The Dreamforce main keynote was delivered with incredible energy. Titled “The Great Reunion”, 40k attendees have been brought together in San Francisco, and 150k expected to stream online. This was the session to frame Salesforce’s big ideas, going into the future – not only featuring new technology innovations, but also including important underlying messages.
The opening video was a witty poetic verse that emphasized making the world a better place: “It’s a new day” for business, environment, Trailblazers, work, and Customer 360.
The keynote covered each of these, woven into a rich fabric of innovation and inspiration. Here are the highlights from the 2-hour session.
Note: The full recording is available on Salesforce+
1. Salesforce Genie
“A new day for customer magic.”
Salesforce Genie, declared the greatest Salesforce innovation in the company’s history, paves the way for highly personalized customer experiences, delivered in real-time. It’s your command center for everything about the customer. Genie ingests and stores real-time data streams at massive scale, and combines it with Salesforce data.
The result? A single, cleaned record for each individual customer, reconciling all the many identities one individual could have across the hundreds of apps your organization uses (976, on average!). It paves the way for personalization at hyper-scale.
Genie, which is Salesforce CDP extended, is dynamic, adapting the single source of truth about the individual customer as their data does. Alongside Einstein, you can run predictions and recommend the Next Best Actions along the way.
Salesforce let us in on a secret. Genie has been powering the Dreamforce experience end-to-end (including Salesforce+), behind the scenes. It’s been “battle-tested”.
Featured customer demos
- Ford (Ford+ Plan): As the customer drives her new car, Ford sends her notifications to remind her to charge the car, using Genie to do this. She schedules an upcoming service appointment, and Einstein Next Best Action is to send her a courtesy car. Her actual car will be delivered thanks to Field Service Genie. Ford later sends her an offer to upgrade her business fleet – she doesn’t have to speak to anyone, all done via Einstein and Genie.
- L’Oreal: An influencer, who cares about beauty tech and sustainability. She goes to the website to find items to share to her followers. She wants to talk more about the product that’s caught her eye, but she’s put on-hold when she rings up. Frustrated, she’s tempted to leave a negative review. Rewind. The alternative experience is much better! Through instagram, she sees a L’Oreal advert, adds the item to her e-commerce cart – and then, forgets about it. Genie can catch this at the very moment it happens. An Einstein Chatbot is launched to save the purchase, arranging a virtual trial. Augmented reality enables the influencer to try various shades of lipstick on, leading to a successful purchase. She can choose a sustainable shipping option, and with Salesforce Payments, can purchase straight-away.
2. Slack Canvases & Huddles Coworking
Slack has experienced such accelerated innovation since they were acquired by Salesforce, and especially this year.
- Slack Canvas: Alongside a Slack channel you have a Canvas. Slack canvases are described as a “surface to capture and share knowledge [with] the ability to access and take action on Salesforce data directly in Slack”. Similar to Quip? You’re right. Quip has been integrated with Slack, you could consider this an interactive board which pins key information related to the channel.
- Huddles Coworking: Huddles allow you to jump into quick conversations from any channel or DM – bringing what we loved about the office into your “digital HQ”. Huddles have been enhanced to include video and screen share, pop-out window, reactions, chat in thread, and post-huddle threads.
The demo featured Slack canvas and huddles working together, which we thought was worth watching (approx. 1-hour into the session).
3. Net Zero Cloud (+ Marketplace)
Right from the opening video, we knew that environmental protection would be a theme that carried through the rest of the show. Salesforce are confident in putting their phrase “it’s a new day for the environment” into action:
- Salesforce are scaling up their ocean research program, which protects endangered whales, tackles plastic pollution, AI for monitoring ocean health, and expanding marine parks.
- The “great reforestation”: By conserving, restoring, and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030, the goal is to sequester 200 gigatons of carbon with 1t.org (“the platform for a trillion trees”).
- Net Zero Cloud: A Salesforce product that helps organizations meet their sustainability goals. Manage sustainability data, automate supplier emissions tracking, and forecast and reduce risk. “What-if Analysis” (powered by Tableau) and Einstein Recommendations also help power the Net Zero Cloud.
- Net Zero Cloud Marketplace: Powered by the Commerce Cloud, the Salesforce Net Zero Marketplace will connect buyers and ecopreneurs, offering a catalog of projects alongside a seamless e-commerce experience for purchasing them. The marketplace will launch with 90 projects in 11 countries.
Availability: All generally available for Net Zero Cloud.
