Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei and Siemens CEO Busch Debate AI’s Future at Dreamforce 2026 | AI1G

Industry guiding it all right from our Slack headquarters building. We watch you every day.

We're watching it from you. It's all good karma, isn't it? And we're watching you doing an incredible job. You become the number one AI in the world. Three times larger than the nearest provider. It's been amazing to be partnered with you. It's all been very karmic and kismet and good. And one of the things I have to ask you before we get into the interview, I want to talk to you about AI Force. I want to talk to you about Cloud Force. I want to talk to you about how you're running your own business, but wow, you wrote, you know, everything from your first essay that you wrote, you know, about Loving Grace to the essay this weekend on pacing has been incredible, but give us your state of the AI industry and pacing and where your mind is right now.

Yeah, I think it's maybe easiest to explain it by an analogy. So, let's say you're running a car company and another car company, not yours, they have some kind of safety incident, right? Something goes wrong with the brakes, you know, something with the manufacturing. Now, you believe you have the best safety record in the industry. What do you do? How do you approach it? Obviously, it's very tempting to attack your competitor and say, 'These guys are unsafe. We're safe.' But I think the more responsible way to respond to it is to say, 'Hey, first of all, let's look at our own record, right? We may not have had this big high-profile incident, but I'm sure we're not perfect. Let's look at everything and we can always be better. Let's make our practices better. Let's recommit to transparency. Let's invest more in safety.' Then let's organize the rest of the industry and say, what can we do to set standards for everyone? What can we do to make everyone's standards better? And then finally, there should be an international component to it. And that's essentially the three-step plan that I laid out in the essay. The first of which we committed to and the others of which we're going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry about. And I think that's the way to lead the industry forward, to set an example to say that everyone can always be better.

Let me ask you a question, Dario. You know it's been amazing what you have been able to accomplish like I said but there are a lot of surprises also that you have gone through. So you know just tell us what has been your biggest surprise over the last decade and you know you've obviously been heads down in AI now for 10 years really in earnest. What's your biggest shock about where we are right now?

You know, it's been the pace of the progress not just of the technology but of the economic side of it. So we, you know, I formulated the scaling laws along with some of my co-founders which tell you that AI models get smarter and smarter the more compute you throw into them. And so we had a prediction of just how capable these models would be. But I think what we didn't appreciate is that it would lead to these companies growing so fast to all these incredible, you know, products that we're working together on and you've been talking about today and how quickly they would become central to everything that's going on in the world, right? I just watched the talks before that where, you know, you guys talked about MCP and co-work and Claude skills and these are all new things that people are just beginning to use, but they're being adopted so quickly because the economic value is so great. So, I've just been surprised that such a pace is possible in the business world.

Well, I'll tell you at Salesforce, we are huge co-work fans and also when I was in Europe, I met with so many customers who are co-work fans. It's incredible what you've done with the product. I noticing over your shoulder here you've got a few Salesforce alumni behind you who are helping you to run your company which

You train them well, Mark. You train them well.

Trying to do my best to help the whole industry, you know.

I measure myself by how many CEOs, CTOs, and CROs are in other companies that all came from Salesforce.

You do a fantastic job of that. No, truly, truly you do.

Thank you.

But what I want to say is this. I want to say, you know, yes, we have to keep our eye on the pace of AI. You know, it's been amazing what's happened over 10 years. No one could have written the story. Now, these interfaces are truly amazing. The demo we just saw is remarkable. I think every customer here wants to have that same interface on all of their systems. Everybody wants to unlock the trapped value. You know, what is your kind of recommendation for everyone in this room and the virtual room? Obviously you can see we have 10,000 people all over this room but 10 million joining us online, you know what actions do you want us to take?

Yeah. So, you know, I would just say when I look at the technology versus how much it has diffused, even if we freeze the technology in place, which we're not doing, pacing the frontier is not doing that at all. The technology will keep getting better. But just suppose we freeze it in place. Even if that were the case, we're making use of maybe only 5 or 10% of what the possible value of the technology is. So, I'll give you just an example that relates to what we're doing together and to the CCO you just pointed at, which is that Paul, you know, every day now he wakes up and if he wants to look at, you know, our head go-to-market prospects, he still uses Salesforce, but he uses Salesforce with Claude. He talks to Claude using Salesforce's data about, you know, what are the 10 biggest deals we're doing this week? What are the 10 deals we're most likely to lose? What are the themes in those deals? How do we win those deals? You know, just making use of all the information fluently with Claude and it's really incredible and the fraction of people who have seen this and seen that this is possible is still small compared to those who could gain utility from it. And so there is still so much diffusion left to do.

Well, we are really excited to wake everybody up at the show to show people what the possibilities are for the future, how we're going to show them that data layer, which as you know, I think is really critical, the having that grounding of the data. We've talked about that so many times, the application and semantic layer, giving the AI even more intelligence capability, the agentic layer that you've really helped pioneer, and now this incredible interface layer, and we're so excited that the first one is on co-work. Congratulations. Well done. We're going to do incredible things. You're doing a great job. Thanks for everything you're doing for the whole industry. We're so grateful to you.

Thank you for having me.

Really thrilled. Thank you so much.

All right.

And thank you for coming to Dreamforce. Please thank the Anthropic team.

And now, please welcome back from that brief intermission, Patrick Stokes. Give him a hand.

All right. Me again just for a minute. Okay, so I think you can see how special this is. And what I really want is for you all to go out and feel it. You know, Dario was right. When you start using Salesforce with an agentic interface, the amount of value that you get from Salesforce just explodes. It's an incredible experience. Okay, so we've talked about AI Force. It's time to talk for a few minutes about Agent Force. You know, Agent Force has been this incredible platform for us. I think I was the one launching it maybe two or three years ago. I've lost track of time right up on this stage. And then in that time, we have over 30,000 customers on this platform. We're doing 7 billion AWUs. We've been adding more and more to it like agent script and voice which are GA now. But you know, we've kind of learned something as we've started putting this out. This is built as a platform. So any of you can come and build your own agents. But what we learned is that building agents, it's actually kind of tricky. Building with a probabilistic system is a new muscle, is a new skill that we all have to learn. And so we wanted to solve for that. So this year we have been hard at work building out-of-the-box agents that sit on top of Agent Force that anyone in the organization can go and implement and deploy. Anyone, not just IT, but your business users as well. And that starts with agents like Hunter. Marcus talked about this a little bit. Your outbound sales agent out there responding to your leads, hunting them down and trying to turn it into real pipeline or Piper, which you're going to see in just a moment, which sits on your website, responding to questions that all of your customers might have. And then of course, we have Casey. When you need to get help, you can go see Casey right now on help.salesforce.com. You can deploy this on your own website so that your customers can get help. But your customers aren't the only ones who sometimes need help. Sometimes your employees need a little bit of help as well. And we have Page for IT service and HR service. So if your laptop breaks, you know exactly where to go. And as Mark pointed out, we're incredibly excited about our all-new customer agent, Finn, which is just an incredible agent. I hope you get down to the campground to see Finn. And now to bring Agent Force and all of these agents to life, I'm incredibly excited for her first Dreamforce mainstage appearance. I think you're going to like her. Please welcome Katie O'Neal.

Thank you, Patrick. Siemens is a global leader in industrial AI. Their technology powers buildings and factories and transportation around the world. Over the last decade, Salesforce has really become an integral part of how they run their business. And today they're driving success with Agent Force, a family of agents working together across the business. And we're going to show you these agents in action. So let's dive into a demo. We're going to start here on the Siemens website. Now Siemens, they rely on a global ecosystem of partners to bring their technology to their customers. But when one of those prospective partners arrives on the website, they could be left searching through pages, filling out static forms, and ultimately waiting for someone to get back to them. That is potential revenue slipping through the cracks. But Piper changes all that. Piper is Siemens' inbound pipeline generation agent. You can think about her like their newest employee on a single mission, converting inbound buyers into quality pipeline. Piper, she is always on. She is super easy to implement. Every customer goes live in 45 days or less. And she is working 24/7. So let's jump in. Let's engage with Piper.

