Salesforce's annual fall conference, Dreamforce, kicks off on Tuesday with artificial intelligence as the main star, but questions loom about the conference's future.
Salesforce is riding the artificial intelligence wave that was sparked when OpenAI publicly launched its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
Earlier this year, Salesforce announced its own generative AI tool for customer relationship management, or CRM, databases called Einstein GPT. Benioff even attributed at least some of its second quarter financial results to the launch of AI-powered products.
Salesforce also launched an AI-focused venture fund in March. By June, it doubled the size of the fund to $500 million. And in August, the company participated in a megaround that invested $235 million into New York-based AI startup Hugging Face.
This is also the first Dreamforce since Bret Taylor stepped down from his role as co-CEO earlier this year. In February, Taylor revealed that he was launching his own AI company with Google veteran Clay Bavor.
On Tuesday, Salesforce CEO and chairman Marc Benioff will kick off the Dreamforce with a conversation about "the future of trusted AI" with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Other AI experts and business leaders lined up to speak during the three-day conference include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, Pano AI CEO Sonia Kastner, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Typeface CEO Abhay Parasnis, Adept AI Labs CEO David Luan and Salesforce's own head of AI Clara Shih.
On Thursday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed is expected to appear at the event's annual pitch competition, known as Dreampitch. Actress Kristen Bell and the CEO of Palo Alto-based You.com, Richard Socher, will be among the competition's judges.
Other notable speakers this year include Black-Eyed Peas member Will.i.am, film director Spike Lee, environmentalist Jane Goodall, producer and actress Viola Davis, comedian Rainn Wilson, media titan Arianna Huffington and actor Matthew McConaughey.
Earlier this year, the WSJ reported that was paying McConaughey more than $10 million a year to be a "creative adviser and TV pitchman."
On Wednesday evening, the Foo Fighters will headline the conference's annual charity concert, called Dreamfest, at Chase Center, the proceeds of which go to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals.
The conference is expected to draw 40,000 attendees in-person at Moscone Center in San Francisco, as well as "millions" of people virtually, Salesforce said.
That's on par with last year's attendance, but far from the conference's peak in 2019 when Dreamforce attracted 170,000 attendees.
San Francisco's downtown core has recovered more slowly than other major cities from the Covid-19 pandemic, due largely to continued remote work. The city's office buildings remained nearly 30% vacant in the first quarter of the year, and total market availability creeped as high as 36% in the second quarter, according to some estimates.
The city also continues to struggle with decades-long issues of chronic homelessness and open-air drug use, which have become more visible over the past several years as offices, along with vacant storefronts.
These issues have also become fodder for news headlines, and used by executives as a justification for closing stores or leaving San Francisco entirely.
Dreamforce could be the next conference to pack up and leave the city, though it still has a contract with Moscone Center for an event every year through at least 2032.
“If this Dreamforce is impacted by the current situation with homelessness and drug use it may be the last Dreamforce” held in San Francisco, Benioff told the told the San Francisco Chronicle last week. “We’re working hand in hand with the city as we always do … it’s in all of our interests for it to go well."
Overall, tourism from conferences is expected dip by 34% in 2024 before steadily recovering over the next several years.
“Since 2019, we’ve been reporting 2024 would be a more challenging year for conventions given some cancellations and it being an off year for rotational events," San Francisco Travel Association president and CEO Joe D’Alessandro said during a summit in August.
By 2025, though, SF Travel also forecasts that visitor spending will exceed 2019's record high of $9.6 billion and visitor volume will reach 2019's level of more than 26 million visitors by 2027.
Despite flat attendance over last year, Dreamforce was expected to generate around $57 million in economic impact for San Francisco this year, according to early estimates. That would be around 42% more the $40 million generated by Dreamforce last year.
On Friday, SF Travel told me that direct spending related to Dreamforce is now estimated to exceed $62 million this year with a total projected economic impact of around $89 million, and the higher spending is attributed to an increase in overnight attendance.
There are also 76,000 hotel rooms blocked out for the conference, SF Travel said, which is a slight increase from previous hotel data that showed slightly under 72,000 room nights were blocked out.
Here's a look at the highlights from last year's Dreamforce conference.
