Now that we’re home and recovering from the Dreamforce flu (mine has progressed from my nose to my chest) I’ve found some time to write up a short synopsis of my observations from the campground.
One phrase from last week’s keynote stuck with me. To do a bad Benioff paraphrase, “Salesforce is where your data lives, that data is reconstituted in the surfaces where you work.” Here are my reconstituted memories of Dreamforce 2026, distilled into a few key themes.
Data at the forefront
Dreamforce is always about data, but the last few years, the main narrative has been more of a focus on Agentforce and experiences you can offer with customer data. This year’s keynote brought the focus back to the data itself, where it lives, and how it’s presented. Benioff’s keynote made the case that Salesforce is where data lives, but they’re admitting what many business users have known for awhile – it’s a tough place to view the data. That’s the case he made with AIforce and the launch of a Salesforce-hosted MCP for Claude. Now you can skip the headaches of building reports into dashboards and create a hyper-personalized view of Salesforce data in Claude, and eventually, your LLM of choice.
I’ve seen leaders at my own organizations building similar claude-powered dashes over the last year, but the Salesforce connector has been a struggle. Good to see them empowering this use case, though I’m sure there will be a price tag after the Beta.
Two things I found interesting from the keynote.
- Salesforce Guardian got a full keynote segment, which I was glad to see. Security and compliance are on the minds of most organizations and CIOs, CISOs, and others often struggle to get a full view of the data lifecycle. Guardian’s updated dashboard looks like a step in the right direction for better classification and visibility.
- Data collection was glossed over. Even Guardian’s view of sensitive data and audit trails only looks at the information once it’s in Salesforce, and doesn’t offer governance of the processes and pipelines that bring that data in. That’s a gap we’re trying to close at FormAssembly by giving organizations the ability to enforce their data policies on their forms and data workflows, with visibility that extends beyond the CRM to the point of data collection. We’ll make some announcements on the topic soon, but you can see the latest versions of our Compliance Dashboard and Policy Library when you schedule a demo.
Training for the forces
The campground floor and many sessions were again focused on making the commercial case for Agents this year. I personally enjoyed the Crocs booth with their agent Rivet helping me figure out the right set of shoes(?) for my wife. That said, I did notice a strong emphasis on agentic voice experiences this year, with phone booths set up to give attendees a chance to hear their agent over the hubbub of the floor.
The most welcome addition this year was major floor space in the trailblazer campground devoted to training on Agentforce and AIforce with quick, 15 minute sessions. Dreamforce attendees are there to learn, giving them more chances to get hands on rather than walking through strict vendor demos is a nice change.
I think the AIforce/Agentforce story is still a bit muddied, but beyond the branding issue, Salesforce is making clear steps to put your organization’s data to work everywhere, which is one of the clearest value propositions of AI in 2026.
Campground trends
Speaking of campgrounds, as a vendor I spend a lot of time on the expo floor at Dreamforce, and I did notice some troubling trends. There was more dead floor space in Moscone North this year, and foot traffic was inconsistent. I also noticed several brands hosting two booths at the show – including our own. I’m wondering if fewer brands are seeing the ROI of Dreamforce sponsorship and instead moving to just attending and hosting meetings off-site.
All in all, I’d say Dreamforce 2026 did a fairly good job of bringing order to a relatively chaotic year in Salesforce news and announcements. As always, I’ll be watching and waiting to see if the dream of AIforce and Guardian dashboards comes true, and hoping that the global outage we saw on Wednesday isn’t an indication of instability to come.
For those of you that read my blog on preparing for this year’s show, I want to say that I found two new fantastic spots for food around the show. Oink and Oscar gave me one of the best and biggest cuban-esque sandwiches I’ve had (though I hadn’t eaten that day since 3:30am ET, so take that with a grain of salt). And the Crafty Fox Ale House gave me exactly the low-light, warm olive plate vibes I was looking for after a long day on the floor. I hope to make it back to both next year.
