Live Q&A with Product Leaders | True to the Core, Dreamforce 2026

All right. Welcome everyone. Hopefully, if you're not here for True to the Core, please leave. Just kidding. So this is always our favorite way or my favorite way to close out the conference. Somehow the faces keep changing, but mine still stays up here. But I love doing it. I love being with the community. I saw a small cohort of you at the, what do we What do we call it? The beginning, the party.

MVP.

MVP, the Unconference. Thank you, the Unconference. So that was awesome. If you want to see some crazy people dancing, that was one way to do it. But we gave out some awards, and so I saw a few of you. But here we want to just hear from you and have an exchange, kind of bond with you over ideas of how to make the product better. And so I love your feedback, and then I just hand it off to everyone else to go handle it. And with that, I will pass it off. Meredith, are you going next or who's—

Yeah.

Yeah, why don't you hit it?

Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to Joy for being here with us again.

Welcome, Joy, once again.

Thank you.

I had the iPad for a moment. I had the iPad for a moment to answer the questions and I was told to dutifully hand it back.

Yeah, I mean, I think what we love about True to the Core is the feedback. It turns into real programs. For example, like coming out of True to the Core, we rebuilt the Well-Architected We had an amazing admin keynote, architect keynote yesterday.

Oh, good.

Yeah, we rebuilt the Well-Architected Program. We did that in partnership with many of the architects here in the room that came directly from True to the Core. So there's a lot of feedback that we get that we take, we bring it into programs. And twice a year, we're also doing a community sentiment survey. So we get a lot of feedback here one-on-one. You all line up in the mics. We love that feedback. But we also have thousands of you that give us feedback twice a year. And you've told us about pricing. There's— we'll probably hear more about that today. You told us about some of the frustrations with the product name changes and how fast everything is moving. And we look through all of those comments. A lot of that is turning into programs that we're running. And I wanted to share one stat that came from our community sentiment survey that we did just recently in August. And it was around the skills and the skills that many of you said you needed in order to be successful in your career. And 60% of you said that the most important skill is around your AI skills. And so I wanted to share real quick before we get into the questions, some of the programs that we've put into place. So a lot of you are on Trailhead. We've had over 151 million badges that have been completed on Trailhead, which is— that's a lot of learning. So congratulations to all of our learners in the room. At this point, we have 1.5 million active certifications in the ecosystem. That is turning into real certifications and 270,000 Agent Blazor statuses. An incredible amount of learning happening in this room and across the ecosystem. By the end of the year, we will have done 700,000 instructor-led learning. Training that many of you are showing up, You're learning, you're getting hands-on, and it's always incredible to see what's happening across our, our online groups. So we have 8,000 community groups where many of our community members are answering questions, helping you get up to speed on all of this incredible innovation and change that you're seeing. But I wanted to make sure that you were also aware that we have virtual workshops. By the end of the year, we'll have 100 of those happening. Around, you know, twice a week. You can go, you can get hands-on. And by the end of this year, we will have trained up 1.3 million Trailblazers. So, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can go to developer.salesforce.com. You can find out about these virtual workshops. Hopefully, you went over to the Trailblazer Forest this week. It was packed. The lines were long. So, there's just an incredible amount of opportunities for you to get hands-on with the technology. But a lot of that learning also happens in the community. And so we have, you know, 3,500 community group meetings that are happening every year. And we're taking all of that enablement that we do virtually and we're giving it to our community group leaders so you can bring it to your user groups. So really excited to get that in the hands of all of you this year. 50 community conferences that are happening around 20 countries. We have Salesforce leaders that are showing up. We had over 120 that came this year, including my friend here, Jay Hurst, who joined us at Midwest Dreaming this year. So, you can expect to see more of our product leaders and our executives showing up at this community. So, with that, I'll turn things over to Jay, I believe, to talk about the Idea Exchange.

Yeah, and thank you guys for joining us again. You know, this is always one of the most enjoyable parts of Dreamforce to really hear the, the unadulterated feedback from everybody. So we continue to appreciate that. Um, but we have been continuing to deliver what we can. Uh, over 445 ideas, uh, were delivered in the last 18 months. Uh, ideas that you guys have pushed us to and driven us to deliver for you. So, uh, wonderful changes like, uh, launching the screen flows from related lists and list views. That was a huge one. I know a lot of you have been asking for that for a number of years. One that I'm really happy for, for Daniel Bollinger working on the Apex heap limits, really increasing that, really easing some of that simple developer pain that you guys are seeing. So, and plus the over 1,000 ideas that our PMs have been commenting and engaging with you on to get workarounds, feedback, and continue to drive it. So thank you for your support and your feedback. And I believe I'm turning it over.

Yeah, you're turning it over to me. I also want to remind everybody that you don't have to wait for just 2 times a year to give us your feedback. There are multiple ways to give us feedback throughout the year. You can visit Idea Exchange. You can attend the next True to the Core deep dive. We run webinars all year long. And you can also participate in our Salesforce Research Program. The QR code is up now. We would definitely love for you to do that. The closer we can get to you throughout the year and get your feedback, the better.

All right.

With that.

All right. So I was kind of expecting mics here, Emily, but I will do this. It's fine. Don't worry. I'm all good. I'm all good.

I'll keep an eye on this one.

So, you know, the walk is fine.

It's clear out there.

Out of here. Don't worry about it. So please line up. We would love some volunteers. Anyone want to volunteer?

Ready, set, go.

Ask a question.

All right.

So if you get in line, we will do our best to get through as many of you as possible. And since this line organized earlier, you guys get to go first.

