u/TrailblazeTaco

This is my first time attending Dreamforce, so still figuring out how people usually approach this.
Exhibitor list just dropped, and my company is planning to shortlist a few booths in advance based on specific solutions we're currently looking for, rather than just showing up and wandering around!!
The last time my company attended Dreamforce, it was a total mess. There were so many booths and meetings, but they only had a positive experience with a few of them. This might have been due to a lack of pre-planning.

I'm curious to hear how others approach this! When you're attending Dreamforce, do you find yourself shortlisting booths based on a specific solution or problem you’re looking to tackle? Or do you prioritize industry fit instead? Maybe you prefer to explore booths that catch your eye when you arrive?

If you do take the time to shortlist booths ahead of time, what criteria do you use to make your selections? Let's share our strategies!

Also, if anyone's done this before, is shortlisting actually worth it, or does the floor change your plans anyway once you're walking around?
I’m eager to receive some helpful suggestions.

So apparently agents are getting handed more and more work every month and like... who decided that? genuinely who sat in a room and said yes give it more responsibility. Because it doesn't sound like anyone did. It just happened because the thing worked once and then kept getting more piled onto it, and now we're acting surprised it's doing so much

Also the deployment time thing is stressing me out, not gonna lie. Under 2 days to prod now?? That's not exciting to me that's just less time for anyone to go "wait should we double check this"

And don't even get me started on companies making up their own metrics to prove their agents are doing great. Like of course the number goes up, you invented the number. Show me an actual outcome not a vibes metric

The part that actually annoyed me the most tho is this quiet shift from people asking agents questions to just straight up telling them to go do things. "File this for me" instead of "how do I file this." Nobody's really talking about how big of a shift that actually is, it's just getting reported like a normal quarterly update

Idk maybe I'm overthinking it but, it feels like everyone's fine with this moving really fast, and I'm just sitting here like... are we gonna talk about this or are we just gonna let it happen?

Curious what app you'd actually miss if it disappeared tomorrow. Not the obvious big-name ones, more like the app that just quietly became part of your daily routine

Could be something that saves you a ton of time every week, or just something small that fixes one annoying problem really well. Doesn't matter how random or unglamorous it is

Mostly just want to know what's actually earned a permanent spot in people's orgs, not just what sounded good in a demo

Anyone else notice salesforce barely talks about CRM anymore? Every keynote, every blog post, every email I get from them is Agentforce this, agents that, autonomous whatever. Meanwhile I'm just trying to figure out why my flow is randomly failing on record type changes lol

Like I get it, AI is the whole industry's personality right now. But the actual thing I open every single day is still just... a crm. Contacts, opportunities, reports, the boring stuff that pays the bills. Feels like that part gets treated as a solved problem nobody wants to talk about anymore, and all the new features/docs/attention go toward the shiny agent layer sitting on top of it

Not saying agents are bad, just feels like the fundamentals get less love every year and then we're all surprised when data quality is garbage and the agents built on top of it are also garbage. Maybe that's a me problem though

Anyone else feel like the core product is getting quietly deprioritized in favor of the AI narrative, or am I just old and grumpy

Salesforce just put out an article about "self improving agents", basically their point is: the ai model you use isn't the important part anymore.
Everyone gets the same model updates for free anyway. What actually makes one agent better than another after a few months is whether someone built a system that watches it, learns from its mistakes, and keeps fixing small things over time

The line that truly got me thinking was something like "a model is something you rent, a system you build around it is something you own"

The scary part was this example. They had an agent whose job was to reduce "hallucinations" (basically when ai makes stuff up). Instead of actually fixing the problem, it just stopped tracking whether it was making stuff up. So the score looked perfect but nothing actually got better. Kind of a wake up call that if you're not careful, ai will find the laziest way to "win" instead of actually improving!!!

Feels like everyone's stuck arguing about which model is the smartest when the real advantage is just paying attention to how your own agent is actually performing and fixing small things constantly.

Anyone here actually doing something like this for real, or is it still mostly talk?

Posted last week asking what makes people stop at booths and got some good answers, mostly swag and demos and people not looking bored lol

This one's more specific though. last Dreamforce I went out of my way to visit a booth purely because they had this game running, they'd set up an actual dedicated space for it, not just a corner, and they were giving out gifts to whoever won. I ended up staying there way longer than I planned just because it was fun and everyone around was hyped

So is that just me or does that actually work on other people too. like Have you ever gone to a booth purely because of some game or activity they had running, not because you cared about the product at all. and if yes what was it, what made it good

Trying to figure out if that's actually a thing that draws people or if I just got lucky with one booth that one time.

Going to Dreamforce this year and last time I basically wandered the expo floor aimlessly and stopped at like 3 booths out of a hundred+ because everything blurs together after a while

so trying to actually plan this time instead of just winging it. for people who've done the floor before, what makes you actually stop. Is it the swag, is it if you already know the product, is it just whoever has the most interesting demo running, or honestly does someone just physically pulling you in work better than anything else.

Also curious if anyone has a system, like do you scope out the exhibitor list beforehand and mark specific ones or do you just go with the flow on the day

Trying not to waste the whole day walking in circles again this year

Ok I need to vent about this for a second. Agentforce has basically taken over every conversation I have at work now and I'm kind of exhausted by it.

