SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Dreamforce is officially kicking off in San Francisco on Tuesday.
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More than 40,000 people have descended on San Francisco for the biggest in-person convention since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
City officials, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed, hope the gathering will give businesses – big and small – an economic lift.
"This is going to be tremendous, not to mention all the restaurants and the retail and all the businesses that are gonna benefit as a result of Dreamforce," Breed told KCBS Radio.
"Events, activities you name it," she added. "This is big for our city and we want to make sure the city shines."
The city's hotel rooms are also full and Breed said that means more tax dollars to support a range of different programs.
In addition, the convention provides a chance for visitors to see San Francisco for themselves, especially as some across the country focus on its problems, including homelessness and drugs.
The massive conference is an annual global gathering for the tech company Salesforce, which is headquartered in the city's Financial District. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he's happy to be part of San Francisco's recovery, but he knows it will take more to get downtown back to what it was.
"What makes this so difficult for San Francisco is that before the pandemic we were just doing fantastic," he explained. "So everybody was just maxing out their office space and every landlord, they just took any space even if it was held by a restaurant and made it office space. Well now post-pandemic that isn’t great when office space is not as valuable."
He also added that many of the challenges San Francisco faces are the same as what many other big cities face.
"Maybe our PR should be a little bit better because I don't think we’re that different. The only thing that we have that others don't have is the most beautiful views in the world, the most beautiful people, the history," Benioff said. "This is not our first set of challenges that we’ve had in our city and we will just have to work hard to get through them. But we have a lot of things going for us that other cities just don’t have."
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