Yeah.

My name is Sukumar. I am from PTC ServiceMax. I'm here to say thanks and also ask a question. The thanks is a couple of years back in the same True to Core, I raised an issue about the platform event and I worked with the product team and then it got resolved. But as an extension of it— As an extension of it, there was a question about how the individual customers or the ISV can look at what's going on in the platform events rather than reaching out to Salesforce support team. So what happened was the Scale Center team, we started working with the Scale Center team, and in the last couple of years, there were a lot of development that was made. I want to say thanks to the team because they have developed the platform events related changes into Scale Center. It's really amazing. I don't need to go to the support team. I don't need to ask about which particular event is creating a problem now. I have the ability to look into the platform events and get the details. So I wanted to say thanks to the entire Skills product team.

All right.

The ask is, it's right now available only for the individual customers. As an ISV, can you extend that ability for the OEM ISV also?

Do we have Raj here?

Sounds like a good idea to me. Wow, we got some shy people.

Oh, we got Tyson.

Anyone want to jump in here? Come on, don't be shy. Connect with your customers in a whole new way.

Let's go.

First of all, thank you for the shout out. It means a lot to us, and Chris is right here. So it's a partnership between Scale Center and Platform Events team. If we can get more requirements from you, because there is one thing about getting your package itself, observability around that, and then we've also heard you getting insights into your customers who've installed your package and observability around that. So which one out of the two would you say is top priority?

I would say the one about the managed package, that would be the highest priority.

Okay. We can connect offline to define those requirements.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you for the question.

Okay.

Over here. Hi.

Oh, this is Katie.

Hello.

Hi, Katie.

Oh, it's on. Awesome.

Yeah.

Cool.

Bring it.

My name is Katie Villanueva. I am a first-time caller, long-time listener. And my question is for Meredith. You had a slide with all these countries' flags, and then you just very much owned how awesome the Trailblazers are around the world and how many certifications we hold. However, but I have it written on my hand because I'm a professional. The Trailhead localized titles Excel sheet, there's a badge for how to get Trailhead in your language. Of the 1,922 badges in English, only 583 of them, which equals about 30%, are in at least Spanish. I didn't account for any of the other languages. I'm from the Latino community, so I want to represent. But how do we support the individuals that are carrying your product forward in other countries and helping them get all those certifications that you put on there? I did come from the Latino meetup earlier, and there was a common thread in discussion that it is hard to learn Salesforce in native languages. With technology going so fast, how is Trailhead planning to keep up with this if we are only at 30% right now?

Yeah, well, I love that you did your homework.

Thank you.

I can go back to my team with that stat, so I appreciate that. We did launch the MCP server for Trailhead. And so we've been working really closely with our localization teams because we can do a lot with technology to localize the content, but we need to make sure it really works for those local markets. So I think we can certainly increase that coverage. And please come find me at TDX because I want that 30% to be a lot higher. I think you're right. We have the technology to do that, and I think we can absolutely increase that number beyond 30. So thank you for the feedback.

And thank you for the certifications in Spanish this year. Props due.

Thanks, Katie.

Hi, Michelle. Hi, Joy.

Hi, gang.

What do you got?

Oh, what do I got?

Well, I got 3 things, but I'll be quick. Number one, I want to say thank you. You have expanded the community space at Dreamforce this year. It is clear that you are listening.

Good job.

In some ways, at least. And I realize there's other things that it's going to take longer to see the results from the requests that we make. So, my request is actually doubling down on one I made here a year, year and a half ago. And I had asked to put on the V2 MoM that every Salesforce employee needed to attend, even virtually, a community user group meeting or community conference. And this year, as Meredith mentioned, Jay, Meredith, several others actually attended Midwest Dreamin', and the feedback we got from that was huge. And the feedback we got from the PMs who attended was also huge, that it was beneficial to them as well. So I am asking for your commitment to send more of your product teams to these community user groups, to the community conferences, and give us another opportunity to interact with you for those who cannot make it to these events.

I will ask my product leaders here, Rohan and Patrick, will you make a commitment to send your teams out to community?

Yes.

Yay.

All right.

Thank you.

See, I manage up well.

Can't wait to see everybody. Can't wait to see everybody.

Parker. Oh, yes.

There's been an insistent question coming in on the iPad.

Oh, okay. Yeah, it won't go away.

No, it's not going to go away. We're going to have to address this now.

Oh, joy.

That's rude. That's rude. You used my name on me like that?

I did.

I did. Ouch.

When are you returning to Salesforce?

Okay, stop there.

This is great.

Stop there.

No, I can't read it like that.

I never left Salesforce.

No, no.

I don't know who thinks I left Salesforce.

No, so I think the question is, yes, when are you going to—

Slack is part of Salesforce, in case you're curious.

Seriously? Does everyone know that Slack is owned by Salesforce?

Yeah.

It's all the same company?

We're one company.

There is a concern that the Idea Exchange is stagnant, and they want you to kick it in the tail and get it moving again.

Yeah.

And I think you have an answer to that.

Maybe.

I think Patrick and Rohan have an answer to that.

I think we do have an answer to that.

I think we do need to do something about—

Would I like to answer? Yes. We have some stuff aging, right?

Anyone? Is it 20 years that we have ideas out there?

Anyone?

Yes?

Yes?

10 years?

20 years?

10 years?

20 years? What's the number out there that you guys are all owning?

Anyone?

Long time, right?

They're not willing to raise their hand and say their idea is 20 years old. I've been on the platform for 23 years. So there are ideas out there that are 20 years old. Yeah.

