Organizations in today’s digital landscape rely on interconnected systems, meaning integrating platforms and unifying operations is critical. As AI becomes a bigger part of modern systems, technologies such as Salesforce Agentforce AI are drawn more in focus.
Practitioners, meanwhile, have proven to be the biggest benefactors and influencers of data-driven markets. With its leading role in automation integrations, Salesforce Inc. has had its eye on the broader enterprise AI market. The company’s plans around automation and for Salesforce Agentforce AI were a central focus of the recent Dreamforce event.
Christophe Bertrand and John Furrier of theCUBE talk during Dreamforce 2024.
“This Dreamforce could be Salesforce living the dream, bringing it all together and building those abstraction layers, and making gen AI to be the glue layer, so to speak,” said John Furrier, executive analyst at theCUBE Research, during Dreamforce. “To bring it all together to abstract away all the complexity, reduce the steps it takes to get things done.”
The latest product announcements, new use cases and Salesforce Agentforce AI were explored by Furrier and theCUBE Principal Analyst Christophe Bertrand. They talked with industry executives and experts about the developments and innovations within the enterprise AI community.
Here are three key insights you may have missed from Dreamforce:
1. Salesforce’s automation plans could transform its future.
As mentioned, Salesforce has long held its reputation tied to its solid business. But with agentic systems hitting the scene, the company has a dream scenario on their hands, according to Furrier.
Christophe Bertrand and John Furrier of theCUBE talk about the latest announcements during Dreamforce 2024.
“Salesforce, although it has disparate systems, has tons of data. They’ve got to use the data, they’ve got to get agents out there, they’ve got to protect the data,” Furrier said. “It is a perfect scenario for them to be the poster child of how gen AI could transform an existing giant into a mega giant.”
As Salesforce integrates generative AI and data-driven strategies, securing and utilizing data becomes more essential. It’s critical, and when a company spends a couple of billion on protecting it, it indicates how it is important, according to Bertrand.
“It’s about the essence of the business. It’s about automating workflows. It’s about leveraging all of that data that maybe you’re actually not using today. Guess what? A lot of people here are probably underplaying their hands with their data right now,” Bertrand said. “I think the promise of gen AI is, and AI in general within Salesforce … is that it will bring a lot of automations and a lot of great things to the table.”
As the event played out, Salesforce laid out a path to infuse business processes with cutting-edge agentic AI. It indicated why Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had suggested that the event would be the most important Dreamforce ever, according to Bertrand.
“It’s very hard to turn a platform company into an application company or vice versa. If they pull this off, they’ll be one of the largest to have ever done it and they’ll transform the company,” he said during an event wrap-up analysis. “It’s not just the Customer 360, but anything that customers choose to connect to the Customer 360 that can activate … an agent. Salesforce becomes the platform on which others can build agents.”
Here’s theCUBE’s complete analyst segment:
2. Salesforce Agentforce AI aims to integrate seamlessly into business workflows.
At Dreamforce, discussions with executives touched on the role of Salesforce Agentforce AI, the company’s major push to deploy AI agents on its CRM platform. Salesforce Agentforce AI represents the next evolution of the company’s AI wave, according to Muralidhar Krishnaprasad (pictured), president and chief technology officer at Salesforce.
Salesforce’s Muralidhar Krishnaprasad talks with theCUBE during Dreamforce 2024.
“We had AI wave one, which was our Einstein predictive. The AI wave two is all our copilots with generative AI, and we’re now entering the age of agents,” Krishnaprasad said during Dreamforce.
Agents are intended to plan better and do more complex tasks, and in many cases, it will eventually lead to the more autonomous AI, according to Krishnaprasad. At Dreamforce, the big announcement surrounded Salesforce Agentforce AI.
“Our platform is going to be one of the most comprehensive platforms for agent development … think about any business in the world. What do you do normally? You do advertising, marketing, you do sales, you do online commerce, you do service, you do analytics,” Krishnaprasad said. “Imagine all of them on a platform on which you can now have agents that can help you through all of these process and more. That’s our big announcement.”
Agentforce transforms customer interactions by integrating AI-driven agents with the company’s trusted platform and Data Cloud, according to David Schmaier, president and chief product officer of Salesforce. All told, it’s about Salesforce Data Cloud powering AI-driven customer experiences.
“Our view is the data powers the AI and the agents, and the agents power the customer experience for the next generation. So, we’ve really brought it all together with Agentforce,” Schmaier said.
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Muralidhar Krishnaprasad:
3. There’s a goal to streamline business and enhance customer solutions.
At Dreamforce, there was an emphasis on Salesforce’s robust ecosystem, which will be key moving forward. That includes a strategic collaboration between Amazon Web Services Inc. and Salesforce Data Cloud.
AWS and Salesforce have joined forces to streamline procurement for joint customers, with AWS Marketplace playing a key role. Many companies are saying they’re using Marketplace with Salesforce to streamline procurement, optimize spend management costs and make things smoother when it comes to buying Salesforce products, according to Matt Yanchyshyn, vice president of AWS Marketplace and partner services at AWS.
Matt Yanchyshyn of AWS talks partnerships with theCUBE during Dreamforce 2024.
“Not only is it Salesforce with Hyperforce, we’re excited how it’s deployed on AWS, but even internally we use Salesforce, and that’s at the root of the partnership,” he said. “I use the Experience Cloud to build my Partner Central product. Our internal CRM is built on Sales Cloud. So we’re big consumers and so we’re partners in the true sense.”
The importance of strong partnerships was echoed during Dreamforce by Nick Otto, head of global strategic partnerships at IBM Corp. For IBM, if a company isn’t driving different outcomes, at the end of the day, the value isn’t going to land, according to Otto.
“What we’ve done with watsonx Orchestrate in collaboration with Agentforce, we’ve been on this being able to get your insights and then drive different outcomes,” he said. “That’s all around automation and orchestration, which has been a focus of ours for quite some time.”
Dreamforce was also a chance to hear more about Salesforce’s partnership with Canva Pty. Ltd., which involves AI-driven data autofill intended to streamline visual communication. Canva’s Data autofill works in the Salesforce CRM, according to Rob Giglio, chief customer officer of Canva.
“If you’re a sales team, for instance, if I have 50 accounts, I don’t want to go into 50 different presentations and add a logo, a name and business details,” Giglio said. “Instead, what I can do is I can create an automated workflow using this brand new integration that just launched where I take Salesforce data, I autofill it into my presentations, and I can create 50, a hundred or 150 presentations in seconds.”
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Matt Yanchyshyn:
Here’s the complete video playlist, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Dreamforce 2024: