Dreamforce 2025 kicked off with a message of reinvention: not only of Salesforce’s platform, but of the enterprise itself. In his keynote and exclusive media/analyst Q&A, CEO Marc Benioff framed the future of Salesforce around the Agentic Enterprise: one built on domain-specific AI agents, orchestrated across business functions, and operating within a secure, data-governed framework.
Backed by major product updates and expanded partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, Salesforce’s announcements this year were significant, particularly for regulated industries like financial services, wealth management, and healthcare.
From CRM to Agentic Enterprise
Benioff described Salesforce’s shift from a traditional CRM suite to an AI-native enterprise orchestration layer. At the heart of this evolution is Agentforce 360, a new platform that allows customers to build and manage intelligent agents tailored to their organization’s workflows. These agents go far beyond chatbots: they interact with enterprise data, reason within business logic, and take real action (e.g., update a case, trigger a workflow, personalize an offer). Crucially, all of this is done within Salesforce’s “trust boundary,” which prioritizes security, compliance, and explainability.
Benioff challenged attendees to consider how AI will change their organizations over the next five years - not just in tools, but in people, processes, and products.
Key Product Announcements
Salesforce introduced several updates to operationalize AI across its platform:
- Einstein Copilot Studio: A no-code/low-code tool to build secure, compliant AI agents embedded in existing workflows.
- Agentforce Commerce Protocol: Enables instant checkout and intelligent commerce journeys within third-party platforms like ChatGPT.
- Salesforce Data Cloud Enhancements: Enriches agents with real-time, harmonized data across clouds and systems of record.
- Agent Orchestration: Coordination across agents to ensure seamless execution across business functions (e.g., sales to service to support).
These features are designed to help enterprises transition from siloed automation to coordinated intelligence, which is an increasingly important distinction for firms in highly regulated environments.
Trusted AI for Regulated Industries: Salesforce + Anthropic
In a major announcement, Salesforce and Anthropic expanded their partnership to bring trusted generative AI to regulated and data-sensitive industries, including financial services.
Key highlights:
- Claude, Anthropic’s LLM, is now a foundational model for Agentforce 360 and can be designated as the preferred model for financial services, life sciences, and cybersecurity use cases.
- Anthropic becomes the first LLM provider fully inside Salesforce’s trust boundary, with Claude running inside Salesforce’s virtual private cloud helping institutions maintain compliance with data privacy and model governance standards.
- The two companies will co-develop industry-specific solutions, beginning with financial services, and plan deep integrations into Slack and other Salesforce environments.
For firms governed by strict data policies (e.g., FINRA, GDPR, HIPAA), this architecture provides a blueprint for secure AI adoption without having to fine-tune or host models themselves.
OpenAI + Salesforce: Embedding Enterprise Intelligence
Salesforce also unveiled an expanded strategic partnership with OpenAI, aimed at building a new generation of consumer and employee experiences via Agentforce 360.
New integrations include:
- Agentforce Apps in ChatGPT: Enables users to query Salesforce data (CRM, Tableau, etc.) directly within ChatGPT.
- Instant Checkout via Agentforce Commerce: Lets customers complete transactions inside ChatGPT, with full enterprise control.
- Slack + ChatGPT/Codex: Brings OpenAI’s natural language and coding agents directly into Slack, enabling task automation, conversation summarization, and real-time content generation.
- Preferred LLM status: OpenAI is now available as a default model option for Salesforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine and Prompt Builder.
This gives Salesforce customers model choice with governance. They can select Claude or GPT based on business needs, while maintaining control of data flow and usage.
Agentic AI in Wealth Management
Salesforce also showcased its investment in wealth management-specific agentic use cases within Financial Services Cloud. These solutions aim to modernize how firms scale personalization, optimize compliance, and reduce operational drag.
Highlighted applications include:
- Client Onboarding Agents: Automate data intake, risk profiling, and document collection.
- Portfolio Insight Agents: Proactively surface investment ideas, risk alerts, and performance trends tailored to client preferences.
- Service Agents: Answer client questions instantly (e.g., “What’s my account balance?” or “When will my statement arrive?”) using real-time integration with back-office systems.
- Orchestrated Workflows: Coordinate across service, compliance, and operations to ensure auditability and regulatory alignment.
These tools are designed not to replace advisors, but to extend their capacity by surfacing relevant data and reducing manual steps — in line with the “AI as copilot” vision many wealth firms are beginning to adopt.
Media & Analyst Q&A: Vision and Competitive Positioning
In a lively Q&A session with analysts and journalists, Benioff was asked about competition from hyperscalers and LLM-native startups like OpenAI. His response: Salesforce isn’t trying to out-model the model builders - it’s building the infrastructure that allows enterprises to consume AI responsibly.
“Our customers don’t want to DIY their AI,” Benioff said. “They want secure, trusted applications that solve real problems.”
Salesforce executives stressed that the enterprise challenge isn’t just intelligence - it’s integration, orchestration, and trust. That’s where Salesforce is investing: in the platforms that connect AI to core systems, support auditability, and allow for flexible deployment based on customer needs.
Benioff’s parting call was to listen closely to customer stories: “What will your business look like five years from now? How will agents transform your offerings, your operations, and your leadership?”
For financial institutions, those are not hypothetical questions: they are urgent strategic ones.
Final Thoughts
Dreamforce 2025 made clear that Salesforce is moving beyond CRM and into the AI infrastructure space, not as a model maker, but as an enterprise AI orchestrator.
For wealth management specifically, Dreamforce 2025 highlighted Salesforce’s push to make AI both powerful and trustworthy for regulated industries like wealth management. Agentic AI isn’t about replacing financial advisors but empowering them, helping deliver faster, personalized service while maintaining compliance.
The future advisor will rely on AI to scale their impact and deepen client relationships, but success depends on strong data, enterprise coordination, and clear governance. Salesforce’s platform and partnerships position it well to help firms navigate this evolving landscape. As AI adoption in financial services accelerates, the combination of governance-ready models, embedded workflows, and multi-agent coordination could prove to be a durable advantage.
