Salesforce Dreamforce 2024 keynote reflections

For Dreamforce24 this year I wanted to share as series of thoughts following the key announcements in the keynotes.? For todays edition, the main Benioff keynote has just finished and here is my summary of the key announcements.??

The main waves today were around two key announcements around Agentforce and ATLAS, particularly highlighting their use by companies like Saks.?

Here are the key things you need to know:?

Agentforce: The Next Big Thing in Autonomous AI Agents

Last year was data cloud and Einstein CoPilots, this year data cloud still remains as a foundational enabler but good old Einstein CoPilots have been upgraded to become Agentforce.? Salesforce is taking AI to the next level with Agentforce, a platform designed not just for answering queries like traditional ?chatbots do but for taking meaningful, autonomous actions. Think of it as the AI version of an employee that can scale exponentially due to the power, data and insight within the core platform. ?

• What’s the so what? Agentforce isn’t just a chatbot. It’s a suite of AI agents that can actually think, plan, and execute tasks on their own. And with the Atlas Reasoning Engine as its brain, these agents don’t just respond; they act smartly, integrating seamlessly with Salesforce’s existing suit of cloud applications.? My take on this is that the announcements in DF23 last year, just become real and in GA this October – this is genuinely exciting
• The Saks Example: One of the first customers to jump on the Agentforce beta were Saks, which is using it to enhance customer interactions and automate complex workflows. The demos were certainly impressive particularly around the voice channel so I would certainly encourage you to watch the playback of the keynote on Salesforce.com

ATLAS: The Brain Behind Agentforce

ATLAS is the reasoning engine which makes Agentforce truly revolutionary. At a summary level, It evaluates data within the broad Salesforce ecosystem, including that data brought into the virtual datacloud capability, refines action plans, and makes sure all the workflows, actions and customer journey interventions run smoothly within your channels as your customers expect. Whether it’s a marketing campaign re segmenting or a customer service query, ATLAS ensures your AI agents are not just doing tasks but doing them with finesse.

• Why You Should Care: With ATLAS, your AI isn’t just making decision, it’s making smart decisions, based on real-time data. And for those of you who are concerning about AI running autonomously, Salesforce has built in solid guardrails to keep things in check.? You can also converge Agentforce agents with human agents and have the two working simultaneously and in harmony with the oversight being managed through Omni supervisor, another new announcement.

There was also a nice re introduction of some of the original Salesforce themes from the early days around DIY – in other words, with these announcements you don’t need to build all your AI yourselves in an engineering way, Salesforce have “platformised” AI making it a core feature of the platform.

Other announcements that may have escaped you:

Marketing Cloud replatformed from exact target to the core stack – I chucked to myself as this came out today as this was one of my predictions when data cloud was announced 3 years ago – I thought to myself that’s the end of data cloud and flow will be the new marketing / journey orchestration tool.? Roll forward to today and that is exactly what appears to have happened.

The move of Slack, Tableau onto the core platform – again not that surprising as the core platform evolves and this makes absolute sense but I am definitely sensing something for the future around Slack as the tool for employee engagement, maybe the future will be a slackesque UI and agentforce working together being powered by ATLAS tableau and datacloud.? Only time will tell there but certainly something to watch closely as more and more convergence happens with Slack into the core CRM/AI/journey orchestration actions.

Physical Device – Credit Spring and Salesforce Foundation's New License: In addition to the innovative replatforming of key systems mentioned above Salesforce introduced a new physical device called "Credit Spring," designed to enhance financial accessibility. This could be one to look at as sounded like some kind of POS / payment device but we could see in Moscone.

Finally, the Salesforce Foundation license was announced combining the core clouds (Sales, Service, Marketing and Data) at a simple flick of a switch quite what this means for your existing or new licenses, this need digging into.

Given all of this what should you do next?

For Customer Service leaders – look at Agentforce within your service organisation, particularly around how you modernise and revolutionise your voice channels making them much more customer centric.? Imagine your welcome message of your IVR starting with “Hi, I am Sophie, how may I help you today” with your voice channel being able to offer self serve with intelligence

For Sales leaders – look at the Agentforce Sales use cases within the library so you can start asking the platform intelligent projections, whatif sales force casts, re forcasting and stock distribution

For Marketeers – potentially the biggest opportunity but as in our experience, the biggest challenges as organisations will need to pivot their marketing departments from traditional campaigns into insightful customer experience and marketing journeys of 1.? This requires a rethink of the operating model, the things that you want to measure from a customer journey perspective and how you can move from the old marketing stack based on exact target to the core platform.?

For digital transformation leaders – be progressive in your ambition and challenge your teams to leapfrog from where you are today exploiting your investment in Salesforce.? We see too many clients missing the genuine transformative capabilities that the platform offers.? Yes this will ultimately cost you in license sales but some of the metrics today around the efficiency gains cannot be overlooked.? Also challenge conventional thinking around how your teams are approaching this – think fightercjet teams that drive pace and progression as opposed to the tardiness of the supertanker sized teams.

If you are just starting our with Salesforce – take time to consider are your ambitions set right, are you clear on your vision, have you really researched what your clients and employees need and are you clear on the capabilities that you need in your business.? Use some of the announcements today to challenge your level of ambition and progression.? Also challenge the pace – you can do a lot quickly as many organisations have proved with platforms like Salesforce.

If you already have Salesforce – ask yourself are you set up to take advantage of these announcements, do you have the pace and flow through your development teams that you need to benefit from these or are things a little lethargic?? Consider standing up some POCs to challenge convention and introduce some of these new features.? This may need you to think about your org strategy or code branching to take advantage.? If you are not experimenting with datacloud, ask yourself why not – this is one of the biggest enhancements in the data space allowing driving portability and openness into data allowing it to be consumed and exploited in ways that you will not have experienced before.?

Watch out for some further blog post capturing the reflections from the other industry and core platform key notes over the next few days.

Useful links:

AI usecase library: https://www.salesforce.com/artificial-intelligence/use-cases/

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