And I definitely know that we have ones that are there for at least 10 years.

Yeah.

And we are going to do something about it. Why don't we take a look? Rebecca, I think we can do something about this. Let's have Claude help us.

We're going to have Claude close all of them right now.

Come on.

Let's look at all of the ones that are 10 years old. All right.

We have a couple here.

Looks like we have delivered a lot, but it also looks like we have a lot that are still open.

Open is winning.

Yeah.

And it looks like that a bunch that are 10 years plus have had 43% of you upvote them in the last year, which means you still want them.

Okay.

So let's take a look. Let's see if we can organize these. Yeah, organize them by PM.

Love that.

Ooh, that one.

Let's do this. All right. And now I think we can group them and send them off to the product teams. I think we can go through all of these. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to look at this backlog. We're going to go through the 10+ year ones that we have. And we're going to process all of them. And we're going to either close them out and tell you exactly why we're closing them out, or we're going to put them on the roadmap in the next year.

That's bold. Come on.

That was like a muted applause.

Thank you. That's amazing.

And because, you know, we're going back in time, we're not going to stop there. We're going to keep going. And this will just be the beginning. We're going to burn them all down. But by TDX, we'll have the 10+ year ones.

Okay? Everyone hear that?

TDX.

Yep.

Is that 6 or 6 years?

We'll see you here at TDX or online at TDX.

Yeah.

All right. Thank you for the question. Please. Hi.

So I'm Tom Bassett, Senior Solutions Architect from London. And I have a rhyme for you again. I've done a couple of these in the past, so let's see how this one goes. Dynamic Forms, Actions, Related Lists, one family, one plan. Experience Cloud slammed the door before the trio began. This should be on Core, no upsell, no additional license required. But since 2024, the promise hasn't quite transpired. Roadmap Exchange says a fix is coming for LWR only though. So if your site runs on Aura, tough luck, no show. Headless 360 swears the UI is here to stay, but half your Dynamics family is still stuck in delay. So my ask here is plain and true. Roll it out everywhere. It's long overdue.

Well written.

I'm sure we have—

Eager to answer this one.

Jay, would you like to answer that or assign someone to answer?

So Experience Cloud, Kush?

We've got some shy PMs today. Kush, you can't get away by not being up here.

We see you.

We can see you.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, there you go. Thanks again for your feedback. Again, we hear you. We understand the importance of dynamic forms. It's fundamentally been a prioritization issue. And we'll take this back again to the drawing board and get back to you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thanks.

All right. All right. Thanks, Tom. Oh, dear.

It's us again. Not going to put you in the hot seat today, Joy. I do want to second what I heard. I definitely think there's been a lot of great improvement, and I recognize all the hard work Salesforce is doing with the community. So, thank you for that. My question quite simply boils down to, it would be great if before Salesforce launches or changes an existing product, if we can test it in a sandbox. I'll give a very short spiel, but we would've had an outage with Agentforce for 5 days in the migration from Agentforce employee license to the Flex Credit model, just because sandboxes couldn't have the Flex Credit SKU. And I learned way more than I care about with your Deal Desk team, your Something Tab team, and a whole bunch of other teams at Salesforce pointing the finger at each other. So, if before y'all make a major change, like that, which requires a signing event. If y'all can make sure we could actually test it, uh, that would be awesome.

Wow, I think I blame Steve Fisher on that.

Thank you, Steve.

It's only a matter of time.

Um, I'm happy to take that. So first, apologies for what you went through with the change on that. Uh, overall, uh, the commitment we can make is for large changes, we want to try to do as many of those with the big releases as possible. At the same point, I'm not going to promise you that everything we do will be on the major release. As you've imagined, with AI, things move pretty darn fast. And so we have to balance how do we give that consistency, reliability that you need for the production needs with the innovation. And so we want to make sure we separate those so that the innovation lane is opt-in and separate. And we give the stability for the production ones.

But I don't think it was about the pace of change. It was that we broke—

We broke them for pricing, but the general—

Let's go fast and not break things. I like that.

Thanks, Zach.

All right.

Here we are. We have a question.

You're in charge, Joy.

I have the iPad. You got the cookie.

Yes, you do.

I have no control here.

All right.

We've got a question from our online audience, I think. Salesforce introduced a significant set of security changes— Jay, this is for you, by the way— outside the normal 3 times a year release cycle, with many of the requirements, timelines, and even details changing after the initial announcements. How is Salesforce going to improve the planning and communication of security rollouts so administrators have a stable, complete set of requirements and enough time to test and prepare before enforcement? Wow, that might have been the elephant in the room.

Thank you for the question. Um, yeah, the, the security changes with MFA, PRMFA, uh, step-up auth—

that was—

it's been a challenging year, I'll say, for us. Um, there's a lot of threat actors in the world who are increasingly targeting our customers, so we had to move very fast in order to, to force these changes in. And it wasn't smooth, I'll admit that. Going forward, as we continue to get more of these security controls in place, we are looking at a couple of different ways that we can implement this for you. So you'll start to see these changes pop up into the release notes. We're going to carve out a new section specifically for security control changes where you'll be able to opt in pretest, you'll be able to identify exactly when the rollout will hit your instance, which was another challenge I know that we had, the scattershot way we were shooting, rolling it out. So we are improving this. The first wave was really about getting it out as fast as possible, getting our customers as secure as possible, and now we can get into the repeatable pattern to roll them out to you. So thank you all for your patience with this, your partnership, and the feedback on the community. To myself, to James, and the identity team. We appreciate it, and we are going to do better on this for you guys.