Welcome back. How can I help you today?

Hi, thanks Piper. I got an email from Siemens about becoming a distribution partner. Can you tell me a little bit more about the program?

Absolutely. Based on what I know about your business, I think there could be a strong fit with Siemens' industrial automation distribution partner program. I pulled together a quick overview based on what's most relevant to your business.

How incredible is that? Piper knows who I am because I clicked through an email. She's grounded in the context of Siemens Salesforce, so she knows everything about my role and my company. Combine that with all of her knowledge of Siemens' messaging and positioning, and Piper just spun up a super personalized presentation just for me in seconds on the website. This is the dream. And you have a hot buyer and Piper is ushering them along in their journey. Now, this has piqued my interest and I do want to take it one step further.

Thanks, Piper. What would the commercial model look like for a distributor of our size?

Great question about the commercial model. It's definitely worth exploring in more detail. Let's get you in touch with a Siemens representative who can walk you through it. Go ahead and pick a time that works for you. Feel free to pick a time that works best for you.

Okay, so Piper knows that a question around commercial signals buyer intent. Combine that with my account context. Piper knows that right now is the time to bring in a seller. So she looked inside of Salesforce, saw that Ryan Smith is my aligned account executive, and in just a few clicks, I can book that time. Boom. Pipeline was just created. No forms, no waiting. Piper just generated quality pipeline for the Siemens business. That was totally incredible. Now that's one area of the business where agents are going to work. Let's expand Siemens' digital workforce. Let's talk about another agent, an entirely different area of the business. Supply chain. For Siemens, something like supplier onboarding, it is a process that can take days. A single disruption, it can cause a huge domino effect that creates production delays and it can cost a company millions. But that's what we're solving with Marshall, our operations agent. Marshall is going to take that entire onboarding period from days and bring it down to just hours. And here's how. All we have to do is give Marshall the name of a supplier and he's going to go to work in the back end. We're here in Slack, but Agent Force meets you where work already happens. So, if you work out of email or Microsoft Teams, Marshall will come find you in those channels. Now, you're watching Marshall go to work. He's doing things like collecting information. He's reviewing documents. He's even going to pull in a person when something needs human review. Now, here you're watching, he's getting through the majority of it, but if you'll notice, there's one area where he's getting stuck, and that's actually creating the supplier inside SAP. And in fact, this is where majority of AI projects hit a wall, which is actually getting your agents to work inside of back-end systems. So today we are so excited to announce new capabilities with Marshall that is going to do exactly that and let's show you. Now as Marshall jumps in these backend systems the first thing he has to do is he has to learn he has to learn this process of supplier onboarding. It is not a trivial process. So we'll give him access to an SAP sandbox. You can think about a sandbox like a classroom. It's a safe learning environment where Marshall can go through and safely learn this process without touching production. You're watching him do things like learn where to click, which fields are required. But he's not just memorizing those things. He's using LLM reasoning to really understand the business rules behind that process. So here, for example, Marshall will learn that a US supplier actually needs an additional form before they can continue onboarding. Now this whole process of learning, this is what would take a new employee weeks to learn. But Marshall, he just learned it in 90 minutes. And what does he do with all these learnings? Marshall will package them up, create a library of trusted actions, and that is where AI reasoning becomes deterministic execution. What does that mean? It means when it comes time for something like supplier onboarding, Marshall's not just improvising. Marshall is executing against the same set of trusted actions every single time. So you know you can rely on him. Okay. So we just watched Marshall learn this entire process of supplier onboarding. Let's put him to the test. Let's see him go to work. Now in this next part of the demo, I do want to direct our attention over to Gus, our demo driver. Gus, give everyone in the audience a quick wave for me. But actually, Gus, wave with both hands because look at this. Gus is actually completely hands-free in this demo. Gus is enjoying his cup of coffee while Marshall goes to work. Look at this. This is incredible. Marshall is in SAP. Marshall is updating every single field completely autonomously. This is incredible. This is where agents are at their best. Repeatable work that has to be done right every single time. Now, back over in Slack, all your employees are going to see is that this supplier has now just been created, has been onboarded, and is activated. And if something inside SAP changes, no problem. Marshall will go back into that classroom. He's going to relearn and adapt. And that is trusted process automation. That is how Siemens is putting agents to work across their business. That's how they're using Marshall to take supplier onboarding from days down to just hours. That is how they're using Piper to generate quality pipeline. This is Agent Force. This is your digital workforce. We're here at Dreamforce. We are so excited for you to get hands-on. We want you to walk away with your own family of agents. So, come find us in the learning labs. And for now, Mark, I will pass it back over to you.

