Dreamforce 2019, Salesforce's 17th annual conference, welcomed a staggering 171,000 attendees to the city of San Francisco. Americaneagle.com was thrilled to be part of the world's largest tech conference and here are some of our highlights:
The conference began with the introduction of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), purported to be a 12 trillion dollar opportunity! Salesforce has always positioned that the business can be a vehicle for positive change. "That is why we're here as Trailblazers: to improve the state of the world with trust, customer success, innovation, and equality" stated Salesforce Co-CEO Marc Benioff.
We heard about how Diversity and Soft Skills are important in the future workplace. As AI becomes more prominent, the workforce must reskill, and those skills that AI can't do well, which are already in demand, become even more important. We already face these challenges, like unintentional bias in AI. Like our children, they learn from us.
Salesforce is definitely a company of inclusion and there is even surprising diversity in their partnerships. Apple is a big component of this partnership and Dreamforce launched two new Salesforce apps on iOS: the redesigned flagship Salesforce app and a brand new Salesforce Trailhead GO app, which brings the trailblazing Trailhead online training site to mobile. Additionally, Apple and Salesforce launched a mobile SDK for iOS (Swift and iOS 13).
Microsoft is also a Salesforce partner and Azure will be the public cloud provider for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and we can expect new integrations that connect Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with Microsoft Teams!
Salesforce is also working with Amazon Web Services with their new Einstein Voice Skills technologies. Einstein Voice turns the Salesforce mobile app into a Salesforce-contextually-aware voice assistant. In spectacular Dreamforce fashion, we even got to demo a prototype Einstein hardware product (think Alexa) which looked like a small Einstein figure.
Even more AI was highlighted, including Einstein Vision (analysis/comparison of images), OCR or Optical Character Recognition (reading of text from an image/scan), and Call Coaching (sales call recording, converted to text, and analyzed for context, sentiment, insights, and trends.)
No beef at Dreamforce? Yes, there really were 171k people at the event, and yes Salesforce feeds them all lunch. For the first time beef was off the menu. This move saved 9 million gallons of water. This environmentally conscious move was backed up with the previously-implemented efforts of using 100% compostable utensils and packaging, and of course: no straws.
Everyone wants a greener world, but despite the name, Salesforce Evergreen is a new application technology, not an environmental action. The newly announced Evergreen allows for modern event-driven scalable app development with the Customer 360 at its heart. Familiar languages like Node.js, Java, and Apex are leveraged to create apps and functions in the microservice style. It all runs with a serverless elastic runtime, powered by Kubernetes. Wow!
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Dreamforce isn't just about keynotes, roadmaps and product announcements - it's also the largest event in the world, with industry experts sharing their knowledge, giving demos, and networking.
We learned how Salesforce uses Salesforce, the importance of needing quality Salesforce Architects (Americaneagle.com is a great choice, of course) for your project, and attended dozens of developer and admin breakout sessions, as well as meeting with our partners and customers who were at the event.
We’re already looking forward to next year's Dreamforce event from November 9-12, 2020. If you need any help with Salesforce, from implementation through post roll-out help with maximizing your investment in the world’s leading CRM, don’t hesitate to contact us.