Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, speaks during a keynote at the Dreamforce 2023 conference in San Francisco on September 12, 2023.
Marlena Sloss | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Foreclosure announced announced Tuesday that its annual Dreamforce conference for customers and partners will continue to be held in San Francisco in 2024.
The hometown commitment comes months after co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff told the San Francisco Chronicle that Dreamforce 2023 may be the last in the city. Some other tech companies, such as Google and Oracle, have decided to move their events elsewhere amid rising concerns about homelessness, drug use and theft in parts of the city.
“We signed a comprehensive agreement with the city that outlined the key elements we knew we needed!” Benioff told CNBC in a text message. The event will take place from September 17th to 19th.
The agreement runs only through 2024, consistent with Salesforce’s typical practice of telling San Francisco its plans a year later, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are confidential.
Before Salesforce announced its intention to stay in San Francisco, it wanted to make sure it could rely on the city to maintain a large enough police presence in the area and to keep sidewalks sufficiently clean, the person said.
Dreamforce attracted around 40,000 visitors this year, and Benioff pointed for cleaning sidewalks and a general feeling of safety. Police officers and others reportedly urged those without shelter to emigrate elsewhere. The crowd was significantly smaller than in 2019, when 171,000 people took part.
Led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other guests, this year’s event was expected to generate over $89 million in economic activity.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed thanked Benioff in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, with a photo of the two in Golden State Warriors basketball gear.
Benioff said on X that San Francisco is “now the AI capital of the world.” It is home to OpenAI and other notable artificial intelligence startups such as Adept AI and Anthropic. Salesforce used this year’s Dreamforce conference to showcase AI capabilities that integrate with technologies from Anthropic and OpenAI.
San Francisco reported 620 accidental drug overdose deaths in 2022, down from 640 in 2021 and 725 in 2020. As of Feb. 23, 2022, there were 7,754 homeless people in the city, down from 8,035 on Jan. 24, 2019, municipal data showed . Banana Republic, Nordstrom and Whole Foods have closed downtown locations in recent months, adding to concerns.
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