Salesforce has always had great new developments to share at its annual Dreamforce conference, but over the last 12 months, they have had a slew of new and exciting developments, particularly in the areas of AI and’ big data’. Because of that, Dreamforce 2024—happening Sept. 17-19 in San Francisco—should prove to be one of the most illuminating Salesforce conferences in a while. If you haven’t registered yet, here is the link to do so.
At DCS, we’re looking forward to the keynotes, product announcements, hands-on workshops, and networking opportunities with people from across the Salesforce ecosystem. Beyond those touchpoints, here are the key topics we’re hoping to learn more about at Dreamforce 2024:
All Eyes on AI
Like just about every technology conference this year, Dreamforce 2024 will be heavy on AI-related content. How do we know? For starters, the Dreamforce 2024 agenda already features some big-name AI headliners, including Daniela Amodei, the president and co-founder of Anthropic and David Kirk, the former chief scientist at NVIDIA.
And if you watched any of the coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympics, you probably saw multiple commercials featuring Matthew McConaughey thwarting a robbery of “customer data” from passengers on an old-time Western train. (Honestly, you probably saw it too many times). The ad focused on the Einstein Trust Layer, which has been rolled out to keep organizations’ data safe when they use AI products on the Salesforce platform. The Einstein Trust Layer is equipped with features such as dynamic grounding, zero data retention, and toxicity detection, which ensure that your safety and security standards remain uncompromised, even when a prompt is sent to a third-party LLM. Expect Dreamforce 2024 to provide a lot more information about its inner workings and coming enhancements.
Since Dreamforce 2023, Salesforce also launched Einstein Copilot – a conversational AI assistant that is grounded in an organization’s own Salesforce data. Thus far, we have seen some interesting use cases such as generating emails to leads based on existing CRM data, generating reporting metrics using natural language processing instead of having to create a report, or summarizing a customer’s progress to a manager or leadership team. If you couple Copilot with existing Einstein scoring data, the potential for marketing and sales teams to continually engage with the right leads at their level of interest in real-time is as compelling. Overall, Salesforce AI tools have the potential to be time-saving technology to help businesses focus on more important, revenue generating activities.
At Dreamforce 2024, however, we suspect Einstein Copilot will become a main show piece complete with many new, real-world applications that leave people saying: “I have to get that!”
The same goes for the Einstein 1 Studio product, which was announced earlier this year at TrailblazerDx, Salesforce’s largest annual conference for developers. We’re most interested in learning how the product’s low-code custom AI actions and Prompt Builder tools will be enhanced.
Data Cloud Developments
Over the past year, Salesforce has emphasized the nexus of big data and AI, which means’ the company’s focus on Data Cloud will likely continue. Earlier this year, Salesforce piloted Data Cloud Vector Database, which purports to be the solution for ingesting all of an organization’s unstructured data, such as PDFs, call transcripts, and emails. At Dreamforce 2024, we want to learn how this product will work with AI-powered tools like Einstein Copilot or be able to be leveraged by other LLMs.
What’s New in Revenue Cloud?
RLM, or revenue lifecycle management is a new(ish) addition to Revenue Cloud that is being touted (and priced!) as an enterprise-level CPQ that offers more expansive use of native Salesforce functionality. Salesforce has been quiet about RLM so far, but we expect it to be a significant discussion topic during Dreamforce 2024. We look forward to hearing how they position this alongside CPQ and Salesforce Billing and what new features they plan on rolling out.
Supercharging Slack
Sometimes Salesforce acquires a product, then doesn’t really do much with it. This is 100% not the case with Slack. Salesforce’s commitment to Slack is clear, as evidenced by last week’s announcement from Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, that Einstein Copilot will be integrated into Slack. This follows earlier announcements at TrailblazerDX, where Salesforce introduced a new free portal providing developers with a suite of tools for building, testing, deploying, and managing Slack applications. The integration of AI, enterprise-level sandboxes, four new APIs, and a new developer community signal a transformative future for Slack. At Dreamforce 2024, we’re looking forward to learning more about what Salesforce has in mind for Slack’s future.
Dreamforce 2024 is shaping up to be an event full of groundbreaking innovations, insightful sessions, and unparalleled networking opportunities. At DCS, we are excited to see how these developments can help organizations—especially our clients—thrive in 2024 and well beyond. We’ll be monitoring any big developments that emerge from Dreamforce 2024 on this blog, so be sure to check back for updates in the coming weeks.
And, if you’re inspired to make changes to your Salesforce setup after Dreamforce 2024, please contact us. Let’s navigate the future of Salesforce together!