All right. How about a huge hand for Katie? Great job, Katie. Well done. Great demo. Well done. Fantastic. Amazing. Katie came from our Qualified acquisition. Qualified team, stand up and take a hand. Qualified team Piper, amazing what you have done. Built Piper, great job. Great. Great job. Okay, my friend has come from Munich, Germany. I was just with him. Welcome, Roland. Fantastic. Great. Nice to have somebody my size here.

Yeah. Yeah. People don't know my family's from Boden and Bavaria. So, you know, we have a lot of fun together. We've known each other for a long time. We're so grateful to have you as part of a Salesforce Ohana and your first Dreamforce, isn't that right? Amazing.

It is.

What's your initial experience at Dreamforce so far?

I love it. You throw a great party. Great people. And Katie, thank you very much. Great job. And I'm so happy to learn that you share talent.

Great. Well, we're just starting. We're just starting.

We're just starting now. Okay, Roland, give us your vision because you understand, you know, these deterministic layers, but also these probabilistic layers, how AI works in the enterprise. You're building products yourself. Siemens is an incredible company. You know, you built some of the best, most exciting technology across every industry, whether it's industrial or even healthcare or energy. It's amazing. I think you know all of us at some time of our life have found ourselves in a Siemens CT scan or seeing how you huge energy plant that you have built. It's amazing what your company does. So give us your vision of how you see this technology impacting Siemens.

Well, I mean you said it, we are building the real stuff. Every third manufacturing line in the world is automated with Siemens technology. Every other electron is touched by Siemens technology or controlled by it and so on. So in short what we do is we combine the real and the digital world in the age of AI. So we build the real thing, this is the hardware part, but we also build digital twins of the real world which behave really like the real thing. So combining that is the huge potential and AI is accelerating. So we talk about industrial AI and you phrased it perfectly. This is bringing a probabilistic technology into a deterministic world. Hallucination does not really work on the shop floor as you can imagine. So and that's the exciting part about the journey which we started. I mean you know that Salesforce is the backbone for how we serve our customers in selling, in maintenance service and the like and onboarding of, I mean we have 120,000 suppliers, 65,000 partners and we count. So that's huge but we don't stop there. So you are the single source of truth for customer, the enterprise AI. With our technology, with Teamcenter, this is the backbone for products, the parts in it, instructions for manufacturing, for service, the single source of truth of the product. Now we bring that together. So the enterprise AI meets industrial AI and that helps really our sales guys, our service guys to serve our customers much much faster and better. We basically give a virtual engineer next to each sales rep or service rep. And that's just the start. I mean Dario said it even if the models would not change from now on. I mean they didn't see most of the industrial data yet and this is really where the real world kicks in and makes a big difference.

Yeah, that is a key point. I want to ask you to that point. You and I have talked for years and years because you helped us build this amazing children's hospital which is a few blocks away from here. So, one of the things we've always thought about is the CT scanner is going to be not just kind of, you know, it's going to be, I would say, more intelligence, more of a diagnostic device. It hasn't exactly happened, right? Radiologists are still in the loop. Even though Geoffrey Hinton said in 1995, we're not going to have any more radiologists. We have more radiologists today than ever. Tell us how is AI and that world coming together? I know you've thought about this exhaustively.

