Dreamforce ran from September 15 to 17 in San Francisco, and the recaps are still coming in. Most of them lead with new names: AIforce, Koa, Claudeforce. If you sell software, one announcement matters more than the rest. It is called Hunter.
Hunter is an outbound sales agent. It researches accounts, writes outreach, and follows up. What makes it different from the AI SDR tools you have already seen is time. It runs on a new runtime that keeps a goal alive for weeks or months, instead of forgetting everything when a chat ends. It is in pilot now, and Salesforce plans general availability for November 2026.
One pilot customer, Perk, says Hunter builds 60% of its sales pipeline. That is a big number. It also comes with no close rate attached, so treat it as a signal and not as a result.
What is actually new here
We compared AI SDRs and outsourced sales teams three weeks ago, so we will skip the full debate. Three things about Hunter are worth knowing.
- It lives inside your CRM. Hunter works from the accounts, contacts and history already in Salesforce. It does not bring its own view of your market. It uses yours.
- It remembers. It keeps context across sessions, keeps plans running when records change, and takes steering from the rep. In the demo it found $340,000 of at-risk pipeline, built a task plan, read the rep's Gmail to learn their writing style and drafted an email ready to send.
- It comes with data. Apollo is the launch data partner. Its 240 million contacts and seven prospecting actions are available inside Hunter, even without an Apollo subscription.
One smaller detail says a lot. Several products that were renamed to Agentforce last year have quietly gone back to their old names, Sales Cloud among them. Salesforce now talks about AI as a layer on top of the CRM, not as a replacement for the people using it.
That matches what buyers keep telling Gartner. In a May 2026 survey, 69% of B2B buyers said they want to check AI generated insights with a real sales rep.
An agent is only as good as the CRM it reads
This is the part the keynotes skip. Hunter decides who to contact and what to say based on your records. If half your accounts have no industry, your contacts changed jobs a year ago, and nobody wrote down why the last three deals were lost, the agent will work very hard on the wrong people.
A human SDR notices when a record looks off. An agent that runs for weeks with nobody watching will not. It will just keep going.
So the useful work before November is boring work.
- Clean the account list. Remove duplicates, fill in industry and company size, and flag the accounts nobody should touch: customers in a renewal, open partner deals, competitors.
- Write your ICP down in plain words. If your team cannot agree on who a good customer is, the agent cannot either. Our SaaS sales checklist walks through it.
- Log why deals are won and lost. An agent that learns from history needs history worth learning from.
- Decide who approves what. Salesforce has said little in public about how approval thresholds work. Until it does, assume you set them yourself, and start strict.
The European part nobody talked about on stage
Dreamforce is a US event and the demos are US demos. If you sell into Europe, a few more questions come up.
- Cold email rules differ by country. GDPR allows some B2B outreach under legitimate interest, but national rules sit on top. Germany, for example, generally expects prior consent before marketing emails go to individuals. An agent that sends on its own schedule has to know which country it is writing to.
- Bought contact data needs a legal basis too. 240 million contacts sounds great until a prospect in Prague asks where you got their details. You need an answer, and you need to delete them when asked.
- The EU AI Act transparency rules apply. Since August 2, 2026, people have to know when they deal with AI in certain situations. We explained what that means for sales teams here.
- Spam filters do not care who wrote the email. An agent sending more volume from the same domains will hit the same limits we described in why cold emails go to spam.
Should a small SaaS team wait for it?
If you already run Salesforce, with a clean CRM and a clear ICP, join the queue and test Hunter on a small segment when it ships. Pick one market, one persona and a fixed trial period. Judge it on qualified meetings and on pipeline that actually closes, not on emails sent.
Watch the cost side too. Salesforce now charges Flex Credits for agentic MCP and API calls and has not published full rates yet. Budget for usage, not only for seats.
If you are not on Salesforce, or your CRM is a mess, Hunter is not your next step. Your next step is the groundwork: a defined target market, a message that works when a person sends it, and a process someone can follow. An agent speeds up what already works. It does not fix what does not.
Where we come in
This groundwork is what we do every day for European software companies. We build target lists that are clean and legal, test messaging with real people before anything gets automated, and run the outreach ourselves when you do not have the team for it. Have a look at lead generation, IT sales outsourcing, full sales cycle support and sales strategy development. If you are weighing Hunter against people, or want both, we are happy to talk it through.
Sources and further reading: Salesforce Ben on the Dreamforce 26 announcements, PPC Land on the long-horizon runtime, Apollo press release on Hunter, Gartner buyer survey, May 2026, Salesforce Hunter product page.