My guess is this is only going to go faster.

It will only go faster, but we want it to be repeatable. We want it to be predictable for you guys so that when something important does happen, you're able to easily opt in, opt out, and make the changes.

So great.

Thank you.

Okay.

Hey.

Uh, hi, my name's Alon. I've been here a few times. Um, I wanna start off with some kudos cuz it will take a turn after that, and I know Andrew's coming up after me too. Um, I like that you are listening to us and like doing all those ideas you posted on the screen, like a bunch of stuff that's been delivered. You're listening to us, you're like putting stuff in core and not only paying attention to AI all the time. So like, I appreciate that. But I do take issue. I guess I'm gonna tell a small story, like not— I'll avoid the story and just say like one of the things you put on the screen earlier very specifically affected my team. So there's someone on my team, well, multiple stakeholders who just wanna do something really simple, just like have a chart and a dashboard that has the colors they want, like red, yellow, green. That sounds great. It also sounds relatively easy to put together. And right on the screen a few minutes ago you said, Someone asked for, or people asked for, more report and dashboard color customization. And then it goes on with whatever and, you know, got cut off. And you were like, we released all this awesome stuff, brand color palette and reporting. So, I want to ask the team genuinely, do you think that's a good solution to the problem you were trying to solve? Obviously, I think it's not at all useful and not at all what the people wanted, but you've marked it off as done now. And so, now I'm worried that you're never actually going to solve the problem that people wanted. And For the record, for the people listening, like, all you can do is go into Salesforce settings and be like, green, that's the color of my brand. And then Salesforce says, okay, you're gonna have like 5 different greens and that's what your report can look like. But I just wanna do something like red, yellow, green, or make up my own colors or whatever. And the reason I bring this up is because it's so obviously what people want. And the solution that you put in place that you advertise as, you know, having solved it is so obviously not what people wanted. So like, how do you reconcile that? And will you ever actually solve the problems? You solve a lot of problems in the way people want. I don't, I don't want to take that away, but there are times when like you just do it wrong. And I want to know how like we deal with that and how you even put that together and said like, that's a good solution.

Thanks for the feedback, actually. So I just want to call out, I'm the PM, Mayank Singhal, for the reports and dashboards. And yes, I definitely take your feedback, but just the brand palettes which we have started, that's the first phase of it, and we are still working on getting to the exact problem you are looking at. So wait for some feedback, wait for some more time, but we are definitely working on it.

Okay.

All right. Simple enough. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you. Great.

This is Andrew.

Andrew.

Andrew's ready.

I know Andrew.

Hello.

Hi.

Hello, Andrew. Here. So, it's great that we have True to the Core, and there's a lot of good questions that are asked, but there's also, sometimes there's action taken on them. A lot of times there's commitments that are made, and there's no follow-up or action taken on them. So, one, the ask is that we can have some type of a blog post or some website, someplace that Salesforce will, one, list out all the questions that were asked from each True to the Core, and then the follow-up or action that came out of them to deliver them. So almost like an accountability ledger for True to the Core. That would, I think, help a lot to help True to the Core. But we also have some issues that we need to go over, specifically known issues. At the last True to the Core, there was a question that was asked about known issues. And if anyone remembers when the search was removed from the help site, that also broke the search from the known issues site. because known issue search wasn't really needed, so it just broke, and it only searched the title of the known issue, not the contents of it. That's kind of a problem. There also is a problem where currently, of all of these known issues that are in solution in progress, solution scheduled, or solution deploying, there are approximately 9,510— thank you, Claude, for pulling that out because I had to scrape the website— that have not been touched in 2026, but are currently getting the solution deployed. or solution is deploying, or solution is scheduled. I have a feeling that all solutions that are deploying, like, will probably have happened within maybe 6 months of it, and we're already in September. So there's like 1,000 or 10,000 almost that are abandoned, that are stale. It's a problem when builders are trying to figure out what's wrong, and it's like, well, is it this bug? Do I need to talk to support? So it's quite a challenge, and that's still open. I think MK maybe was on stage and agreed to look into it. But we're still sitting at 10,000 currently. So just an example of one, but I think we need a ledger to really have accountability.

Yeah. Well, I, I think on the ideas, I don't think we need new blogs and everything. And like most of these are ideas. And so if the idea exists, we should have some way of tagging that it came up, um, at the True to Core and when, so that you could see here's the ones that Uh, we've talked about, um, that would be my suggestion. We can do a blog as well, but I, I think if you have too many different places to look, it's too hard.

Just somewhere.

I'm open to anywhere. The other one also, Trailhead phone support was offered at TDX. If you call 1-800-NOW-SOFR, I think it was offered that you could get Trailhead phone support if you had help with badges or super badges. I believe it was one of the questions that, that was an answer is that you could get phone support, and I don't know that that exists yet. So, just another thing that was mentioned.

Yeah. And then on the known issues, I don't know, does someone want to take that? Got a shy group today. This is really interesting.

Right?

Give some people some caffeine here. Nope?

Great.

That would be great if you don't mind. Thank you.

Here, Andrew, I'll stand right next to you. For the known issues experience, we definitely hear you on the staleness of known issues. I will say the progress that we've made so far is that the sync functionality now does work moving forward. So, what we had in the past is product teams use a variety of coding systems when it comes to releases, and if they're not on the core release schedule, they don't automatically sync. We have to do that manually and retroactively. The place where we're at now is that we have to go back in time and actually get the information from the individual engineering teams to know what to do with the status of that bulk of known issues he's talking about. So, we need partnership. We lead the known issue side of the house, but from the engineering team, we have to know the source of truth before we can update them. So, it's really the need of the engineer teams to go in and actually give us an accurate status.

