What to Expect at Dreamforce 24?

Each Dreamforce, the Product Marketers at Salesforce take stage and show us the future. This year will include a big reveal of a compelling evolution of Einstein.

Gen AI / Einstein / Data Cloud / Agentforce

Since December 2023, a new Einstein AI Roadmap has been published, on average every 12 days. The last one was August 5th and will be re-written after Agentforce hits the stage. Here's what we can expect to see and get our hands on:

• Agentforce?- the new marketing brand referring to the platform to build and customize AI agents.
• Einstein Copilot?- an assistive agent used to augment individual employees on any task based on their role and goals
• Agent Builder?- (formerly Copilot Builder) the tool used to customize Einstein Agents by defining topics and actions using prompts, flows, and Apex. This also includes the Advanced Planner used to test the agent’s responses and plan of action.
• Einstein Agents?- pre-built agent templates shipped by Salesforce to address various jobs to be done across Sales, Service, Commerce, etc. with pre-configured roles, topics, and actions.
• AI Agent?- a proactive and autonomous digital coworker that is specialized in doing one role 24/7 to help teams achieve their goals, using an LLM to process information and execute actions related to the assigned role

Product Updates and Keynotes:

• Sales - expect to see the Einstein Sales Coach and Einstein SDR Agent. Revenue Lifecycle Management: The old Steelbrick CPQ gets a new look.
• Slack - expect to see Salesforce objects more available in Slack
• Service - expect to see Agentforce for Service
• Marketing - expect to see improvements to compete with Braze and Klavio
• Tableau - expect to see conversational AI introduced to enable semantic Q&A of data visualizations
• Commerce - expect to see more Order management, CMS, headless and payment integrations.
• True to the Core - too hard to predict, but get there early to get a seat
• Life Sciences Cloud - expect to get new look at how Salesforce will take on Veeva in the Pharma market, a big battle brewing over the next 36-60 months.
• Other Industries: Each industry will leverage Agentforce, Gen AI and have targeted use cases for example: Patient Services in Health Care, Policy Support in Insurance, Wealth Management Assistants in Financial Services, Asset Lifecycle management in Manufacturing

Acquisition Updates?

Airkit.AI

We expect the original Airkit tools will appear in the new Agentforce, focused on customer service.

After four pivots in 6 years, Salesforce announced Airkit acquisition September 2023. Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, Airkit? was founded in 2017 had 50 employees (down 46% in 24 months) and is is backed by venture capitalists, including Salesforce Ventures, Emergence Capital, EQT Ventures, and Accel. They had raised $68M over 3 rounds. Airkit has had four pivots since 2017.

• 2017-2019: a low code developer platform
• 2020-2021: a DXP Digital Customer Experience development platform,
• 2021-2022:? A commerce experience development toolkit
• 2023: a generative AI customer service platform with AI agents

Airkit.ai provides a low- to no-code bot-building platform that empowers businesses to orchestrate AI-driven conversational experiences. Primarily used for service automation, Airkit enables firms to design and automate complex cross-platform workflows, enhancing automated customer interactions across Salesforce applications.

Expanding on Airkit.ai’s foundational capabilities, Salesforce has integrated Mulesoft to enable insights triggering cross-platform automations, alongside real-time data harmonization within Data Cloud. Moreover, the platform now incorporates generative AI (GenAI), enhancing its ability to interpret text, images, and audio/video for diverse customer engagement scenarios.

Predict Spring

On August 1, 2024, Salesforce announced the acquisition of PredictSpring. PredictSpring is known for a modern mobile Point of Sale (POS) system for retailers. They were founded in 2013 with 31 employees, based in Mountain View CA. PredictSpring at least three funding rounds and raised over $30M, including an investment from Salesforce Ventures.

·?????? $11.4 million in a Series A financing round led by Felicis Ventures.

·?????? $16 million in a Series B funding round from its existing investors

·?????? Other funding not listed brings the total raised to $32M

I expect it will be folded into the Retail commerce product line and perhaps we will see a Retail Cloud, that includes marketing, loyalty, commerce and POS. Predict Spring is currently focused in these niche markets:

? Apparel & Footwear

? Health & Beauty

? Home Furnishings

? Telecommunications

? Wineries

? Watches & Jewelry

Tenyx

September 3, 2024, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Tenyx. Tenyx is known as “a developer of AI-powered voice agents that create natural and engaging conversational experiences, transforming customer service. Tenyx received seed funding of $15M in May 2022 with 11 investors. They are headquartered in Los Altos CA, with about 30 employees.

I expect we'll hear from Tenyx Voice in the Service Cloud Keynote. Tenyx Voice, a comprehensive conversational AI solution for the enterprise. Backed by the team’s groundbreaking?research in fine-tuning, the new AI voice product takes aim at elevating customer interactions and improving customer satisfaction with its unprecedented ability to capture each brand’s unique identity.

At the heart of Tenyx Voice lies a deep understanding of the challenges plaguing existing voice AI systems, from user frustration and limited analytics to rising costs and scaling difficulties. Tenyx leverages recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies to create a natural and engaging conversation flow that feels remarkably human.

What Not to Expect?

No investor presentation this year. After last week's earnings call, that would be good to see an updated Total Addressable Market projections.

Key topic: If Gen AI is so good, how can it not reduce Service Cloud seats by 15% in the next 3-5 years? Will the extra price of Einstein 1 at $500 per user per month make up the difference?

Links to Slalom Events

The Slalom team will be there speaking in 20 sessions, hosting breakouts, customer panel discussions. I can be reached at [email protected] to discuss your perspective on the future of the Salesforce Ecosystem.

Link to: All Slalom sessions at Dreamforce

Link to: Slalom receptions and Breakfasts at Dreamforce -

• Financial Services
• Travel
• Commonwealth Night
• Women in Tech
• Communications, Media, Tech
• Manufacturing & Automotive