For the 124th episode of Burning Platform, Michael Maoz, SVP Innovation Strategies and Ed Thompson, Market Strategist at Salesforce provide a sneak preview of what to expect at Dreamforce.
Michael and Ed are former Gartner colleagues and it was great to reconnect with them as we prepped for the episode.
They cover a lot of ground in about 35 minutes. Several things stand out
- Agentforce will dominate the airwaves. Salesforce calls it a “suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce, driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction.” CEO Marc Benioff had previewed in a Jim Cramer Mad Money interview early examples from several industries including Wiley (publishing), Kaiser (healthcare), ADP (services), Wyndham and Open Table (hospitality). Michael promises there will be many more and DF attendees will be able to take their own personalized agent home. “That’s the new swag” he says. Ed points out attendees will learn about “71 use cases of Generative AI and agents that Salesforce is using internally ”. It’s about time the conversation in the industry moved beyond GPUs and LLMs, to practical use cases and payback and Dreamforce promises plenty of that.
- Data Cloud should also get plenty of attention. It has been scaling massively over the last couple of years “We're up to over a trillion different data interactions. And by the way, trillions of predictions. And “we have 3000 developers working on it. Everyone tends to look at Databricks and Snowflake, that category of vendors but we've got more developers than they have, just focused on this stuff.” Michael also clarifies “we're not trying to own your data. That's not our game. We're not building it so that we can charge you to store your data on our system and have it all trapped. Data Cloud is not a traditional database, the way people think about it.”
- There will be plenty more in the 1,300 sessions. As Ed summarizes “there are 500 features in the latest release, which get completely ignored.”
- Of course. Dreamforce is never just a product showcase. You get to meditate with monks, mingle with all kinds of mascots and musicians and Trailblazers and the creative team at Salesforce always takes the “National Park” to new heights. And the city of San Francisco which has been going through a rough time the last few years, always cleans up for the event.
Image Credit – Ray Wang
Nothing compares to being there in person. But you can feel the pulsating energy in their voices. Very nicely done.
