In the Dreamforce 2026 keynote, Salesforce executives outline a new vision for enterprise AI that merges probabilistic large‑language models with Salesforce’s deterministic data and application layers to create a live, agentic interface called AI Force. Paul argues that the so‑called SaaS apocalypse is really about moving away from software that requires humans to do all the work; instead, AI‑driven agents will handle administration, building, and operation of applications. The company showcases a partnership with Anthropic, demonstrating Claude Co‑work embedded in Salesforce to surface pipeline, service data, and insights through conversational interaction. Real‑world industrial AI adoption is highlighted via Siemens, which uses a family of agents (Agentforce) to blend enterprise AI with shop‑floor operations, reducing hallucinations and improving service speed. Salesforce emphasizes its commitment to trust by training its agents on synthetic data (Nimetron from NVIDIA) without using any customer data. Additional technical pillars—Frontier AI models, an agentic harness system, and the Open Shell—are presented as the infrastructure that enables any enterprise to become an AI‑first organization. The keynote frames this as an interface revolution, moving from DOS to GUIs to web to mobile, and now to dynamic, composable, alive AI interfaces that unlock unprecedented value for customers.
Chapters
We've been hearing all this kind of crazy nonsense about the SaaS apocalypse, especially over the last 6 months. Hasn't it been wild? But I think that we realize that SaaS apocalypse, well, it's not about the end of software, but it may be about the end of software that makes humans do all the work. Models alone cannot run the enterprise. Models alone are not going to show us what's going to— what's possible. Models also are very probabilistic. They kind of know what's going on, but they're not grounded in a single set of truth like your traditional Salesforce apps. To really bring enterprise intelligence to run on our core system, we have to unify the probabilistic intelligence with that deterministic intelligence, the deterministic data, the source of truth of data, the data layer, and the apps and semantics as well. where you have spent so much time educating those applications on who your businesses are and how they run. When we get to the interface layer, I promise you this, you will see an interface unlike anything you have ever seen before. It will transform your enterprise. It's an interface revolution. But we've seen a lot of interface revolutions. We went from DOS to GUIs. And we went from GUIs to web, and we went from web to mobile. And today you're going to see AI interfaces that are dynamic and intelligent, that are composable and alive, and that can work with you in the fundamental administration of the applications, can work with you in building the applications, and work with you in operating the applications. And then when you put it all together, when you put all those things together, you get AI Force, you get those capabilities, and you get this live interface that entraps the value. This is really the most exciting thing I have ever seen for Salesforce because we have been talking about the data layer for a long time. We have been talking about the applications and semantic layer for a long time, and we have been talking about now the agentic layer for 3 years. And now, for the first time, we're talking about this— a live interface on Salesforce.
Other software companies, they think their product is the UI, but that's not what we think at Salesforce. At Salesforce, our product is the trust that all of you, our customers, put in us to hold your data, to hold your workflows, your business processes, your permissions, your security rules. is the Salesforce product. And we asked ourselves, what would it look like if we could plug that product into a new interface, to an entirely new interface, an agentic interface? And that's exactly what we set out to do with our friends from Anthropic. Now, here I am inside of Claude Cowork, and I'm about to show you my interface. So, look, this is my Salesforce. Like I said, everything that you see here is something that I specifically asked for, and Claude helped me bring it together. I can see if I expand this, I can see my pipeline coming in from around the world, everywhere I've got a new opportunity opening up. I can see all of my service data coming in, all where my cases are landing around the world, so I can see where my hotspots are.
Paul, you know, every day now he wakes up, and if he wants to look at, you know, our head, Go-to-market prospects. He still uses Salesforce, but he uses Salesforce with Claude. He talks to Claude using Salesforce's data about you know what are the what are the ten biggest deals we're doing this week? What are the ten deals we're most likely to lose? What are the themes in those deals? How do we win those deals? You know, just just making use of all the information fluently with Claude, and and it's it's really incredible. And and the fraction of people who have seen this and seen that this is possible is still small compared to those who could gain utility from it.
Siemens is a global leader in industrial AI. Their technology powers buildings and factories and transportation around the world. Over the last decade, Salesforce has really become an integral part of how they run their business. And today they're driving success with Agentforce, a family of agents working together across the business This is bringing a probabilistic technology into a deterministic world.
Hallucination does not really work on the shop floor. And that's the exciting part about the journey which we started. I mean, you know that Salesforce is the backbone for how we serve our customers. This is the backbone for products, the products, the parts in it, instructions for manufacturing, for service, the single source of truth of the product. Now we bring that together so the enterprise AI meets industrial AI, and that helps really our sales guys, our service guys to serve our customers much, much faster and better.
It's interesting. You just step back and think about 27 years of product innovation in CRM, deep understanding of the customer scenarios, and almost a decade-plus of AI and data research. All that learning and all that value has gone into CoA. You know, CoA is designed to support long-running agents that execute multiple tasks and complete complex outcomes. CoA has always been trained just on synthetic data built and extending Nimetron from NVIDIA, another phenomenal company, right? And the reason that's important is because our commitment to customer trust has been carried forward. Not a single byte of customer data was used.
How can we turn every single enterprise into an agentic enterprise? And so we did several things. The first thing that we did was we created the Frontier AI models. The second thing we did was create an agentic harness system. And then the third thing, super important, is this thing called Open Shell. And so these are the things that we did, and now we can turn every single enterprise, every single company into an AI company. The sky's the limit for us. The sky's the limit for our company. The sky's the limit for, for every industry, for every single country. So engage AI, don't get left behind.
I think this technology, the way it empowers people, the way that it takes people who, you know, can really make a huge dent in companies and transform them, the technology can partner with them to do this in incredible new ways. That is what I'm really excited about.
