Dreamforce 2026: The Era of the Agentic Enterprise

This IDC Market Perspective describes how Dreamforce 2025 (held October 14-16) marked Salesforce's pivot from Customer 360 to Agentforce 360, positioning the company as an agentic platform rather than a cloud-first CRM. The company declared the "end of the cloud era," recasting each former cloud as an Agentforce module (Sales, Marketing, Service, Field Service, Revenue, Commerce, IT Service, and Industry Clouds), while Slack is reframed as the Agentic Operating System and conversational UX. Partnerships with OpenAI, Stripe, Anthropic, and Google broaden model and commerce reach; Slack's role as collaborative UX places it at the center of agent-driven work. Data 360 must prove value beyond existing warehouses by operationalizing context for agents, while suppliers align tech stacks and skills to Agentforce's deterministic plus agentic pattern.Agentforce 360 is a pragmatic step toward enterprise-ready agents, balancing nondeterministic intelligence with governed, predictable execution across the customer life cycle."Dreamforce 2025 is Salesforce's line in the sand moment: Agentforce 360 reframes Salesforce from system of record CRM to an agentic AI operating platform, with Slack as the front door and Data 360 as the spine," says Heather Hershey, research director of AI-Enabled Digital Commerce at IDC. "Salesforce has placed a major bet on the future of the emerging agentic enterprise, one in which intelligent context starts to operationalize the 'messy middle' - the 80% of repetitive business processes locked in unstructured data and outdated flows - turning unstructured data into opportunities for agentic decision autonomy with human-supervised execution."