Is that a question you're asking engineering?

Thank you.

You know, something I was—

If committed to it, they're on, they're working through it. We know we've seen progress on that. But I think just to close the loop on why it occurs and how we handle it, there's always the solve moving us forward, and then there's retroactively how we address that data.

Thank you.

Yeah, one thing that we were talking just before we came up, I think we can do a lot more in looking at how to leverage AI for looking at known issues, for looking at things that haven't been solved, to update and even close or hopefully eventually fix where the AI can maybe even start to suggest fixes. We can go a lot faster. And I think we need to look at how we're managing this again and see if we can get some people just to try some things with AI to see how much faster we could go. So we'll, we'll commit to that as well and maybe we'll make more progress. So we'll give that a shot.

And on your second question about Trailhead support through voice, it's available. You can try calling and if If there are any issues, let me know. But it's live.

Oh, it is live. It is live. Yeah, I do. I have one. I have a question, online question, before we go to the next microphone. Patrick, are you ready? Well, I'm told you need to be ready. Are you stoked? Yes. Salesforce has changed the names of so many products and capabilities that it is Becoming difficult for customers to understand what they actually own and which documentation applies to them. What customer problem is being solved by the frequency of these renames, and how are you measuring whether the benefit outweighs the confusion? Please and thank you. Personally, personally, my certifications being renamed with the clouds and all of this makes my dozen—

People complimented it. Sales Cloud, that is a great name.

I appreciate all the laughter on the question. This drives us nuts too, if we're being honest. I'll tell you what customer problem is being solved, and then I'll tell you what I think we can do about it. And you may not agree with the customer problem that's being solved. I'm just going to warn you. The way that we like to kind of talk about our products every year at these events, is we like to put some sort of word either at the front or the back of it that implies what's new about it. It's all about making it seem like it is a new version. Now, sane people would have, like, Sales Cloud version 1, version 2, version 3. We're less sane than that. And so, we come up with different names that go into it.

Right.

And so, that's what's actually going on behind the scenes is there is a process to imply what is new. Here's where it breaks. Where it breaks is that's really just a moment in time. And if we're all serious about it, we all recognize that at the end of the day, we just end up calling things the original names anyway in speech, right? We just say Sales Cloud, whether it's Agent for Sales or Sales Cloud. We're going to say whatever. Most of the time, we're going to say Sales Cloud. And so what happens is when these big changes come through or these new words come in, our teams, my teams over-index on it. They don't really appreciate that it's just a moment in time. It's just a way to communicate what's new. And instead they go and they start trying to update the website and update this, and then they never get as far as they actually would need to, to do a full-on web change. So then you see inconsistencies in things. And so the change that I want to make is to really codify that these name changes are just exactly that. They're a moment in time. They're meant to communicate what's new, but they're not actually real changes in the products where we're going to go and update the header and the website and all of these things. And that's going to be a little bit difficult to manage, but that's, that's the change that I want to, I want to try to make. I fully appreciate how frustrating it is. I fully appreciate all the memes online that, that go on. I laugh at them too. And then I cry a little bit. And so this is important and something that we're going to try to do better on.

I love that answer.

Yeah.

Thank you.

All right. We have a question in front of us. And I'm sorry, I need to interrupt you before you start. Your dog is the cutest little donut right now, and I'm loving it.

Thank you.

Too bad he knows it. My name is Andrew Johnson. I'm from BIT. And there's been a lot of talk this week about trapped value, and Salesforce has uncaged a lot of trapped value over the years for blind people like me. The platform is so accessible that at one job, no one knew I was blind in our cameras-off organization for 3 months because I didn't need training. I didn't need anything except for the platform. And I love that about Salesforce. And I love Headless 360. I love having optionality. But I've also noticed that over the last year, one of the main reasons I'm logging into Salesforce less is because new rollouts or updates cause regressions that make it harder for me, or sometimes impossible for me to do the work that I need to do. This is things like JDA360 Flow Builder, Experience Builder. Now, I'm pretty AI-pilled. I love throwing tokens at problems to make my life easier. My friends say I love it too much, but I disagree. But that incurs an additional cost. specific knowledge and just this whole agentic loop of prompt, test, and then sometimes, like, if it's visual, like, take a screenshot and send it to somebody else for something that sighted people can do with a couple of clicks. And I think about the guy who maybe isn't in a company like me or doesn't get to stand up here and is trying to compete in a sighted world. And I have to ask, is Salesforce still committed to making the UI a place where people like me can do real work?

I would say yes.

Hi, and thank you so much for the question. My name is Bonnie Parisi, and I lead the product accessibility team. And we love partnering with BIT, so thank you so much. I can attest that we are deeply committed. This is actually the mission of my team to ensure that everybody can use and get value from our products as we ship them. And so I encourage you, we have a dedicated accessibility support team who would love to know about issues or regressions in the product as you're using them. Please, please file them. We will work closely with that team. to understand them and get them unblocked. But this is our remit, is to make sure that we don't have challenges with people who are using assistive technology or who have a diverse set of abilities. So I am here offering time to discuss more, but this is a top-level commitment all the way to the time it takes us to remediate defects that goes all the way to the top. So I can assure you that that commitment is still there and would love to discuss further. Issues or just ongoing roadmap?

Yeah. Would you mind connecting just after we're done here and just have a quick discussion on this to get into more detail?

