Salesforce customers are heading into Dreamforce 2026 with less interest in another round of AI demos and a sharper question in mind: where is the measurable business value?
“Nine months to a year back, it was everyone enamored by the AI and agents and agentic kind of move. Everyone wanted to get more demos, get more POCs,” Preet Takkar, global and U.S. Salesforce alliance leader at PwC, told Channel Insider. “Most of those POCs never led to any kind of a P&L impact,” whether through reducing costs, reallocating employees or driving growth.
Now, those same business leaders are reevaluating not only individual AI deployments, but also the workflows, pricing models and enterprise architectures required to turn AI investment into sustained value.
Salesforce’s value proposition is moving beyond the interface
That shift is also changing how PwC talks to customers about Salesforce itself.
Takkar pointed to Salesforce’s increasing emphasis on headless architecture as an important recognition that the company does not necessarily need to own the interface through which users interact with enterprise applications.
The interface, he said, could increasingly be voice, an AI model or another conversational layer.
Instead, Salesforce has an opportunity to position itself around the governed data, context and business logic underneath those experiences.
“Rather than trying to cling on to that interface and engagement war, Salesforce has evolved more into: how do I become that governed data and context layer and the business logic layer?” Takkar said, highlighting the benefit to customers of such a large platform provider pivoting to a more open structure for use moving forward.
Takkar expects that interoperability to remain important. Large enterprise environments increasingly involve combinations such as Salesforce and AWS, Salesforce and Anthropic, or Salesforce and OpenAI rather than a single vendor supplying every component.
Dreamforce could clarify AI pricing and headless CRM
For Takkar, one of the biggest opportunities at Dreamforce will be reducing some of the uncertainty surrounding Salesforce’s evolving AI strategy.
He expects customers to seek additional clarity on what headless Salesforce architectures mean in practice and how newer AI capabilities span business functions.
Commercial models are another major question.
Traditional per-user, per-month software licensing becomes harder to apply when the “user” interacting with Salesforce data could be another AI agent rather than a human employee.
That is pushing conversations toward consumption models based on factors such as API calls or data usage, Takkar said.
“What does consumption-based pricing really mean?” he said. Customers also want to understand committed pricing structures and whether Salesforce could eventually move closer to outcome-based models already appearing elsewhere in enterprise AI.
Those answers could prove particularly important as companies begin planning their 2027 technology investments.
Proprietary enterprise context becomes the AI advantage
Regardless of what Salesforce announces at Dreamforce, Takkar believes the more consequential AI competition will happen inside enterprises themselves.
AI, he argued, will ultimately become a standard component of business practice much like the Internet. If every company has access to increasingly capable models, simply adopting AI will not create lasting differentiation.
Instead, the advantage will come from the proprietary data, context, policies, and operating models that businesses build around it.
“The universal truth is that AI and agentic is going to become the infrastructure,” Takkar said. “But how do the organizations define their operating model and leverage their proprietary data and context to serve their customers? That’s where the edge or the differentiation would come.”
For PwC and its customers, that makes Dreamforce less about collecting another round of AI demos and more about determining how Salesforce’s technology fits into the enterprise architecture — and the business case — that comes next.
We also spoke with OSF Digital EVP and Global Head of Strategy Sean Catlin about what he’s seeing in the Salesforce ecosystem ahead of Dreamforce. His experience echoes much of what Takkar said, showing the importance of AI implementation to Salesforce’s strategic roadmap.