Dreamforce attendees in San Francisco offer thoughts on AI promises, fears

Dreamforce didn't get its name by accident. It's where the brightest minds in tech come together to dream big and think forward.

We know the discussion around AI's future is enormously important. So while they are here, we wanted to see what those working on the technology think.

As protesters marched to the entrance of Dreamforce Thursday, it felt like a reminder of the broader discussion and divide taking place with artificial intelligence and its future.

So we decided to take that discussion to those working on its future, Dreamforce attendees, and ask two simple questions.

The first: What's your deepest fear with AI?

"If I'm constantly using AI and I'm not really learning anything, am I still developing?" wondered Cornelia Smit.

"Deepest fear would be that we don't understand it," Nathan Bellet said.

"My deepest fear is losing my job because of it," attendee Sareena Kazla said. "I see AI developing what I already do, which is building demos."

The second question: What is AI's greatest benefit in the future?

"If you use it as a proper tool, then you actually maximize the output," Smit shared 

"Because it's a Model T moment. I've been telling people this is going to change everything. It just depends now on what," Bellet explained.

"I think bettering society as a whole," Kazla added.

One obvious consensus among those here is that San Francisco will be impacted no matter where AI takes us. Mayor Daniel Lurie is paying close attention to what's being said this week.

"I was encouraged by what I heard this week by the three companies that they all agree that there needs to be guardrails put into place," Lurie said. 

But then there are experts, like Politico tech journalist Brendan Bordelon, who wants us all to take a deep breath and remember that, at the heart of this discussion, is human bias, especially among the leaders of this industry.

"There's also a lot of concern in Silicon Valley that has been talking about this for a long time. It's almost reached a quasi-religious level," Bordelon said. "So you also have to keep in mind that some of the people building this technology may be a little bit blinkered in their views of how it's going to all play out."