That'd be great. Yeah, thank you. And I will say, I've had great conversations with people. It's not that I don't think that the company is committed, but I think the work is fragmented. And it felt like something that I wanted to bring to True to the Core because I think accessibility has to be a core issue or it's just impossible.

I mean, it sounds like we're dedicated to it, you agree, but we're regressing too much on the product where we're hitting issues that you're seeing. Is that right?

Yes. And in many ways, you go above and beyond. Like, this isn't, you know, meeting some legal standard or whatever, but just making this place like a first-class platform where people like me can unleash their full potential and be competitive in a sighted world.

It's really important. And again, maybe we— And maybe we can figure out in our software development lifecycle loop how AI might catch these before the regressions get out to you and cause you issues. So we'll, we'll, we'll do better.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, I just want to add over here. So first, thank you. We take this feedback very seriously. Bonnie and the platform team work very closely to each other. The tools that you articulated, we have efforts around them to improve the accessibility. In terms of any new applications that are being generated, whether— or agents that are being generated, whether that is pro-code, whether that is from our no-code set of tools, accessibility is number one and top of mind for us as well. It's built in from GetWorld. So again, we'd love to keep partnering with you, and you have our commitment.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

So, hello, I'm Maham Hassan. I am Salesforce Solutions Architect based in Dubai. So, forward-deployed engineering seems to be an important part of the future of the Salesforce career. And Salesforce is doing an amazing job enabling the partners to build the skills and get certified FTE predictions. But the challenge is these programs are primarily for the partners and For the solo consultants, the opportunities to participate in these workshops are quite limited. So my question is, what roadmap or pathways are available for the solo consultants to participate in these Certified FDE Practitioners program and help themselves accelerate their careers?

Good question.

I'm not sure who can take that one.

Hmm.

Who would own that? Let's start.

Well, that's, that's the start of the problem. Um, I'm gonna answer this by saying I didn't know this was a problem. Uh, I had no idea that, that solo, uh, uh, SIs and, and consultants were having this problem. So, uh, let me talk, uh, right after. Well, I'm sorry, you're over here. Jesus. I'm like, where is it? Doesn't look like, um, like, who am I talking to right now?

Sorry, Patrick, you got it.

It's okay. It's all, it's all turned around and backwards. Let me talk to you afterwards. I didn't realize this was a problem. I'd like to learn more, and we'll figure out exactly what to do.

Thanks.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Maham. All right, we got an online question again. People are watching.

You're in charge.

Go for it. Salesforce+.

Yeah, I work for you.

I am a customer, you know. Yeah, this is true.

I know.

So, Craig Scholl, are you around? You have a microphone yet? All right. With Flex Credits, when a process or feature goes rogue and burns more than 4 million Flex Credits, In 2 days. When can a governor limit or guardrail get added so the system stops and there isn't an event that makes a business pay $30,000 when something is outside of their control? Oh my gosh, this happened to me. This isn't my question. Please, I would—

Yeah, absolutely.

I thought Steve Fisher was going to answer this, but I'll take it. Uh, yes, we heard this this morning in the MVP session. It was actually something that I was not aware of, um, that, that we needed to put sort of caps in the system. And so it's something actually we actioned on this afternoon, was to sort of investigate whether this is possible. So we'll come back, uh, after we do that.

Fantastic, fantastic. Um, I will say that we had— me personally, I had, um, our, our team of Signature Success people come up with some solutions for us, but that doesn't help us after it's already burned.

So, yeah.

We're over here. We're over here.

Hi there.

Thank you so much for hosting this Dreamforce. It is my first time here. Thank you. I have been in the Salesforce ecosystem since 2018. And I am impressed with what Salesforce has been doing to date, truly. My name is Mario, and I have been providing Salesforce consulting services, and most of my clients are deaf-run organizations. And I'm noticing a growth of Salesforce usage in the deaf community, but only to an extent. Their number one topic they have been expressing with me is the accessibility challenges with AI. English is not sign language, and sign language is not English. It is a visual language. I do have a question.

Hmm.

How is Salesforce planning to make products completely headless for the deaf community and where individuals can interact with AI in their native sign languages? By addressing this, this will definitely retain them within the Salesforce ecosystem.

I don't know how to do that, but I would love to figure it out for you. I mean—

Right here.

Yeah. Maybe we know.

Sorry. Can you hear me?

Hi.

Yes.

Hi.

Thank you for the question. This has actually come up quite a bit, especially as we interact more with voice and other agents. And so, There has been an initiative. I'll connect with you offline because we have been exploring sign language as another localization. And so that's come up as top of mind. And it would be great to connect, get your feedback, and see how we can make this a reality.

Yes, please.

And we also have close relationships with both Anthropic and OpenAI. So we'll reach out to them. I'm sure they're researching this. searching this kind of problem or opportunity.

All right. We've got a question over to the left. Hello.

I'm Jennifer Timm, and I manage the Salesforce Center of Excellence at Delta Airlines. I've been a customer now for 15 years, and I know firsthand how much support cases matter. They are a lot of how I built my career. Well, that and Steve Mo helping me out on the community.

Thank you, Steve.

So, like I said, support cases matter. But for an enterprise, there's a big problem that we have where I have multiple orgs, I have lots of admins, and I want them to use those cases as they're growing their career so that they can learn, ask the questions, get the feedback from Salesforce directly. I can't federate all of that and control it in my team. It needs to be Salesforce offering that support. However, support cases is also how you sometimes have to enable or disable important security features. And for an enterprise, a well-intentioned admin can submit that case, and a change could be made when it is not the enterprise's intention. It was somebody not necessarily understanding what the implications of that were. And so, the support case is being worked in the way it's supposed to be. For enterprises, we need another level of governance and control around these cases. What I was told was, well, just don't let them have access to cases if you need to control that, and that's not the right solution. solution, not for a big company, not with multiple orgs. We need those admins to have access to your support, but I need to be able to trust that they're not going to be able to change the security of their org in ways that we're not comfortable with.