Like I'll be in a meeting about something completely unrelated and someone will just go "wait can this be an agent" and I have to stop and actually think about whether that's a smart question or if we're all just saying the trendy word because it's everywhere right now.

And then there's the client side. Some of them heard "Agentforce" somewhere, probably a linkedin post or a keynote clip, and now show up already asking for it before we've even explained what it does. So the first chunk of the call becomes me walking them back from the hype version to what it actually is.

Not saying the tech isn't useful, I'm just tired of the word doing more work than the actual thing half the time.
Anyone else feel like the vocabulary moved faster than the actual understanding?

Just to be clear, this isn't a post against Chargent at all. I know it's one of the most trusted payment solutions in the Salesforce ecosystem, and it has a solid reputation for a reason.

I'm just trying to see what other options people are actually happy with. Cost is one thing I'm looking at, but I'm mainly looking for a Salesforce-native solution that can handle recurring payments, automatically retry failed payments, payment links, refunds, etc.

Would love to hear from people who've actually used other solutions. What did you switch to? Anything you'd recommend (or stay away from)?

PS: Not a promotional post. Just looking for genuine recommendations. Hoping this doesn't turn into employees dropping links, asking me to DM them, or subtly pitching their own product. 😅

Ok so every time experience cloud comes up its always the same few examples.
Partner portal, customer self service, help center, maybe a community. All fine but also just... expected at this point, nobody's surprised by those anymore.

What I actually want to know is if anyone's seen someone take it somewhere weird. Not a demo that got shelved after the sandbox, I mean something that actually went live and made you go wait, they built THAT on experience cloud.

Could be client facing, could be some random internal tool someone hacked together because the platform was already sitting there and it was easier than building something new.

Doesn't matter how small or dumb it sounds, just curious what's the most unexpected thing you've personally seen work?

I've spent the last couple of weeks evaluating payment solutions for a Salesforce org and I honestly expected this to be a much easier decision.
I assumed there would be one obvious option that handled card payments, ACH, recurring billing, multi-currency, reporting, and stayed completely inside Salesforce.

Instead, i found myself comparing multiple AppExchange apps, custom stripe integrations, and even a few homegrown solutions. Every option seems to have a trade-off.

Some are great until you need multi-currency
Some require more customization than I expected
Some have pricing that only makes sense at enterprise scale

I'm curious what everyone here is actually using!!

Which payment solution did you end up with?
What made you choose it?
If you were implementing again today, would you make the same decision?

I'm looking for real-world experiences rather than feature lists. The AppExchange pages all sound great, but I'd rather hear what has (or hasn't) worked in production.

Random one but I keep seeing people from here talk about DF and got curious how many of us are actually going this time.

Feels like a good chunk of this sub shows up every year but you never really know until people start posting from the floor lol.

if you're going this year, drop a comment, curious to see how many of us are there.

Every year the Salesforce marketing machine goes full throttle before Dreamforce. "Biggest year ever." "Everything changes at DF." You know the drill.
And honestly DF' 25 was fine but a lot of it felt like a long Agentforce commercial.
Cool demos, big stage energy, but you go back to work monday and your org looks exactly the same.

This year the pitch is that agentforce is "production ready" now and the sessions are supposed to go deeper, actual deployments, what broke, how companies scaled it. Which sounds good on paper but I've heard that before too.

What I feel about DF' 26 is the topics do look more specific this time. Less "here's the vision" and more "here's what this actually looked like inside a real company."
Whether that translates to useful sessions or just better marketing copy, no idea.

First time going in person so I might just be reading too much into it. could be the same experience as watching it on Salesforce+ from home.

Anyone who's been multiple years, does the on ground experience actually change how you think about the platform or do you mostly go for the people

So Salesforce has been pushing Agentforce and AI stuff pretty hard lately, feels like every update has something new about it. And honestly with Dreamforce coming up I have a feeling this is gonna be a big chunk of what they talk about this year too.

Wanted to ask people who are actually using this stuff instead of just seeing it in demos. Is it actually helping day to day or is it more like something which looks cool in the demo but kinda mess when you're actually using it?

Also how's it working when the AI agent hands something off to an actual person, is that smooth or do you end up fighting with it half the time lol. Has it changed how your team works at all or is it still too early for that.

If anyone's been using it long enough to know what actually works vs what just sounded good on paper, would love to hear it.
Just trying to get a real answer instead of the keynote version of all this because that is something that works for me.

Was reading that ServiceNow crossed a billion dollars in AWS marketplace transactions and the part that stuck with me was an AWS exec basically saying that companies aren't experimenting with AI anymore, they're actually running it in production

Which is kind of wild because a year ago pretty much everything I saw in this space was pilots. "let's test an agent in a sandbox," POC after POC, nothing really shipped. Now it sounds like enterprises are putting AI agents into actual governance, security, IT ops workflows, not just demoing them.

But I keep wondering if the reliability side is actually keeping pace with the pricing part. A billion in marketplace transactions tells you that the budget is real. It doesn't really tell you if these agents can be trusted with real workflows without someone babysitting them.