4. Hyperforce and the External Encryption Ecosystem
Hyperforce is a “reimagination” platform architecture to securely and reliably deliver the Salesforce “Cloud” products, on major public clouds, including AWS, Azure and Google.
Currently available in 10 regions, Hyperforce will reach 17 countries by the end of 2023.
Two primary aspects of Hyperforce are security and data residency (i.e. your data is a “resident” in a specific country/region for compliance reasons).
The new External Encryption Ecosystem was created when Salesforce hoped to expand Hyperforce into new regions, but came up against increasingly stringent data residency requirements. Using cryptography, Salesforce can “hand the key over” to the customer, who as a result, will have full control over data. It’s a huge opportunity that will enable Hyperforce to operate in more challenging regions.
5. The Growing Trailblazer Community
Salesforce shared that there are over 17 million Trailblazers (Salesforce professionals) worldwide. This also includes the “DataFam” (Tableau enthusiasts), “Muleys” (Mulesoft enthusiasts), and “Slack Stars” There are over 2100 community groups across 100 countries. Compare the 2019 statistics, and you will understand the huge growth, yourself.
No surprise, Trailhead continues to grow in popularity. Over 57 milion badges have been earned on Trailhead! New Ranger (Ranger Star) ranks give Trailblazers a way to demonstrate their knowledge and dedication, beyond the first 100 badges.
Community Tags are also now available to add to your Trailblazer.me profile to let the people who land there know who you are, at a glance. #AwesomeAdmin is sure to be a popular one.
Then, we heard about Sima Samara’s inspiring and touching story. Having fled her home country, she felt isolated when arriving in a foreign place, having to rebuild her life. By chance, she came across an advert offering refugees to learn Salesforce – no previous experience required!
You may have already heard of this organization that’s connecting refugees with opportunities to learn Salesforce: Refugeeforce. There was an eye-opening line in the introduction video: “[They] come with a different perspective of the future”. Sima was able to get introduced to Salesforce (and a love for Trailhead) and now has a fulfilling, well-deserved career in the ecosystem. Congratulations on your Golden Hoodie, too!
6. True to the Core Progress
At Dreamforce events in previous year, Parker was asked consistently, by enthusiastic Trailblazers, what has been improved on the Salesforce platform since the previous Dreamforce. “Shiny new things” are nice, but the community cares about how their day-to-day challenges are being addressed.
That’s where “True to The Core” comes in. This program is an unfiltered view into Salesforce’s forward-looking roadmap, with the sessions working like an ‘ask me anything’ to Salesforce executives and product managers (no wonder it’s one of the most popular sessions at Dreamforce!)
300+ innovations have been delivered as a result of the request-upvote program. What have Salesforce made better since last year? There’s been significant effort to integrate their acquisitions onto the core platform.
“I have never been more excited about the strength of our core platform” Brett Taylor.
7. World’s Largest Enterprise Apps Company
Salesforce are projected to reach $31 billion in revenue this year, with a slew of awards beyond fiscal success:
“#1 Most Innovative Companies“ (Forbes).
“#1 Best Workplaces” In multiple regions globally.
“Top 100 Companies that Care” (People) 6 years in a row.
8. The Power of Salesforce Flow
44 billion Flow automations are run every day, saving organizations 100 billion hours of work every month that would otherwise be spent manually updating Salesforce record data, and more. This equates to an estimated $2 trillion in customer value.
Genie is built using the Salesforce metadata model which makes everything actionable for use with Flow.
9. The Power of Salesforce Einstein
The Salesforce Einstein engine is making 175 bill predictions per day. Again, as Genie uses the Salesforce metadata model, it can tap into Einstein for real-time predictions.
10. Nonprofit Customers Are Stepping Up
Salesforce offers nonprofit organizations a number of free licenses to support their mission. During the Covid-19 pandemic, and subsequent world events, nonprofits using Salesforce have achieved great things. There are 50k+ nonprofits running on the Salesforce platform.
Summary: Shoshin
Benioff raised the word shoshin (初心), Japanese for “beginners mind”. Especially when it’s a new day like this – how do we recultivate ours? What’s really important? What do we really want for Salesforce, for our industries, for our communities?
Not only have Salesforce had their core values clear from the outset, and have created a successful business (#1 CRM in the World), they’ve also enabled us, as customers, to deliver incredible success to our organizations, with some impressive statistics, to boot! What an exciting time to be involved with Salesforce.
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