Oh, no, that's a great question. I completely agree with what you're asking, and we have been trying to solve that. And one of the things we have been trying to do is in-app, so we know who you and what persona you have. And you will see a lot of investment in that space in the coming 12 to 18 months where you can invoke— you're logged into Salesforce, you log a case, we know who you are, and based on your profile, we can restrict or give you access to request that and do it. But completely acknowledge that that is an issue today. And we surely don't want to restrict people from reaching out to us or engaging with us, but completely understand that we want to honor the— persona and the profiles.

But we need to be able to tell you who has that right, right? Like, somebody could have sysadmin. They are a sysadmin, but they should not be able to enable or disable some of those security features.

Absolutely.

All right. Thank you. Thank you. Are you ready?

Yeah.

All right.

So, I love all of the AI stuff. I think it's great, and it's obviously going to help us, but I feel like it's being put on a very old Foundation, right? There's a lot of things that haven't changed in a very long time in Salesforce. And the one that drives me crazy is tasks. Completely drives me crazy, right? The polymorphism that isn't there, the multiple what IDs that technically the data model supports, but you can't do, the inability to @mention someone in the system. Yes, Chatter's there, but we all hear Chatter's going away. You got to replace it with Slack, but it is not a good experience to have to leave what you're doing to just @mention somebody, right? Especially when you're talking about tasks, multiple assignments, making multiple people assigned to the same task. These are basic things that most systems can do, and it hasn't changed in Salesforce in a very, very long time. And it— tasks are the heart of the interactions that we are having with our clients, and that we— there, that is where all of the valuable data that AI is going to pull out, almost all of it for us, is because that's our 360. That's where we're tracking those conversations. So all of that insight is hidden in there, but tasks haven't changed fundamentally in so long, and there is so much capability that's missing from them. Without that, I fear, that we will still have trapped value inside of our system.

Who owns Tasks?

I don't know.

Okay.

I didn't expect dead silence, honestly.

I think that's part of the problem. I don't know if we have anyone who's owning it right now. Do we?

Not sure.

Who owns Tasks?

Do we get to auction it off to the highest bidder?

I mean, that's crazy, right?

That's core.

That is—

Yeah, I think you raise a very good point. So we'll start by making clarity. I think this is a bigger issue. We have to make sure we have clarity of ownership, and certainly in productivity and task management, that's— I agree, it's the very heart of our system for a lot of the work.

I have an answer. Behind us, maybe. Do we have—

Hi, I'm a product manager in the core team, not exactly responsible for Tasks, but we will take this up. We'll discuss with the team. And I think this is something which is very important for us as well. So thank you. Thank you for giving the feedback. OK, great.

OK, thank you.

All right, thank you. Oh, Tom, are you ready? Tom, you're coming back?

All of my tokens today.

All of your true to the core tokens with Joy. You're going to just burn through all your Joy tokens today. All right.

We need iambic pentameter this time.

So make email the default logging experience is an update which is coming. I posted an idea to no longer enforce this update on Saturday, and it's had 61 votes. on the Idea Exchange already. You are inherently making the platform less secure because my email address is easily compromised. And ultimately, your plans to remove the username from the login form on login.salesforce.com or test.salesforce.com and replace it with an email address— I then use that email address, verify the email address. I select one of my 69 Salesforce orgs because I'm a partner. and I have lots of orgs. So ultimately, this is telling a bad actor or a hacker all they need to do to understand which Salesforce orgs I have access to, and the usernames and the org IDs for all of those orgs, is they need to compromise my email address. Please do not enforce this update.

Thank you.

Thank you. We have Anusha, who's helping drive this program, that can, that can help answer, I think.

Hi, thank you for your concern. On the outside, it is a valid concern that, you know, once you enter your email, you're able to see your assets. But we do have some protections in place, things that you can see and cannot see. The protection that you can see is that you need to verify with the verification code before you can see all of your assets. Behind the scenes, we have edge protections to make sure that bots are not taking over and there's no attacks that are compromising your email.

Yeah.

Does that address your concern? The second question was removing the ability to log in with usernames. That is not what we're doing right now. We're just making email the default. We still have the ability to log in with usernames. The third question was, You see all your orgs. We are making that experience more usable by trying to auto-favorite your login hints. So that's coming soon as well. So you can use it and it's a lot more usable.

Okay. So either way, my email address is public information. My username is not public information. With that username, somebody could lock out my account or reset my password. Because that's all you need to request a password reset. So I still don't think this is a very thought-through change, and this is something that isn't broken. Please don't fix something that's broken. Fix dynamic forms instead. You know, like, this is not broken. I appreciate there are a small proportion of customers who get confused between username and email address, but when you switch it and make email address the default, the people that are currently not confused will become confused.

Can you connect?

Yeah, we'll connect and work with you to make sure—

If we could connect right after this and just have a deeper discussion.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Tom. We have one— we have 2 more questions in person.

