Salesforce’s flagship conference, Dreamforce, is taking place this week (September 17th-19th, 2024). Dubbed the “World Premiere of Agentforce”, there’s no surprise that this will take center stage this year. The message that “AI is only as good as the underlying data”, Data Cloud continues to gain traction and new capabilities.
Plus, in an effort to address the rapidly growing AI skills gap, Salesforce is investing in “hot” vendors that carry the same values – particularly trust – to create a landscape of trusted AI and choice for organizations.
1. Agentforce
In basic terms, Agentforce allows organizations to build and manage autonomous agents for tasks across various business departments – in fact, there’s an “Agentforce in every app”. There’s the potential to build Service Agents, Sales Agents, Marketing Agents, Commerce Agents, and Platform Agents.
Agentforce comes with other announcements:
- Atlas Reasoning Engine: The “brain” behind Agentforce, an agentic system that takes into account what needs to be done, generates (and refines) its plan, then takes action (see the next announcement for more details).
- Agent Builder: Create and customize agents, and enable agents with automation, APIs, and code on the Salesforce platform. Agent Builder joins Prompt Builder and Model Builder to form the Agentforce Studio.
- Agentforce Partner Network: Salesforce have forged partnerships with leading software vendors that extend agent-building capabilities, such as adhering to the same ethical guardrails, data sharing, and actions.
Salesforce’s main message is one of faster time to value. With some AI projects swallowing incredible amounts of budget over years-long periods, Salesforce claim that Agentforce is utilizing what your organization has built within your own Salesforce org to launch with speed and control.
There will be an Agentforce “Launch Zone” at Dreamforce, where 1,000 selected Salesforce customers will be building their own Agent prototypes, guided by Salesforce employees. What a great way to launch Agentforce by sourcing a wide variety of use cases from these customers!
2. Atlas
As the “brain” behind Agentforce, Atlas, an agentic system (versus an assistive system), has more agency in actions that it performs on behalf of the user. Atlas is essentially Salesforce’s upgraded copilot engine.
Atlas generates a plan based on what the role is trying to do, then evaluates and refines its plan (if required, it can loop to pull in additional data). When taking an action, it will look at what business process (e.g. flows) should be used. Finally, it engages with the customer or employee based on their channel preference.
It was made clear that Data Cloud underpins Atlas. After all, the quality of AI is only going to be as good as the data that underpins it.
3. Data Cloud: New Additions
Data Cloud has been in the limelight over the past years, having graduated from a CDP for marketing use cases, subsequently changing names (remember Genie?) and now the data foundation that underpins every Salesforce “cloud” product.
As Data Cloud continues to gain traction with customers, these three announcements may seem trivial but in fact are important for catering to the performance and scalability that organizations will need:
- More unstructured data formats accessible: Native processing is now possible for video and audio formats. The Vector Database earlier this year brought attention to unstructured data, followed by enhanced support for semantic data since then. With 90% of company data being unstructured (as opposed to structured in records, objects, and object relationships), companies are missing out on a wealth of information that can’t be surfaced in traditional reporting. With this announcement, video and audio (e.g. sales demo calls, customer service calls, voicemails) can be analyzed to reveal insights.
- Additional Connectors: There are 50 new pre-built connectors launching. The new total will now be 200+ pre-built connectors. We get into what the different purposes and categories are in the guide linked below.
- Sub-second Real-time Capabilities: Sounds like a mouthful, but Data Cloud will be able to work incredibly fast across all of the processes it handles – from data ingestion, to activation, all in sub-seconds. In my opinion, this is the most important of the three.
The image below indicates the three capabilities highlighted above, and how the Atlas engine works in tandem.
4. Free AI Certifications and Training
The message “AI for all” is tantalizing for any Salesforce professionals out there. Salesforce has teased that they will be offering free premium instructor-led courses, as well as AI certifications through 2025.
While details have not been fully announced, Salesforce has stated that it will offer its premium AI courses, and AI certifications free of charge via Trailhead through the end of 2025.
5. IBM & Google Agentforce Partnerships
New partnerships with Google and IBM will extend Agentforce by building agents and actions.
- IBM will launch autonomous agents tailored for related industries. One example is IBM Banking Agents which can speed up loan approvals by handling credit checks, comply with local tax laws, and create client onboarding documents.
- Google and Salesforce are teaming up to build agent force actions to interact across the Google Workspace applications to automate tasks. For example, generating Google Docs, searching across Gmail, and triggering action based off of Google calendar events.
“We’re leaving the era of disconnected copilots behind and moving into a future of a broad, open connected network of interoperable third-party systems and agent forces.” Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI.
6. Salesforce Foundations
Salesforce Foundations is a free* feature set that brings together new sales, service, marketing, commerce, and Data Cloud features, which also includes an updated user interface. Salesforce’s goal for Foundations is to give organizations a flavor of how powerful AI can become when using all these products together, and to get Agentforce into the hands of customers.
*Free for all Sales and Service Cloud users on enterprise licenses or above. Note that some features have limits imposed on them, which you can read at the end of the Salesforce Newsroom article.
“Upgrade” by going to the “Your Account” app, or contact your Account Executive if you don’t see Salesforce Foundations visible. You will be asked to e-sign a “zero dollar” contract before Salesforce Foundations is provisioned.
7. Slack Innovations
Agentforce also brings more power to Slack:
- Agents in Slack: Slack channel human members can now converse with agent members in natural language. Responses are based on both structured CRM data and unstructured conversational data. In the image below, you can see there are 25 humans, and next to this, a new button shows how many agents there are.
Each agent has a profile which lists their skills – again, going back to the concept of roles (what the agent can do) and guardrails (what the agent can’t do).
- Third-party AI agents: AI agents and assistants from partners like Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and more can be deployed in the same trusted, secure environment in Slack.
- Salesforce channels: A new type of channel that brings the goodness of your CRM data and insights right into the flow of work and conversations, for example, to collaborate and account or opportunity. Below is a merchandising team use case, where an order has been launched.
- New Slack AI features: Enhanced capabilities such as huddle notes, simplified automation, and improved search.
- Slack templates: Collections of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows.
8. Out-of-the-Box Agents for Industries
For years, Salesforce knew that doubling-down on CRM that tailored to the needs of specific industries was going to give them a long-term competitive edge. There are 100+ industry-specific prompts that you can use to command agents.
Scan the QR code below to browse the Industry AI Use Case Library.
9. Agentforce World Tour
Salesforce will be taking Agentforce global with the tour that kicks off in October through the end of the year. This will be a ‘repackaging’ of Dreamforce sessions, as well as specialists on the ground to answer your questions.
10. $1B in AI Funding
Salesforce are not sheepish when it comes to pumping investment into artificial intelligence – whether that’s in their own “four walls” or beyond.
- AI Centers: The first AI center launched in London this year which, proudly, is our home base, so we were able to attend on the ground! There are plans to expand this to cities such as Chicago, Tokyo, Sydney, and a pop-up AI Center in San Francisco. These spaces will be hosting the premium in-person courses, as well as bringing together industry experts, partners, and customers.
- Salesforce Ventures Investments: Salesforce has announced that they are investing $50M into initiatives designed to upskill workforces in a bid to address the AI skills gap. Investments into AI companies that advocate the same values (especially trust) include Cohere, Hugging Face, and Together.ai.
Summary
Dreamforce announcements will be coming through thick and fast, so make sure to keep your eyes on Salesforce Ben for all the key information you need to know.
What has been your favorite announcement so far? Let us know in the comments below!
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