Salesforce is scaling back the number of in-person attendees at its upcoming Dreamforce event and mandating stringent health protocols. It's a bid to return the signature conference to its pre-pandemic glory as COVID-19 continues its resurgence across the U.S.
While the company previously planned to have thousands of individuals attend events in multiple cities, Salesforce will now be limiting it to "hundreds of Trailblazers for an in-person, invite-only experience in San Francisco" in September, Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Franklin wrote in a Wednesday post. Vaccinations and "sequential testing" will also be required.
The post did not address the fate of the planned in-person events in New York, Paris and London, suggesting those gatherings are canceled. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The reduced cap is still a far cry from the roughly 170,000 attendees who would descend upon downtown San Francisco for Dreamforce in year's past, but even a highly scaled-back event is a step above the all-virtual conferences of the past year.
For Salesforce, however, that may not be the worst situation. The company is using Dreamforce as a way to showcase "Salesforce+," a new marketing website that will offer streaming content from the software giant.
Climate TRACE's data show emissions at the facility-level.Image: Climate TRACE