Yeah. Okay. First, I want to say thanks. I had a 2-part question, but one of them was already solved. My question was about why don't we use Claude? for the Idea Exchange, so thank you for that. The other part is maybe on the Idea Exchange, can we have it where it's customer voting importance? There are other product feedback platforms that when you just do the upvote, you're asked, how important is this to you? And there are 3 choices. How often will you use this? Sometimes, regularly, occasionally. And then when do you need this? Never, right now, because all of our different industries, we can provide that. Subjective feedback— sorry, objective feedback to product managers, but then expose that so we know how important it is to you guys to start fixing it out.

Yes, that is something we can do. All right, thank you.

Oh, fantastic.

That was easy.

I like that one. All right, we've got one more in person here, and I've got one online, and then maybe you get a second chance. You settle down, Andrew.

All right.

This is Charlie Guo. I'm a Salesforce architect. I'm going to talk about money here.

I love money. Yeah, because would you like to give us more money?

I would love to, because tokens are expensive and we have to pay for that. And it used to be when we architect a solution, we are advised to recommend the best solution and don't consider the cost. And that works well when it is— when the cost is seat-based. And nowadays in a large enterprise, we have to justify every use case and tell the executives how much we need to budget for this if we are gonna consume tokens and if we are gonna use credits. So my ask is that please give us the information. And if we have multiple use cases on one org, we need to know the information per use case how much credit we are consuming. And we also consume credits on the sandboxes. We also need that information to do engineering and monitoring.

So we want to keep investing in this. We certainly have things like the digital wallet that are— the intention is to give that visibility. I think we also want to continue— I think we're in this early phase of AI. And like early this year, especially with coding, all of a sudden everyone's costs like Whoa, it's really just crazy. We're using the, you know, top models. But for example, with Slackbot, we did a lot of work. We thought, oh, I don't think we can control the cost. We're gonna have to put that on you because we pay a lot of tokens. Like Anthropic loves us using Slackbot. Um, but the team really did a lot of engineering to keep that a fixed cost. As an example, we're still paying tokens, but we're optimizing really on your behalf. to make sure that we can help you control your costs. I think that's the direction that we're going to go. It's not— not everything will be fixed price, but we are also going to keep experimenting with various models. And so we want to keep giving you high quality with a, with a lower cost as much as possible, as well as the visibility. But we don't want it to be like, oh my gosh, this whole thing is so expensive, it's a runaway cost. We have runaway processes that are far too expensive. And so I think we're in these early days where some of that is true. We're going to give you the visibility, but we're also going to keep optimizing so that the costs go down and it's not such a huge issue for you.

That's wonderful because we are competing against other platforms. If we are 10 times more costly, they're going to say, why don't you use that?

Yeah.

So I love this platform. I want us to be successful.

Well, the other thing we're doing, and Rohan Kumar, who joined us from Microsoft, runs our platform and engineering now. His vision, and one of the things we're going to do, you saw at this conference, is we want to give you more visibility across all of your AI heterogeneously to see, you know, what is it doing, you know, is it secure, but also what is it costing and what is it returning. And so you're going to see a lot more IP from us to help you do that in the enterprise.

Thank you, Parker.

Thank you. Andrew, my deepest apologies, no. We're out of time.

And—

Wow.

The little— I know.

Andrew, I'll let you ask.

We'll talk later.

I'm going to override Joy and you can ask.

You can talk to him later.

But Joy's going to do this right now.

Yeah. I mean, there was a real quick question about the Trailhead content team using AI to help create new badges faster. And I think the answer is—

We do use it in some ways, but we have a very large editorial team. Everything that goes out publicly, there's human eyes that go on it. It's all against a rubric, voice, tone. But of course, we're using agents to try to go faster because we have so many products to talk about.

So the short answer is yes. And then I'm getting like the shepherd's crook is going to pull us right off the stage. We've got to wrap things up.

They can't pull us off.

Don't worry.

Oh.

Andrew, do you want to—

go ahead.

Can we get an MCP for Salesforce Help Docs so like Claude can actually access all the help docs?

Great idea.

Yes. I love that.

That's a good one.

Jim, you want to answer that? Come on, introduce yourself, Jim.

Also log docs for us.

If they could, like, log— we could have Claude log cases, respond to case comments. So, like, we could have our Claude agents just do all the working with Salesforce support for us.

Beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Love it.

Thanks for the idea.

Yeah, introduce yourself, please.

My name's Jim Roth. I run the customer success team, including customer support. Thank you, Andrew, for your question. Thank you, Parker, for allowing one last question. We spend a lot of time thinking about what does headless service mean in a world with a headless product? So, you're exactly right. What we're working on is being able to take the same agent that powers help.salesforce.com and bring it to 2 new surfaces, really. One is it's launching and rolling out right now in-app. So, the question mark icon in Core, as it rolls out across these orgs, across, you know, between now and the end of October, it will launch the help agent. The reason that's powerful is 2 reasons. One, you're already authenticated. So, if you need to get to a human, there's no extra authentication that happens externally. The second thing is we were able to pass context, like what page were you on, which allows us to personalize the experience. So that's one. But as the product goes headless, we also want that same help agent to be headless. So through the Salesforce MCP, you're going to be able to access that same agent. So imagine in a world where you can not only look up all the knowledge through Claude, but you could actually get to one of Sanjeev's humans through Claude, initially with chat, but maybe you could speak. To Salesforce support through Claude. That's where we're going.

Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

All right, we're done?

Well, yeah, we're done here. I know that Salesforce+ is going to say goodbye to us, I think.

Yeah, I just want to thank everyone. This is really part of our culture. It's part of our core. That's why we call it True to the Core. But thank you. It's a long week. You all showed up. We showed up. This is how we do it at Dreamforce. So thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of Dreamforce, and we'll see you at TDX.

Thank you.