Dreamforce 23 Recap

My 12th Dreamforce was filled with many moments with customers, learning about new Salesforce products, catching up with key Slalom partners and enjoying the many Slalom presentations and round tables.

I counted 65 new or recently announced products across the Platform and all the clouds. "Copilot" is the new Kleenex (sorry Microsoft, every vendor will have a Copilot now.)

The biggest difference in this year's Dreamforce was the focus that the Salesforce product management team put on clearly outlining when each new product would become available. Every presentation ended with a summary of the products and a date when we can expect to start using with customers. David Schmaier's leadership impact is being felt across the entire portfolio.

Every product session focused on the new capabilities of Generative AI which will push Salesforce further ahead of enterprise players Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and the point competitors like ServiceNow, Zendesk, Shopify, and all the others that try to offer an end-to-end set of CRM applications, Data management and integration and Analytics solutions. The new Data Cloud free edition will introduce hundreds of new customers to the power of the platform. For long term investors, the new management team has started to prove themselves. CRM's ability to adapt and execute will not slow down the pace to $50B. Notably absent this year was the Investor Day session.

Salesforce veteran's popular "True to the Core" session featured the product managers responding to tough audience questions which improves the products and features.

The funniest quote of Dreamforce? Parker Harris speaking about endless Salesforce Product Renaming: “There’s an Elephant not in the room that changes the name.” Patrick Stokes explained the rationale of the renaming well, including a commitment to share when they are re-branding existing features. He responded to "Why rename to Einstein1 Platform? What is really new?" We rewrote the metadata to support new features for the high scale b2c products like Commerce, Marketing and Data Cloud on Core as well as adding Generative AI with Copilots and Prompt Builder.

David Schmaier spoke about product bundles and how product suites will win over time and tier 2 products will become part of the primary "sku" or unique product. See the Sales Cloud bundles below for an example of this coming to life.

Each product Keynote featured new features, a vision demo, a customer and a recap of product and feature availability for the products mentioned in the session. Follow these links in Salesforce+ for each keynote replay and glance at some of the slides shared.

Keynotes!

While the main keynote was closed 45 minutes before, we all could watch the broadcast all over Moscone and outside. Below are links to each keynote and a few product slides shared.

AI & Data Cloud Keynote

Data & Analytics / Tableau Keynote

Service Cloud Keynote & Field Service Keynote

Sales Cloud Keynote

Marketing Cloud Keynote

Commerce Keynote

Slack Keynote

MuleSoft Keynote

Customer Success Keynote

IT (Platform) Keynote

True to the Core

The City of San Francisco

The Moscone conference area was obviously cleaned up around Dreamforce, but outside the bubble, the terrible drug use and homeless tent city problem persists.

This year, the political flavor of Dreamforce included Gavin Newsom and London Breed.

Stephanie Rhule interviewed Marc B and offered a good recap of the city's challenges. Will we be back in San Fran next year? Or in a the mega conference cities like Chicago or Vegas or Orlando? We know we'll see you in Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago Minneapolis, Philadelphia and New York later this year.