San Francisco’s definitive mega-conference is back this week. Starting Tuesday, Dreamforce will bring tens of thousands of guests, a spate of celebrity sightings and a surplus of forest-themed decor to the city’s downtown.
The Salesforce-led conference runs Tuesday through Thursday at and around Moscone Center, blocking off streets and taking over entire buildings, including the Chase Center, for keynotes, demonstrations, panels and musical performances. It’s all meant to beef up the software company’s clout and customer network; tickets ran from $999 to $2,299, though you can expect that most attendees’ employers footed the bill. Yet more cash will pour into South of Market’s local businesses, which expect their most profitable week of the year.
Dreamforce, in its 23rd iteration, can feel as predictable as the wave of warm weather in San Francisco’s autumn. But its mix of celebrities, the fast-moving trends of the tech industry and Salesforce’s current dilemmas mean that this year’s event bears extra attention. Here are a few conference basics and things to expect, pulling from SFGATE’s past coverage of Dreamforce and its host company, plus from the 2025 plans.
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What are the stakes of this year’s conference for Salesforce?
First, the basics. What exactly does Salesforce do? It’s a “customer relationship management” company, meaning that it licenses software tools that help its customers — companies, nonprofit groups and government entities — better deal with their customers. Salesforce’s tech could help a company personalize its ads and sales pitches, say, or swiftly respond to complaints. Salesforce also owns the messaging service Slack and data platform Tableau.
FILE: Dreamforce attendees mill around on a blocked-off Howard Street in San Francisco around lunchtime on Sept. 17, 2024.
Stephen Council/SFGATE
By any measure, Salesforce is an absolute juggernaut. It occupies San Francisco’s tallest building, finished January with more than 76,000 employees, and, as of Friday, was worth almost $230 billion on the stock market. But that valuation belies a deeper truth: The company is in a tricky position. Salesforce’s stock price is down more than 25% since the start of the year, missing the artificial intelligence boost that’s propelling some of its peers. Last year’s Dreamforce saw the company ardently peddling its so-called Agentforce AI tools, but the Information recently reported that less than 5% of the company’s 150,000 customers are paying for the platform. (Adding another annoyance, a wave of cyberattacks against customers led to a flurry of lawsuits in September.)
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This year’s conference has a clear goal: convince more of those customers that their longtime relationships with Salesforce’s software would improve with a dose of AI, and that the upgrade is actually worth the money. In a moment of economic austerity, that may be a tough sell. But this circus’ ringleader is CEO Marc Benioff, the crème de la crème of tech sales.
What celebrities and major events will highlight Dreamforce this year?
As ever, Dreamforce’s pitch to attendees is laden with high-profile guests. Sure, you could spend your Thursday afternoon learning how to feed your company’s data into a large language model or listening to sales pitches. You could also go watch Ilana Glazer and Kumail Nanjiani’s comedy hour.
FILE: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff walks across a stage during Dreamforce on Sept. 17, 2024, in San Francisco.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
On Wednesday evening, Metallica are scheduled to perform at Chase Center and Benson Boone at Bayfront Park, in benefit concerts for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. Past years have also included some late-addition musical acts like Maggie Rogers. And as usual a range of celebrities not typically associated with the tech industry are billed for sessions sprinkled throughout the conference: Rob Lowe, America Ferrera, will.i.am, Yoshiki, Ellen Pompeo, Soledad O’Brien, Mel Robbins, Bryson DeChambeau (in a keynote on how Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf is using AI to transform the sport) and Jesse Eisenberg. On the political side, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is scheduled to run a session, as is Hawaii Gov. Josh Green.
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Of course, Salesforce has also roped in a batch of tech heavyweights. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Dario Amodei, CEO of AI lab Anthropic, are each scheduled to sit down with Benioff for sessions. The conference’s billing also includes high-ranking representatives from OpenAI, Waymo, HP, Docusign, Amazon, Starbucks, Time Magazine, FedEx and PepsiCo.
Matthew McConaughey, a longtime Salesforce shill, is on the billing yet again. And Bryan Johnson, the tech founder trying to dodge death, also apparently has a session — though as of Friday, it hadn’t been put on the schedule.
How does Dreamforce impact San Francisco?
For restaurants nearby the Moscone Center, Dreamforce brings the busiest days of the year. Kathy Fang, chef and owner of the Chinese restaurant Fang on Howard Street, told SFGATE that the week adds up to two or three weeks of regular business, and that it’s “all hands on deck” for her staff. This year, she said, the infrastructure for Dreamforce started going up extra early.
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FILE: A large Einstein cartoon looks out on the Dreamforce conference’s thoroughfare on Howard Street, on Sept. 12, 2023.
Stephen Council/SFGATE
“I feel each year since the pandemic, the conference has gotten larger and larger, getting closer to where it used to be prior to the pandemic,” Fang said. The Game Developers Conference and RSA Conference, a cybersecurity event, also bring lots of foot traffic and buyouts, she said, but not as much as Dreamforce.
Brian Sheehy, CEO of the hospitality group that owns downtown’s Dawn Club, Lark Bar and Local Edition, echoed Fang’s excitement. He told SFGATE that his bars started getting bookings for Dreamforce almost a full year ahead of time, and that everyone on staff looks forward to the lucrative week. Dawn Club and Lark Bar also plan to run a whiskey-tasting expo and blues music fair on the Saturday after the conference, timed to take advantage of the rare glut of visitors.
“The convention business, for so many years, we all took it for granted,” Sheehy said. “But now we see it. If there’s a convention in town, we’re all busy. If there’s not a convention in town, it’s a real struggle.”
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FILE: Dreamforce conference attendees cross the interesction of 4th and Mission in downtown San Francisco on Sept. 12, 2023.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
Last year, SF Travel estimated that Dreamforce’s local economic impact would reach nearly $93 million, combining spending by attendees, business-to-business purchases and wages. The group hadn’t worked up an estimate this year.
Dreamforce often brings a much larger police presence than usual to the streets around Yerba Buena Park, and this year, the first of Daniel Lurie’s mayoral term, looks to be no different. Cops and security guards, in the past, have shooed away people who were sleeping in the area. Benioff, on Thursday, told the New York Times that he thought President Donald Trump should send National Guard troops into San Francisco to act as police and, per the outlet, “lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers” for the conference, complaining that there aren’t enough city police officers.
“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he reportedly said. “That’s how it used to be.”
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The conference won’t affect Muni service, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Erika Kato told SFGATE. Through Sunday, Howard Street is inaccessible between Third and Fourth streets, and Fourth street will be closed between Howard and Mission streets through Thursday. The agency expects “significant traffic congestion” around the conference between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. each day.
The agency also gave a lower estimate for attendance than Salesforce spokesperson Cheyenne King’s tally of more than 45,000, with Kato writing that they expect about 30,000 people at Moscone Center.
Benioff, after last year’s conference, signed an agreement to continue hosting the conference in San Francisco through at least 2027.
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