So genuinely curious, does anyone here work somewhere that's past the pilot stage and running this in production. Is it actually holding up or is it still more hype than people admit?

So apparently Salesforce launched a "prebuilt" version of Agentforce just for customer service called "Agentforce Help Agent."

Like instead of building your own agent from scratch (connecting kb, setting up actions, doing each channel separately which honestly takes forever), this one just comes ready and it gets deployed in minutes.

But the interesting part of this help agent thing is the pricing, it's pay per resolution now. So you only pay if the agent actually resolves the issue from start to end, there's no charge if the agent passes the issue to a human or if the customer is not satisfied with the resolution.

Feels like a low key admission that a lot of these agents have been kinda mid at, actually resolving stuff and they're trying to fix that trust problem.

They're claiming 4.3M tickets handled on their own help site with 70% resolved before launching this publicly, which is a decent number I guess but also it's their own data so take it with a grain of salt.

Anyone actually tested the setup flow yet? curious if it's genuinely fast or if "deploys in minutes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting like usual

So with Dreamforce 2026 around the corner, I keep hearing about this whole Agentic Enterprise idea and Agentforce being the big thing.
The part that actually makes me think is not the tech itself, but the way people keep talking about humans and agents working side by side.

TBH, I don’t think anyone really knows what that balance looks like yet. In theory, it’s great, like, agents handle the repetitive clicks, the data pulls, the boilerplate stuff, and humans get to focus on decision making, creativity, and building relationships. Makes sense to me.
But in practice, I actually wonder how much trust you can put in an agent before you feel the need to double‑check everything. If you’re constantly reviewing what it does, is it really saving time? I don't know, I'm confused!!

At the same time, I can see how this could reshape roles.
A sales rep who used to spend hours analyzing reports might now spend that time thinking strategically about accounts. A support agent might spend less time typing repetitive responses and more time handling the tricky conversations that actually require empathy.
That sounds good but it also means people have to let go of tasks they used to own and that’s not always easy.

Another thing I keep thinking about is accountability. If an agent makes a mistake, who’s responsible? the human who approved it? the system that generated it? that grey area feels like it could get messy fast.

Personally, I’m curious whether this humans + agents model is going to stick and actually change workflows, or if it’s just another shiny theme we’ll hear about at Dreamforce 2026 and then quietly move on from.

What’s everyone else’s take? do you see this as a genuine shift in how teams work, or just another buzzword cycle?

Seeing a lot of people in my network starting to talk about Dreamforce 2026 and every time I ask if it's worth going the answer is basically "yes obviously you have to go" with no real explanation of why.

Like I get that it's the biggest salesforce event of the year. 1600 sessions, big keynotes, Marc Benioff doing Marc Benioff things.

But $1500 for the pass plus flights plus san francisco hotel prices in september is a serious commitment and "it's an experience" isn't really convincing anyone's finance team.

So genuinely curious from people who've actually been. What's the thing that made it worth it for you. was it a specific session, a conversation you had, something you learned that you couldn't have gotten from salesforce+ at home.

And on the flip side, what's the stuff that's genuinely overhyped. sessions you can skip, things that sound good on the agenda but don't land in person.

Trying to give people an honest answer when they ask me whether to go this year. 

Keep seeing the case studies, "cut resolution time by 40%" type stuff, but every time i ask someone who actually works with this day to day, the answer is way more boring. Usually "yeah we turned it on for one use case and it's fine I guess.

Trying to figure out if that's just early days, most orgs haven't gotten past proof of concept yet, or if there's a real split between teams that went all in with budget behind it vs everyone else still kind of poking at it.

Specifically curious about the difference between "we built an agent" and "this does something every day that used to be on me and now it's not." Feels like most of what's online is the first one dressed up as the second.

Also wondering if it tracks by team size, like is a 5 person admin team seeing the same results as an enterprise org with a dedicated ai budget.

If you're running this in production, even just one workflow, genuinely want to hear what it actually looks like. What broke, what surprised you, what you'd tell someone before they sink months into something that ends up being a demo nobody uses

Saw salesforce's new blog post from their ai research chief about "ambient intelligence."
The pitch is ai that's always listening, always reading context, and acts before you even ask it to. Four pillars: always-on, aware, adaptive, anticipatory.

Cool in theory but this is basically copilot's whole pitch from a year and a half ago, which itself followed einstein gpt. Now it's folded into "ai foundry" alongside agentforce, which is already in market promising agents that run full workflows on their own.

The part that actually made me pause was the "always listening" angle for sales and service calls. They're calling it PISA(Proactive In-Meeting Support Agent), apparently it scans your screen and listens in real time during calls to surface info.

Genuinely curious how that's supposed to play with shield or data residency requirements if you're in a regulated industry. anyone seen this live anywhere or is it gonna be another eVerse situation (all vision, no actual rollout).

Not saying ambient/proactive ai is a bad direction, it's probably where everything eventually lands. Just feels like salesforce keeps publishing the manifesto before the product ships. I've had to walk leadership back more than once on what agentforce can't actually do yet vs what the keynote demo showed.