At Dreamforce, business leaders say older AI models are enough

At Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, the spotlight was on the debate over AI safety and how quickly frontier models should advance. Executives from companies including Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia discussed whether development is moving too fast, while Nvidia’s Jensen Huang argued for faster progress. On the conference floor, many attendees said the bigger issue was not the future of AI but how to use the tools already available. Several business leaders said older, lowercost models are often sufficient for sales, customer service and other everyday tasks, and that many companies are still working out budgets and model choices. The article also describes how software firms are adjusting to AI’s cost structure. Companies such as Salesforce, Docusign and Nice are using model routing and a mix of frontier and openweight models to balance performance and expense, while some customers prefer to wait before adopting the newest releases.