Dreamforce 2024, which debuted in 2003, kicked off on Tuesday in San Francisco, featuring more than 1,200 keynotes, sessions, and workshops. While the event will encompass a wide spectrum of topics, expect Salesforce to showcase Agentforce next week at Dreamforce.
Designed to streamline workflows, boost customer satisfaction, and redefine the customer service landscape, Agentforce was unveiled just days in advance of Dreamforce 2024, but expect the conference to be full of talk about the low-code tool suite for creating autonomous AI agents that can reason for themselves when completing sales, service, marketing, and commerce tasks. Salesforce also recently announced the October availability of two autonomous agents for sales teams built on Agentforce. In his keynote, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will no doubt discuss Agentforce further, as Salesforce seeks to become the platform of choice for building AI assistants for sales, service, and marketing use cases.
AI capabilities integrated into Salesforce products is taking center stage. Watch for updates and enhancements to Salesforce’s data cloud platform and new tools and features designed to improve customer engagement and satisfaction.
It’s also likely Salesforce will announce new or update existing industry-specific offerings tailored to verticals like healthcare, finance, and manufacturing. Dreamforce is also traditionally where Salesforce provides insights into its product and platform roadmap.
Here’s the latest news and insights from Dreamforce 2024, as well as related Salesforce coverage. Be sure to follow this page for more Dreamforce 2024 news as it unfolds.
From Dreamforce 2024
5 key takeaways from Dreamforce 2024
As Salesforce’s 2024 Dreamforce conference rolls up the carpet for another year, here’s a look at a few high points as Salesforce pitched a new era for its customers, centered around Agentforce for bringing agentic AI to enterprise sales and service operations.
Alation and Salesforce partner on data governance for Data Cloud
September 18, 2024: Data intelligence platform vendor Alation has partnered with Salesforce to deliver trusted, governed data across the enterprise. It will do this, it said, with bidirectional integration between its platform and Salesforce’s to seamlessly delivers data governance and end-to-end lineage within Salesforce Data Cloud.
Autodesk enlists Einstein AI to enhance employee and customer service
September 17, 2024: The CAD/CAM design giant is putting Salesforce generative AI to work as part of its AI-augmented journey to enhance its employee and customer experience.
New Data Cloud features to boost Salesforce’s AI agents
September 17, 2024: In a move designed to empower its AI agents with a boost in capabilities, Salesforce is rolling out new features for its Data Cloud. The focus is on enhancing the data accessibility and processing power for Einstein, Salesforce’s AI engine. The new features include data lakes for storing large amounts of information, data warehousing for structured data analysis, and streaming data ingestion for real-time insights. Salesforce hopes that by improving data management, its AI agents to handle complex tasks, personalize interactions, and ultimately drive sales and improve customer satisfaction.
Certinia showcases Customer Success Cloud at Dreamforce
September 17, 2024: Professional services automation firm Certinia used the Salesforce Dreamforce 2024 conference in San Francisco to announce its Customer Success Cloud solution. This cloud-based platform is designed to help enterprises transform customer experiences by offering a hub for managing all customer interactions. Natively built on the Salesforce platform, CS Cloud uses the same underlying database as Certinia’s marquee product, Professional Services Cloud (PS Cloud), but with a view to the needs of the customer success manager rather than a manager of professional services.
Slack opens up to third-party AI ‘agents’
September 16: Slack is opening its platform to third-party AI agents. The move is designed to integrate AI assistants from Asana, Adobe, Anthropic, Box and others directly into Slack workflows. According to a statement from Salesforce, users can interact with these AI agents to access data, update records and draft emails without leaving the Slack platform. Other AI features in Slack are receiving upgradesinclude AI-powered summaries for video calls and an AI workflow builder designed to automate tasks.
Related coverage
Salesforce unveils Agentforce to help create autonomous AI bots
September 12, 2024: The CRM giant’s new low-code suite enables enterprises to build AI agents that can reason for themselves when completing sales, service, marketing, and commerce tasks.
Salesforce to acquire data protection specialist Own Company for $1.9 billion
September 6, 2024: Cloud-based CRM vendor Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Own Company, a data protection and data management solutions company for $1.9 billion in cash. Salesforce said the growing use of AI and generative AI has heightened customers’ awareness of their need to protect and manage data, and Own’s solutions will enhance availability, security, and compliance of customer data across Salesforce’s platform.
Salesforce mulls consumption pricing for AI agents
August 30, 2024: Salesforce is mulling a new pricing model for AI agent conversations as it gears up for the release of Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform. Agentforce is a low-code/no-code platform for building autonomous AI agents that Salesforce co-founder, Chairman, and CEO Marc Benioff is expected to detail in his Dreamforce 2024 keynote in September. During the CRM giant’s 2QFY25 earnings call on Aug. 28, Morgan Stanley Analyst Keith Weiss noted that with Salesforce promising big productivity gains from AI agents investors are worried that Salesforce customers will need to license fewer seats.
Salesforce unveils autonomous agents for sales teams
August 22, 2024: Salesforce announced two autonomous agents geared to help sales teams scale their operations and hone their negotiation skills. Slated for general availability in October, Einstein Sales Development Rep (SDR) Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent will be available through Sales Cloud. Both agents are built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform, a forthcoming low-code/no-code platform for building autonomous AI agents
Salesforce to acquire PoS startup PredictSpring to augment Commerce Cloud
August 2, 2024: Customer relationship management (CRM) software provider Salesforce will acquire cloud-based point-of-sale (PoS) software vendor PredictSpring to augment its existing Customer 360 capabilities in an attempt to get a stronger hold in the retail industry. The California-based startup’s PoS systems enable store associates to engage shoppers and complete transactions from anywhere in the store via a mobile device, Salesforce said in a statement.
Salesforce debuts gen AI benchmark for CRM
June 17, 2024: Salesforce announced a gen AI benchmark for CRM, which aims to help businesses make more informed decisions when choosing large language models (LLMs) for use with business applications. “Customers don’t just want the best model,” explains Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI. “They want to make sure it’s the best model that’s compliant, fits their security standards, and doesn’t break the bank.”
Salesforce-Informatica acquisition talks fall through
April 12, 2024: Salesforce’s negotiations to acquire Informatica, an enterprise data management software provider have fallen through as both couldn’t agree on the terms of the deal. The disagreement about the terms of the deal is more likely to be around the price of each share of Informatica, WSJ reported, adding that Salesforce was negotiating a mid-30s price per share with the enterprise data management software provider.