Yeah. So the thing about AI is you come from a world where you just have a co-pilot somehow helping you to really embedding AI technology really deeply in your workflow. You have to rethink the way how you design products, how you produce them and how you operate them deeply. It changes user interface. I mean you said it perfectly. It changed everything and the whole process behind the big thing in that particular case is data fusion because currently, I mean, we're already there to analyze CT/MR scanners with an AI agent to really help the doctor. The doctor is obviously finally in the loop but if you fuse data from blood diagnostics, from your scans, even the medication you get, this makes the way how you treat people or how you actually act before a disease strikes, bringing them completely to the next level. By the way, eating habits does its own.

I want to ask you one critical question is this, Roland, when you think about your vision for your company or for all your companies you have such a portfolio of companies now, over the next year, call it, what's the biggest change you think that your customers will begin to see?

They will see that a new superpower which is a channel purpose technology will change everything what we do, the way how we design products, the way how we manufacture and the way how we use them. And that happens, Dario said it, in an unprecedented speed.

It's great to have you at Dreamforce. Roland Busch, welcome. So glad to have you. Please welcome him. Thank you so much. Great job.

Okay, Maryanne, take it away.

Thank you, Mark. We are all here at Dreamforce to answer one big question. Will AI actually work for my business? You know what is at stake? A lost customer, a missed quarter, your reputation. You know, generic AI is basically like an amazing race car with absolutely no wheels. But the Customer 360, well, that is the wheels and the steering wheel. Why? Because of all of you. You have for the last 27 years put all of your business logic, your data, your processes right inside of Salesforce. And the Customer 360 brings all of that alive. And then what we did, we took that amazing foundation that you built and we built on top of it. Our product team has been working so incredibly hard innovating every single cloud. We've completely re-energized every single business and we put agents and AI at the heart of it. Now, I know that we have 1,600 sessions, but I have nine super favorite features that I want to walk you through. So, are you ready? All righty. Let us start with sales. What's the absolute best thing about Sales Cloud? Well, it is Hunter, of course. And sorry, Patrick, but the best part of Hunter is not just that it's all new and it is an outbound sales agent. It's that it is built with your data vendors included. What does that mean? Yes, ZoomInfo, Demandbase, Apollo, your data vendors are built right in. That is amazing. This agent has everything. But I am now on Service Cloud and my family, well, we are kicking butt because SaaS is going live in October. Now, this person is looking at me wondering why we're putting cats in the ocean. Contact center as a service is important because it's your contact center. It is your telephony. It is your CRM as one system. Every single person needs this. Why? Because you don't want to think about technology. You want to be focused on your customers. I think I hear angels singing no more tool stitching ever again. And what about marketing? Well, marketing is crushing it. And their all-new campaign agent, it actually builds and iterates campaigns by itself. Now, how many marketers love manually building 500 campaigns in the middle of the night before Dreamforce? Yay. No one. So, I am sorry. The midnight snack business is now officially closed. Marketing Cloud is really taking us to the agentic future. And the new Commerce Cloud, well, it has a shopper agent, which frankly is way too good. I had one conversation and then I ended up with 10 outfits for this keynote because it looked at the shipping information, the inventory. It even made me backups for what I was going to buy. So, I said yes to the dress and then to the suit and then to another dress. Thank you, Commerce Cloud. And if anybody here has people who are fixing things, physical things out in the field, well, you know that field service is where it's at. And the best thing about field service is voice to text. Now, who loves taking off their gloves, using greasy fingers, touching a phone while you are doing the job? Well, with voice to text, you have no hands that you need to use. You can do more paperwork without your hands. You just speak and the form literally fills itself. That is amazing. Okay, now hold up. We just launched HR Service last year here at Dreamforce. I happen to run this business, so I'm not allowed to pick favorite children, but if I was, my favorite child would be our brand new CMDB. Why? Every single IT organization knows that the CMDB, it is the brains of your organization. It's how you map your asset. And ours, well, it even updates itself. You're welcome. And with Revenue Cloud, what's Revenue Cloud? Well, of course, it's quote to cash. And the all-new renewals agent, I absolutely love that it automatically figures out what accounts you need to go reach out to, and it even does the upsell. That is amazing. Anyone found their favorites yet? Keep watching because now we have Tableau. Tableau gives you a semantic understanding of your entire business that's live for your teams and your agents. And what is even better than that? Well, proactive intelligence is better than that. Who wants to know the story without even having to ask for it? Thank you, please. And then there's Industries. Every single one of us, we run our business inside of an industry. There are regulations that maybe aren't just ours, but our regulators. The Industries team is amazing. They have packed all of that into industry. So that know-how is built into Salesforce. You can do what you want and make sure it is compliant every single time. And I'm going to steal this phrase from Miguel, but we have an embarrassment of riches. There are over 500 agents and actions built right in every single industry, every single sector. So, if you were wondering, dive right in today. You just saw the amazing reimagined Customer 360. It is on fire. This is amazing. So, as you can tell, I'm a little obsessed with product, but what I love more than product is I love the people I get to work with. So, Rohan, can you stand up? Rohan just joined us. He is our new president of platform and engineering. This is his first Dreamforce. Everyone, thank you. Marianne, can you tell us what you're working on? I've heard you have an amazing announcement for us.

Oh my god, it's amazing. You know, for the last 3 months, you know, I've traveled around the world, you know, met a lot of customers and one consistent piece of feedback that I've heard from everyone is that they want a choice for AI. Awesome. They essentially want to pick the AI model which is best in terms of price performance for the outcome that they're seeking. That's awesome. And given that feedback, I'm so excited. Are you guys excited to introduce CoR, Salesforce's first CRM reasoning model for Customer 360? You know, it's interesting. You just step back and think about 27 years of product innovation in CRM, deep understanding of the customer scenarios and almost a decade plus of AI and data research. All that learning and all that value has gone into CoR. You know, CoR is designed to support long-running agents that execute multiple tasks and complete complex outcomes. So, think about a sales agent that's trying to figure out the next best step to take to actually pursue a complicated but a very valuable sales opportunity. CoR can help with that. Think about a service agent that's actually figuring out the next best step to take to handle a complicated customer case, a customer support case to get the customer to the right place. CoR can help with that. You know, as a part of designing CoR, our commitment to customer trust has always been maintained. It's something that's extremely important to Salesforce. CoR has always been trained just on synthetic data built and extending NeMo from NVIDIA, another phenomenal company, right? And the reason that's important is because our commitment to customer trust has been carried forward. Not a single byte of customer data was used. We can't wait to see what you build with it. And to talk about where we're going with this incredible partnership, let me hand it over to Mark.

All right, great job. Please welcome Rohan Kumar. We're so excited to have you, Rohan, as our new president of engineering and platform, but we are especially welcome. Please welcome Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, is here. Jensen. WOOHOO. Great to have you, Jensen. Thank you for being here.

Jensen, we can do that. Do you want to?

Yeah, let's walk here. Come on. Let's walk and talk. I'll do... I'm going to do the training myself.

You have to take a left now.

So, Jensen, congratulations on everything that you are doing for the whole industry. The GPU, it's a huge success. It's transformed everything. You're sitting next to David Kirk on our board who I think was at NVIDIA for a while as well.

And now give us your vision of the future. You know, where are we going? Because of course you've got these critical components. You've got the GPU and now you've got the number one open-source platform in the world that companies like ours can fine-tune. You know, how do you think this can go ahead? We can go this right here. Do this.

And so, first of all, as you know, we're going through a new industrial revolution. Just as a few hundred years ago...

With electricity, we could power everything. With the internet, we can find... Now...

With internet, you can find anything. And now with artificial intelligence as an infrastructure layer across the planet, we can know everything and do anything. And so this layer... this layer... you want to go this way.

Yeah. This is good.