For the second year in a row, Dreamforce has shifted from an event that fills every hotel room and Airbnb in the San Francisco Bay Area to a digital extravaganza with millions of online viewers.
The world has changed, and Dreamforce has changed with it. Dreamforce 2020 was held in December, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We completely reimagined Dreamforce as fully digital, for anyone from anywhere. We put up an outdoor stage in Salesforce Park, adjacent to the San Francisco Salesforce Tower, with Marc Benioff, Bret Taylor and a handful of other socially-distanced executives sharing the Dreamforce news virtually, to a global audience.
Sharing our vision: safety protocols, technology help Trailblazers gather for Dreamforce ‘21
Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff addresses Dreamforce attendees on September 21 2021 in San Francisco. 
Sarah Franklin, Salesforce’s Chief Marketing Officer (R) and a keynote speaker, meets Trailblazers at Dreamforce 2021 
The entrance to Dreamforce International Park on Howard Street in San Francisco, the venue for this year’s Dreamforce event.
Today, with vaccines, sequential testing and other safety protocols, a thousand Trailblazers were able to gather at the outdoor Dreamforce International Park on Howard St. in downtown San Francisco for the Dreamforce keynote and other activities. More than 100,000 Trailblazers also tuned in on Salesforce+ to watch the keynote and access 150 virtual sessions.
While the Dreamforce keynote isn’t being delivered in a 10,000 seat hall at Moscone Center, it continues to provide a look at new product innovations, how customers are transforming with Customer 360, and how to make the world a better place. And of course, this year’s event features special guest appearances by the likes of Metallica, the Foo Fighters, Lionel Ritchie, and Jason Sudeikis, also known as Ted Lasso.
This is a time when we share our vision for the future — in this case, our vision for helping our customers succeed in a world undergoing unprecedented transformation and facing several urgent crises.
In his keynote Marc outlined multiple challenges that impact everyone on the planet and shared Salesforce’s vision of the Trusted Enterprise. Many organizations have not yet started to reckon with the challenges ahead. We face multiple crises, all happening all at once, that must be addressed for organizations to become Trusted Enterprises.
The world is facing multiple crises
Of course, we’re in a pandemic crisis. COVID-19 and the Delta variant won’t likely be the last biological threat that impacts our lives. We are living in a pandemic era, and we’re all adjusting to a new normal.
We’re in a sustainability crisis. The effects of climate change are all around us. Millions of people will continue to suffer losses from catastrophic droughts, hurricanes, fires, extreme temperatures, and floods. Since the beginning of July, fires have consumed large areas in North America, Europe, and Russia. Flooding has overwhelmed cities around the world, from Western Europe to New Orleans to New York City. Our oceans are warmer than ever, and our atmosphere has more carbon than ever. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that limiting the temperature rise to 1.5°C, a goal of the Paris Agreement, may be out of reach.
The pandemic has produced an accompanying workforce crisis. We’re still mostly not in our offices anymore, working in our homes worldwide. Many companies indicate that only 15% of their employees are coming back to the office, and are struggling to adapt to this new normal. There is both the Great Resignation and the Great Relocation, with many workers leaving their jobs, moving to new cities in search of more flexibility and balance in their work life.
We’re in an ongoing inequality crisis, with widening inequities in pay, education, healthcare, and justice systems. The pandemic, as well as climate change, are disproportionately impacting the more vulnerable populations. During the pandemic, women are nearly twice as likely to lose their job than men. The less developed countries don’t have sufficient access to Covid vaccines, which is prolonging this pandemic and exposing those countries to even more hardship.
Finally, we’re in a trust crisis. Around the world, people have less trust than ever in most institutions. Social media has connected us but it has also made it difficult to know what to believe. The level of mistrust in everything from our politics and climate change to education and the pandemic has been supercharged.
The Trusted Enterprise is the Salesforce playbook for how business, governments or any organization can navigate these crises, get back to growth and improve the state of the world.
What is a Trusted Enterprise?
So, what makes a Trusted Enterprise? The Trusted Enterprise has five pillars: Trust, Customer-first, Digital HQ, Health & Safety, and Sustainability.
In a world of so much mistrust, being a Trusted Enterprise means making trust your highest value. Nothing is more important than earning the trust of our employees, our customers, our partners, and our communities.
Being a Trusted Enterprise means putting the customer first. Customers don’t want to do business with companies that they don’t trust. They want more direct, trusted relationships. That’s what Customer 360 on Hyperforce enables: building direct, trusted relations with customers with a single source of truth across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
“In a world where everyone is working from everywhere, a digital HQ is an essential building block to build a trusted enterprise.”
In a world where everyone is working from everywhere, a digital HQ is an essential building block to build a trusted enterprise. Our digital headquarters are now more important than our physical headquarters. That’s why Slack is now part of Salesforce, and Slack is being built into every Salesforce product.
Being a Trusted Enterprise means putting health and safety first. Employees, customers and communities are trusting companies to help keep them healthy and safe, both physically and mentally. That’s why testing and vaccination are important to getting people back to shared spaces safely. And it’s why everyone at Dreamforce has to have a Salesforce DreamPass verifying that they have been vaccinated and tested. Digital health passes, contact tracing, wellness assessments, and vaccine management are all part of the new Health Cloud 2.0.
Finally, being a Trusted Enterprise means protecting the planet. Trusted Enterprises are sustainable enterprises. Every company is going to have to pay attention to its carbon footprint and join the “Race to Zero,” where more companies commit to 1.5% Celsius science-based targets. Salesforce is a Net Zero Company and runs on 100% renewable energy. It’s why Salesforce built our Sustainability Cloud 2.0, which is designed to help customers track and reduce their emissions and take action through a full view of their environmental footprint.
Salesforce is investing in building an Open Exchange Ecosystem, in which customers will be able to purchase and manage high-quality carbon credits from ecopreneurs creating innovative, nature-based solutions to protect the planet; advocate for science-based climate policies; and democratize sustainability by educating teams.
Deforestation has had a disastrous impact, compromising one of nature’s natural ways to get carbon out of the atmosphere. Salesforce and the World Economic Forum created 1t.org, a global movement to restore, conserve, and grow a trillion trees over the next decade. The U.S. chapter of 1t.org has committed to 50 billion trees and Salesforce is contributing 100 million trees.
This is how Salesforce is pursuing our vision of a Trusted Enterprise. At Dreamforce, we’re welcoming companies to join us on this journey.
Watch the Dreamforce 2021 keynote with Marc Benioff here, and watch the whole of Dreamforce 2021 on Salesforce+, here.
Editor’s Note: This article references Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, which is now known as Net Zero Cloud. For the latest on Salesforce’e sustainability solutions, check out this product page. For the latest news on Salesforce’s sustainability efforts, check out this page.
