On shipwrecks and harbors

"AI is not a solution for everything, but for the last two years, Salesforce has been pushing AI and Agentforce as the solution for everything."

The room shifts. Part of the audience squirms uncomfortably. This is True to the Core at Dreamforce '25, an annual session where Salesforce executives face unscripted questions from the community. No planted softballs, no pre-approved talking points. Just a microphone, a line of professionals waiting their turn, and Parker Harris, Salesforce Co-Founder and Slack CTO, in the hot seat.

Alon Waisman, a Salesforce Architect, is at the mic. He's not angry. He's precise.

"I come to Dreamforce to learn, and for two years, I've heard nothing but Agentforce. I really want to keep coming back... I know you're doing other things, and I want to know more about them. Flow Builder, for example. What we use every day — I can't learn about these because you won't talk about them."

Harris's response: "Dreamforce is where we need to talk about the future, and where we're going — the big things."

Minutes later, another architect approaches the mic. Chris Pifer has a different request entirely: "I'm actually going to ask for more agents. I may be the only one here!"

Same room. Same profession. Same session. Two architects on opposite sides of a transformation that most practitioners are stumbling upon.

Later, Tom Bassett doesn't ask a question. He reads a poem.

"Where is the trust?
Where is the truth?
We've built this Ohana,
we're standing with you.
We give our time, our hearts, our drive,
yet we're treated like marketers
keeping the dream alive."

He's referring to budget cuts that hit the community hard in 2025 — Certification Days reduced, Community Group Leader recognition scaled back, the Well-Architected program quietly shelved before being restored after pushback. The Salesforce Military program went dark, then returned. The deal has changed. Something is being renegotiated, in real time, between the platform and the people who built their careers on it.

One architect wants to talk about craft. Another wants more agents. A third reads a poem about broken trust. They're all describing the same moment, but we don't quite have the vocabulary to pin down what's happening to us.

An Italian philosopher who died in a fascist prison in 1937 did.

The prison notebooks

Antonio Gramsci was a Stalinist. This needs to be said early and plainly, not to discredit what follows, but because intellectual honesty matters — especially when borrowing from thinkers whose politics we don't share. He co-founded the Italian Communist Party, supported the Soviet Union, and died in 1937 after years of imprisonment under Mussolini's fascist regime. These aren't credentials that would typically resonate in enterprise software circles.

And yet.

Gramsci spent his prison years filling notebooks with observations about power, culture, and how societies transform. His most influential concept — cultural hegemony — describes how dominant groups maintain control not primarily through force, but by making their worldview feel like common sense. The powerful don't need to coerce when everyone already believes the current arrangement is natural, inevitable, even beneficial.

But Gramsci understood something deeper than how ideas become dominant. He understood how people themselves transform to accommodate new realities — and that those realities only have to be apparent, not true. The transformation is real even when the crisis that triggers it is not.