I'm standing in the middle of the floor, surrounded by organized chaos. Somewhere to my left, an arcade-style tapping game is chirping through its win sound for the third time in two minutes. Behind me, a group of attendees is laughing at something on a screen. And right in front of me, someone walks out of a storefront that looks like a scene from the Heathrow airport, and declares, "Oh, that's really cool."
Welcome to Salesforce Connections
Back at Dreamforce 2025, our team built Agentforce City: a sprawling, immersive world of 17+ customer storefronts that made Salesforce's AI platform feel tangible. Most trade show builds are temporary by default. We designed this one to last, to move, to come back. Months later, at Salesforce Connections 2026 in Chicago, three of those storefronts did exactly that. And two entirely new spaces went up alongside them, from scratch, in a matter of weeks.
Most B2B experiences on a show floor get forgotten by the time the floor empties. The rare ones inspire belief and conversion. This was one of the rare ones.
Salesforce Connections by the numbers
3 branded storefronts. University of Chicago, Heathrow, and Pearson—pulled directly from the award-winning Agentforce City experience
2 brand-new spaces. The Slack space and the Agentic Enterprise space, both built from the ground up
10 iPad stations, 3 games inside the Slack space's interactive table
10–15 industries represented
Putting customer stories at the heart of experience design
Over years of working together, Salesforce and Left Field Labs have come back to the same belief again and again: people don't believe in technology because someone tells them they should. They believe it when they experience it for themselves.
That idea shaped every space we built for Connections 2026, carrying forward some of our favorite moments from Agentforce City at Dreamforce 2025.
At the University of Chicago Medicine storefront, attendees experienced how Agentforce could support patients through every step of their healthcare journey, then left with a first-aid kit that turned the story into something they could actually take home.
Heathrow showed how AI can deliver millions of deeply personal travel experiences, anticipating what passengers need before they even ask.
Pearson demonstrated how Agentforce helps every learner keep learning, wherever they are in their education.
Each activation told a different story, but they all shared the same goal: helping people see what AI looks like when it's solving real problems for real people.
Designing a Space as Ambitious as Slack Itself
Slack has grown into so much more than a messaging platform. Today it can summarize meetings, surface CRM insights, coordinate work across tools, and act as the place where work actually happens. Our job was to make that vision feel real in just a few minutes.
The space needed to feel like Slack itself: fast, playful, approachable, and constantly in motion.
A custom-built LED cube anchored the experience, cycling through Slackbot animations, customer stories, and calls to action that were impossible to miss from across the show floor.
Around it, ten interactive iPad stations invited attendees to put Slack's AI assistance to the test. They navigated mazes, tackled notification challenges, completed coordination games, and experienced each activity first with Slackbot's help and then on their own. Within seconds, the value clicked.
We rounded out the experience with a custom emoji activation. Attendees stepped in front of a green screen and left with a personalized animated Slack emoji they could immediately use in their own workspace.
We've all brought home conference swag that ends up forgotten in the bottom of a backpack. This wasn't that. Weeks later, attendees were still using something that reminded them of the experience every time it popped up in a conversation.
Building an Agentic Enterprise that people could believe in
While Slack invited people to jump in and play, the Agentic Enterprise space was designed to stop people in their tracks.
The first thing attendees saw was a giant illuminated magnifying glass representing Marketing Cloud, with connected spokes extending to Customer 360, Tableau, Slack, and the broader Salesforce ecosystem. Three independently controlled LED strips pulsed through the structure, creating movement even when no one was interacting with it.
I'll admit I'm biased, but it looked pretty incredible.
People stopped to photograph it before they even knew what it represented, which is exactly what you hope for when designing a landmark experience. It also accidentally became the best selfie lighting in the building, something attendees figured out almost immediately.
Inside the space, Salesforce's newest AI agents, Piper and Hunter, brought the story to life by showing how AI could personalize marketing, identify opportunities, and accelerate pipeline generation in real time.
Inviting the audience into Salesforce’s world with co-creation
One of my favorite moments was watching attendees build their own AI avatars.
Using generative AI, guests designed claymation-inspired characters that represented their personal AI agent, choosing everything from personality and wardrobe to colors and style.
One thing we cared deeply about was making sure there wasn't a "default" person. No assumptions about gender, culture, or identity. Just a creative starting point that let everyone build something that felt uniquely their own.
Attendees could print their avatars to take with them while also adding them to a growing gallery wall. As the event went on, that wall became one of the best examples of the diversity and creativity of the people walking through the experience.
Salesforce building belief instead of just attention
Most B2B event experiences are designed to grab your attention for a few minutes.
The best ones stay with you long after you've left the show floor.
That's what we were chasing.
Not just bigger screens or flashier technology, but moments that made people laugh, made them curious, or helped them finally understand something that had previously felt abstract.
That's where trust starts.
And over time, trust becomes belief. Not just believing that a product works, but believing the people behind it understand your challenges well enough to build something worth investing in.
That's a much harder thing to create than excitement, but it's also the thing people remember.
Inspiring loyalty through real experiences
By the end of the day, every event starts to feel the same. The lights dim. The arcade goes quiet. Conversations fade as people head for the exits. It's always a little strange watching a space return to stillness after spending days watching it come alive.
But that's never really the end.
If we've done our job well, the experience leaves with the people who walked through it.
That's why we love working with Salesforce. They continue to push what's possible, asking how experiential design can help solve one of the biggest challenges businesses face today: helping people truly believe in AI.
Those are exactly the kinds of challenges we love.
If you've got one, we'd love to help solve it.