Salesforce Dreamforce Attendees Say Most Companies Are Still Catching Up on AI

According to CNBC, Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week centered on the gap between AI hype and what many customers can actually use today, even as CEO Marc Benioff hosted keynote conversations with the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang urged frontier labs to move quickly, while attendees said many companies are still struggling to keep up with current AI tools and are weighing whether to use models from Anthropic or OpenAI, or cheaper open-source alternatives. Salesforce shares have fallen 8% this year, even after a sharp August rally, and the company introduced "Claudeforce" on its last earnings call in August as a way for salespeople to access data from inside Anthropic's Claude chatbot. Anthropic's booth drew heavy traffic at the event, and several software executives said older and cheaper models are already sufficient for many sales and customer service tasks. Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen said the company uses frontier and open-weight models and routes requests to the most cost-effective AI system, while Nice chief innovation officer Tim Sanders said cloud software firms must adapt to a token-based economy that could pressure margins.