Milind Katti
COO & Co-Founder, DemandFarm
Dreamforce 2019
Dreamforce – undoubtedly one of the largest tech events in the world. Salesforce’s massive event gathers more than 170,000 attendees at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. Dreamforce 2019 was an electrifying week filled with innovation, excitement, and inspiration.
4 Days; 2,700+ sessions; 50+ speakers
Did you get a chance to catch up on any of the keynotes or ‘fireside chat’ between Marc Benioff and Apple’s Tim Cook? But other than these wonderful conversations, there are few important highlights of Dreamforce 2019 which you need to know!
Welcoming the Newbie – Tableau
Since Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau for a whopping 15.7 billion in an all-stock deal in May, lots of efforts are put in to employ the massive capabilities of the leading analytics platform inside Salesforce.
Salesforce has also made huge investments in AI which can boost Tableau’s efforts shortly. In the keynote, Adam Selipsky, President and CEO spoke about the need for building a data culture within every organization.
Starting the keynote, Selipskya specified the merger as a “natural combination” to join Salesforce. In terms of fit & overlap, Selipsky and Benioff gave a high-level overview of what to expect. Anyways, users and partners can definitely expect some high-level analytical advancements in the Salesforce platform very sooner.
‘Hey Einstein’ – Voice to Customer experience
‘Hey Einstein’ is similar to Alexa or Google’s assistant but a more focused solution for the workplace. It’s all about bringing Salesforce closer to the community by introducing voice access to Salesforce data which will enable salespeople to quickly access data on the go and to ask the system questions about their data. Salesforce is soon launching a tool that will allow companies to quickly build basic Einstein skills to pull up data from Salesforce.
Salesforce Chief Product Officer Bret Taylor gave a small demo and added that “We’re really excited about the idea of voice in businesses — the idea that every business can have an AI guide to their business decisions”. The list of announcements included.
1. Einstein Voice Skills
Ready-made dialogue snippets and tools tailored toward specific roles or industries, designed to help “admins and developers to build custom, voice-powered Salesforce apps”, which could be rendered as Alexa Skills, Google Assistant Actions, or other tasks that can be carried out by voice assistants.
2. Service Cloud Voice
Resources that closely integrate contact center functions with Service Cloud-based applications and services, enabling agents to avail themselves of Einstein in all its capabilities through a “unified agent console”.
3. Einstein Call Coaching
Console for managers that use conversational data to spot trends and provide sales reps with best practices and insights to support designed to improve customer experience (CX).
Trailhead GO
One of the key announcements at Dreamforce was a deepening of the partnership between Apple and Salesforce. The Giants – Apple and Salesforce have jointly come up with a new companion app Trailhead Go – a sales coach and learning solution which is compatible with iOS and iPad OS.
This also implies that no Android for now. Announced in Dreamforce and now integrated with the Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce has entered into the Edutech market providing its users and partners with the best technology resources. Though priced at $25, it’s worth it because of new enhancements of AI and Voice power.
Also note that Salesforce has redesigned and launched its Salesforce Mobile app with advanced features like deeper analytics and insights to users, using Siri shortcuts and FaceID with Apple’s design features. It’s completely free and is available in the app store.
Conclusion
With all these exciting announcements about partnerships and developments, Dreamforce 2019 has ended up leaving us excited for the future of technology. What was your highlight of Dreamforce 2019? Write to us and also stay tuned for our next blog on ‘Account Planning sessions in Dreamforce 19 – Everything you need to know!’