Let's Make Some Quickfire Dreamforce '23 Predictions

#Dreamforce23 is NEXT WEEK!!! If you're reading this, you should already be well aware of this. But if you're not, then it's true. The single biggest event in the year for Salesforce is happening next week. #DF23 is happening as usual in the US over in San Francisco 12-14 September. Many #Trailblazers from across the world will be heading over to attend the event, with many more (myself included) staying home to catch up on all of the hot announcements and hints being made online via Salesforce+ or the the #TrailblazerCommunity via various Social Media sites.

Each year at Dreamforce we get a ton of announcements and hints across the event. So in this blog, I thought I would try to make a few quickfire predictions. The aim for this post is to try and offer some realistic things we can expect to be highlighted at the event. Admittedly, one prediction will be extremely obvious.

If you have your own predictions for Dreamforce, please share yours in the comments section below. I'd love to hear what you think will be announced.

With that in mind ... let's dive in.

#1: AI Overload ... We All Know It's Coming Don't We?

So let's get the elephant in the room that everyone sees out of the way. With the absolute bombardment of AI branding for this events, we're going to get a lot of stuff on AI this year at Dreamforce. This year has seen Salesforce dive on the AI bandwagon to a massive degree. Now don't get me wrong, I think AI knowledge and skills is a must-have going forward for Salesforce Admins, we have to be truthful and say that when Salesforce want to plug something, they REALLY go hard on it. This year will see Salesforce do something similar to what has gone on in recent years for the likes of Slack, Hyperforce and Genie, aka Data Cloud (if you know you know). But what specifically will we get in relation to AI at DF23?

Honestly I find it hard to guess what we can get that would be completely new announcements, as we've already a ton of stuff across the year already across the likes of TDX and the Salesforce World Tours. Part of me doesn't think that we will get an announcement of a new cloud that AI will be associated with (although, if we do I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being something for Nonprofit Cloud).

So my best guess at this time is that we'll get announcements of future certs coming to the AI Specialist career pathway. This week saw the announcement of the AI Associate certification and I image we might see the announcement of at least one more AI related certification. This will most likely come next year, but right now this is my best guess. But we are definitely going to get something on AI.

#2: More Skills for Success Content (Admin Skills Kit)

Over the last year we've seen Salesforce really push the Admin Skills Kit . The 14 core skills of the Salesforce Admin role was first announced at Dreamforce '21 (surprisingly the Dreamforce '21 content seems to have disappeared from Salesforce+), and Salesforce have given it a massive push since then. This push included the release of a community blog series that I was involved in putting together. Just this week, Salesforce announced the launch of the Skills for Success video series on Youtube starting next week (I intend to cover this in my blog to some capacity). My friend Emma Keeling was also featured in a recent Salesforce Admins podcast focusing on the Project Management skill , there will pretty much definitely be more podcasts coming related to the Admin Skills Kit.

The video series will most likely be highlight at DF23 as it is entirely possible that the first video will be live when the Admin Keynote takes place on Wednesday (so there's marketing potential right there). In terms of other announcements related to Skills for Success I think we might get more info on the Admin Skills Board that was announced last year at Dreamforce, and maybe the announcement of Trailhead content tied to the Admin Skills Kit with a new badge for each of the skills in the skills kit. Basically, the announcements around this will most likely be around new and upcoming content that you can leverage as an Admin to help you build up your skills as an #AwesomeAdmin. Maybe there will be more, we'll see.

#3: True to the Core Will Slide In An Announcement of Some Kind

This one is hard to predict, but with the positive praise that the quick turnaround of the release of Custom Error Messages for Record-Triggered Flows, part of me wonders if we will get an announcement at True to the Core that something that the community has been asking for for a long while will finally be coming to the core platform. Right now I don't have an idea what that will be, but there are quite a few contenders I would put on my wishlist for that, for example nested sorting for List Views. If you think about it, Custom Error Messaging was pushed at TDX by the community (in particular by Andrew Russo ) and we're getting it in the Winter '24 release next month. So I think it's entirely possible that Salesforce will try to keep that positive momentum going with the announcement of another highly demanded feature coming to the core platform in either Spring or Summer.

#4: A Sneak Peak at the Future of Flow

OK, so this is another slightly obvious one as it's Flow. But because of my love of Flow I couldn't not include something here about it. At Dreamforce this year, there will be a roadmap session for Flow that attendees can check out live. To my knowledge this is not going to be available on Salesforce+ but I am hoping that we will get to see it in some form online in the future. In this session, we'll most likely highlights relating to Reactive Screen Flows (my guess is reactive record fields and display text), but there will be other things that we will probably see. The Winter '24 release is bringing to us the beginnings of a draft mode for Flow, and we'll probably see this elaborated on at Dreamforce. But there will certainly be other announcements on the future of Flow coming out of the event.

Personally, I have my fingers cross for a mainline Process Automation certification. The fact that the Data Cloud Accreditation from Partner Learning Camp has been migrated into a mainline cert gives me hope that we will see something similar for Process Automation. However, honestly I can't hold my breath on that front, but it's my personal wishlist item, so I couldn't not mention it and keep it hidden.

Depending on how Release Readiness Live goes, it could be that Custom Error Messages will come to Autolaunched Flows as that is an obvious gap in this new functionality at the time of launch as many an Admin would want to include the Custom Error Message in a Subflow and create a single Custom Error Flow.

#5: And Finally ... Sneak Peaks into Spring and Summer '24

And to close off the list, as always we'll be getting some sneak peaks into what's coming in the upcoming releases ... in this case this will particularly focus on the Spring and Summer '24 releases. This is something that Dreamforce always does. And we'll get it again this year. We'll hear of some of the things we can expect to see in the Spring and Summer releases across all of the main keynotes. It will be very interesting to see what those sneak peaks will be and what announcements will be made that we can look forward to come February and June 2024.

Closing Comments

So those are my predictions to what we will see at Dreamforce '23 next week. Much of my guesses are relatively obvious based on what has been announced this week or what has already happened this year. But what do you think? What do you think will be announced at Dreamforce next week that we can look forward to? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below #Trailblazers.

And just as I wrap up. If you're missing Dreamforce in-person next week like I am. Then I am actually going to be opening up Zoom for a watch and chat each day of the event for a brief time on the evening (UK time). The watch and chat will be open for the main and Admin Keynotes and the Admin Release Readiness Live. Unfortunately I won't be staying open for longer than that because, well, I need to sleep and the timezone difference means things like the Nonprofit Keynote is in the early hours of the morning for us here in the UK. But if you'd like to join me for a couple of hours each day of Dreamforce to chat about some of the biggest sessions for Salesforce Admins, then there is a link below with more information.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/thisismarkjones_dreamforce-awesomeadmins-trailblazercommunity-activity-7104865933910781952-vU-W?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Don't forget that we also have #WorkflowWednesdays starting on 20 September. The first event is open for registrations . You can join our LinkedIn group for more information about our sessions and to engage with other group members. Our first event will focus on automation highlights from Dreamforce '23. If you are interested in potentially becoming a guest speaker at one of our events, you can submit a presentation or session idea via our Google Form here . We are looking for speakers between now and December, so if you've got an idea, let me know.