Salesforce After Dreamforce - How $CRM can grow beyond its own interface

George Gilbert (0:00)

This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante.

Dave Vellante (0:06)

Salesforce's next growth opportunity may come from customers spending less time in its interface and having agents do more of the work. Coming out of Dreamforce 2026, we believe that is the shift that is worth exploring.

We've seen the progression from command lines to graphical interfaces to browsers and mobile, and that's now entering another phase. An agent can generate an interface around the task inside Claude, Slack or another client. The customer no longer has to start with the applications screen. The starting point becomes a customer outcome. But generating an interface, well, that's not the same as understanding the business. This is where our system of intelligence, SOI framework comes into play. The system of engagement, SOE, connects people and agents. The system of intelligence supplies the business context. And the system of agency, the SOA, turns that understanding into action. Salesforce's larger ambition is to connect these elements through what it calls an enterprise AI harness.

The data, the business knowledge, workflows and controls that let models do useful work across systems. This goes well beyond answering questions.

The customer evidence from our good friends at Qualitate suggests an exciting opportunity for Salesforce. But the data also shows a company in transition, Qualitate's latest channel checks find that most organizations interviewed remain in Agentforce pilot or proofs of concept.

Yet among customers who have modeled or experienced the financial impact of headless access, 75% expect Salesforce spending to increase, not decline. Working outside Salesforce's interface could actually mean doing more work on its platform. So that creates both an opportunity and a potential challenge. More consumption can generate more revenue, but it does not automatically generate more customer value. Pricing must make sense as these pilots scale. And if customers increasingly work through their preferred AI environment, Salesforce has to demonstrate why its business context and execution capabilities remain an essential underpinning of the customer experience. The point is, the interface can move elsewhere, meaning the next purchase may or may not stay within Salesforce. Welcome, welcome to Breaking Analysis number 327, Salesforce After Dreamforce, how CRM, the company, can grow beyond its own interface. In this episode, George Gilbert joins us to map Salesforce's post-Dreamforce direction into our system of intelligence and new AI stack framework. We combined his firsthand observations from Dreamforce with new Qualitate customer research to examine headless access, Agentforce maturity, competition from AI native agents, and the changing relationship between pricing and business outcomes. So today we explore not only the question whether or not Salesforce can sell more AI, we think it will. The real issue is can Salesforce grow beyond its own interface by becoming the system that makes AI most useful for the business. George Gilbert, once again, welcome.

George Gilbert (3:35)

Good to see you, Dave.

Dave Vellante (3:37)

You were at Dreamforce, deep inside the analyst program. You also did some cube hosting. So we're going to pick your brain on that. You always come out of these with a dot connecting sequence. So excited about that. Eugene, if you bring up the first slide, this is our AI stack framework, one that if you follow this program, you've seen many, many times.

You know, George, what we like to do, we've used this for Snowflake, we've used this for Databricks, we introduced this, I think, now a couple of years ago, and we've evolved it.

Nothing has really changed here. What's changed is we're now seeing that this framework that you developed along with Jeffrey Moore and adapted to the new AI stack, we're now starting to see the software vendor community start to roll out products that fit into this framework. So take us through briefly, you know, remind us how we should think about this framework, and then we'll dig in to how Salesforce maps to it, and then bring in the customer data.

George Gilbert (4:41)

Okay. So at the bottom left, where it's between brown and orange, that's where we started this, building this framework, which is that's the analytic data platform, the snowflakes and data bricks of the world.

And that's where people have, customers have historically tried to aggregate their data. But despite the fact that they could put all their, all their operational data, transform it and put it into one analytic data platform, it's still silos because the cubes, essentially the way they model the data so that they can slice and dice it is aggregated and each cube is itself a silo. That's on the left side. On the right side, on the bottom are the traditional systems of record, whether it's Oracle or SAP or NetSuite or Salesforce itself. And the layer above each, governance metadata, those are the catalogs that allow the data to start making sense to both humans and agents to start making sense. The governance metadata is usually people, places, and things. It's not column names and table names. It's now human and agent readable. But to go to the next layer above where it's in green, this is the core. We keep saying it's the most important piece of real estate and enterprise software for the next 15 years. Because this is what connects general-purpose intelligence in the form of the LLM or the agent into how your business works, the physics of your business, and how that model of your business will improve over time.