past year. However, it's abundantly clear that Benioff harbors a steadfast belief in his ability to emerge victorious in the ever-accelerating AI race. Despite the workforce cuts, Salesforce's chat subsidiary, Slack, set its sights on rehiring former staff in June, all in pursuit of stoking the fires of its generative AI aspirations. And Benioff told Bloomberg that Salesforce plans to hire thousands, including many “boomerangs,” who previously worked at the company.
In the grand scheme of things, Dreamforce unfolded precisely as anticipated—a splendid spectacle of self-congratulation and opulence. My fingers are crossed that the AI boom outshines the other trends in Salesforce's storied history, leaving the Chatter era in the shadows where it belongs.
Kylie Robison
Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Data Sheet? Drop a line here.
