Salesforce’s flagship conference, Dreamforce, is taking place this week (September 12-14, 2023). This year, it comes with impressive statistics, being the largest AI event in the world, with 1500+ sessions, 40,000 attending in-person, and millions of viewers online.
No surprises that the key pieces of news are centered on AI and Data Cloud coming together. The tagline for the keynote, hosted by Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Marc Benioff, was titled: “Now everyone is an Einstein – Data + AI + CRM + Trust”. Every month, Salesforce Flow is automating 1.2 trillion tasks and Data Cloud is unifying 2 trillion records, and every week Einstein is processing 1+ trillion transactions. Here are the highlights…
1. Einstein 1 Platform
Einstein 1 is a relaunch of the Salesforce platform to create a trusted AI platform that Salesforce customers can use with confidence. The key to Einstein 1 is Einstein Copilot, the built-in side panel of the user interface we’ve all become used to.
Internal users, or customers (via Experience Cloud portals or similar), can interact with this conversational AI assistant in natural language – that is, how a human user types, as they would in conversation with another human.
Copilot goes further, offering recommendations in the form of multi-step action plans where users can select/de-select the follow-up actions to take forward.
2. Copilot Studio (Prompt Builder + Skills Builder + Model Builder)
Einstein Copilot Studio is where admins/other Salesforce professionals have both power and control – the power to implement impactful generative AI to support your users’ productivity, while having the control over which processes generative AI is used, and the extent that the prompts should reach.
This is made up of three components: Prompt Builder, Skills Builder, and Model Builder:
- Prompt Builder: Create prompt templates, choose how they want to ‘ground’ the prompts in Salesforce data, and activate for users quickly and easily. In simpler terms: build, test, and deploy generative AI prompts for your users.
- Skills Builder: Grant access to generative AI (on the Salesforce platform) via ‘skills’. For example, this enables you to say: for process A, user X should have N generative AI capabilities, whereas user Y shouldn’t have the same outcome. Basically, an admin/other similar professional embedding a ‘skill’ into a Salesforce Flow.
- Model Builder: The flexibility to select the AI models you wish to use, including Salesforce’s proprietary large language models (which Salesforce have been training for years), or one of their preferred partners, including Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, Google Cloud’s Vertex IX, or OpenAI.
3. Free Data Cloud and Tableau Licenses
Salesforce are announcing free Data Cloud & Tableau licenses, for all customers who are on Sales and Service Cloud, Enterprise or Unlimited edition, to kick off their journey into these previously mysterious Salesforce products.
This free package includes two free Tableau Creator licenses, and Data Cloud licenses for up to 10,000 profiles.
4. Marketing Cloud & Commerce Cloud (“More Core”)
Taking a brief dip into the history of Marketing Cloud (originally ExactTarget) and Commerce Cloud (originally Demandware), these tools were acquisitions Salesforce made, and incorporated with the core platform via connectors.
Now, we’re seeing momentum with the 26 generative AI capabilities on the roadmap between Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud – with an additional 25+ set to arrive by the end of 2024 – all built on Data Cloud.
5. Data Cloud-Triggered Flow
We’ve been building automation with Salesforce Flow for years. Flows are triggered by some action occurring, such as a change in data.
Now with Data Cloud embedded in the Einstein 1 platform, we can power automation with dynamic data from Data Cloud – real-time data, and data from various different systems.
This type of Flow launches when the Data Cloud data model object (DMO) or calculated insight object (CIO) conditions are met.
In the image below, we can see that the Data Space is selected, and the Data Cloud object. A Data Space is “a logical partition to organize your data for profile unification, insights, and marketing in Data Cloud…segregate your data, metadata, and processes into categories, such as brand, region, or department, and then enable users to see and work on data only in the context of their category.” (Source)
6. Slack Innovations
Salesforce has announced Slack AI (Channel Recaps, Thread Summaries, Search Answers), automation, and Slack lists.
7. Data Graphs (in Data Cloud)
When designing prompts in Prompt Builder or assigning skills in Skills Builder, you may need to check that Einstein has access to all the data required to answer a user’s question. This could require multiple layers of related data, going several objects deep, or data from multiple integrated sources.
How do you check that your data is ready for such exploration? Data Graphs (in Data Cloud) enable you to visualize the relationships between data model objects (DMOs), even going several layers deep. Similar to the Schema Builder, you can trace the related fields and rearrange the relationships in a drag-and-drop manner, to ensure that the correct field data will be included in an AI application.
This creates a dynamic set of data points to provide further instruction to the LLM. For example, you can ensure that Einstein has data available when surfacing outputs for prompts made by users.
In Prompt Builder, Data Graphs can be applied, just like a merge field.
8. Salesforce AI-Power to Create 18 million Jobs by 2028 (IDC Report)
The reports published by IDC take a look into the crystal ball of the future – what impact Salesforce could potentially have. This edition’s report contains two stand-out figures:
- Revenue Impact (revenue generated), a $2.02 trillion net gain from 2022–2028.
- Employment Impact (worldwide jobs generated), from 2022–2028, an estimated 18 million jobs will potentially be created globally, with a net gain of 11.6 million employees.
Source: The Salesforce Economy: Fueled by AI-powered Cloud Solutions, IDC.
9. Tenets of Trusted, Ethical & Humane Al
Salesforce often talk about their core values, with Trust being one that has been mentioned often since setting out to pioneer safe and secure AI for the enterprise.
Salesforce have advocated their Tenets of Trusted, Ethical & Humane Al that guide all of their innovations, designed to keep the trust between Salesforce and their customers, and customer companies and their customers.
It’s worth noting that Salesforce created leadership roles in the ethics space before most other companies considered the need to place leaders in roles with these responsibilities.
10. Most Sustainable Dreamforce Ever
Another core value Salesforce lives by is Sustainability. To help other organizations to meet sustainability goals, Salesforce brought Net Zero Cloud to the market.
To practice what they preach, Salesforce have made a conscious effort to make Dreamforce, a large-scale event, as environmentally friendly as possible, claiming it to be the most sustainable Dreamforce ever.
11. New Industry Cloud: Life Sciences Cloud
There will be another cloud added to Salesforce Industries, designed for the life sciences sector, with a specific architecture to help get these organizations up-and-running faster with the Salesforce platform.
Summary
Dreamforce has only just started and there’s already so many exciting announcements! It’s no surprise that the key pieces of news are centered on AI and Data Cloud. We can’t wait to see what the rest of the week will bring!
Let us know in the comments which announcement you’re most excited for…