What happened at Dreamforce 2019: Keynotes and Announcements

Now that the Dreamforce’19 has come to an end let’s delve into the exciting parts of the event that hooked the audience. This year’s Dreamforce with 2700+ sessions attracted 13M+ online viewers and 171K registered guests. That’s a lot!

Global leaders from public and private sector along with politicians, artists, journalists, sportspeople came together at Dreamforce for keynotes, fireside chats, and panels.

This year witnessed the most sustainable Dreamforce ever. There were recycling volunteers, green transportation, sustainable packaging that conserved 100K single-use plastic bottles and 9M gallons of water. This puts emphasis on the sustainable development goals that Salesforce is laser-focused.

Salesforce pledges 1% and over 20 years of giving back; they were successful in adding 9K+ companies to the group. Till date, Salesforce gave back – 1% time (4.5M volunteer hours), 1% equity ($310M+ grants), and 1% product (45K+ non-profit partners).

Salesforce claims for affordable and clean energy – 100% renewable energy by the financial year 2022, Net-zero emissions, Carbon neutral Cloud, Set up Coalition. It pledges to America’s Workers 1M jobs.

Dreamforce’19 had some really big announcements that made heads turn. It also highlighted its partnership with strategic technology partners – Microsoft, IBM, Apple, AWS, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Google, Alibaba Group, Cisco, and Dell.

Let’s see some of the interesting partnerships and what can be expected out of them.

‘Holy Grail’ connecting companies and customers – Customer 360 Truth

Salesforce introduced Customer 360 Truth, a platform that brings together the historically fragmented customer experiences into a single truth. It unifies all of the data touchpoints to build a single source of truth about the customer.

Salesforce illustrated the application of Customer 360 Truth is the Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Platforms. Customers might not want to know how your company is divided into Sales, Marketing, and Service teams but would connect with you as a brand, and that’s what is expected of your business. Quoting Louis Vuitton, Salesforce explained how having a single source of truth (SSOT) allows businesses to provide personalized and relevant customer experiences at every touchpoint.

Helping people see and understand data – Tableau

Tableau, the #1 Analytics platform, was welcomed into Salesforce Ohana. Adam Selipsky, Tableau’s CEO, shared the stage with Marc and talked about how they share the same passion of customer success and digital transformation as Salesforce. He quoted that Tableau helps businesses ‘see and understand data’ because that’s the most important thing for businesses to deal with every day.

Against many expectations, not much has been revealed of how Tableau fits into the Salesforce stack. We might have to wait a little more time to understand the ‘how’ of it, but for now, Tableau seems to add potential to Salesforce for creating a single, unified view of all customer data.

Bringing voice to every customer – “Hey Einstein!”

Though Einstein Voice was introduced in Dreamforce’18, the voice capabilities were pushed this year. Last year Salesforce introduced Einstein Voice Assistant to allow customers to make queries of their Salesforce data using voice commands, and now has extended this across its product portfolio with customizable Einstein Voice Skills. Einstein Call Coaching will give management great visibility into its teams’ performance through natural language processing. They can get insights into trends like the mention of competitors’ names in the calls, or best practices of the top performers etc.

Transforming the way businesses run – Apple Partnership

Even Apple’s partnership was introduced in the last year, but it took center stage at Dreamforce 2019. In the exclusive fireside chat, Mr Benioff explained how Apple has a special place in his heart since 1984 when he joined it for an internship. Tim talked about how Apple blended personal and business with the launch of a mobile operating system that’s best for enterprises. Since then, Apple has been working on bringing enterprise features to the operating system.

Tim believes that more than browsing, email, and messaging, a mobile transforms the way you run a business through its applications. To which Benioff confronted that he himself runs the business on the phone, and doesn’t use a computer anymore. The partnership brings a new Salesforce mobile App that delivers a new Einstein-enables user experience, that’s powered by AI and reimagined for iOS. And also Trailhead Go, the first-ever mobile App for Trailhead, exclusive to iOS and iPadOS.

Creating a positive brand to draw customer loyalty – AWS Partnership

There were a few announcements made by Salesforce regarding its partnership with the public cloud vendor Amazon Web Services. They include Service Cloud Voice, AWS Learning pathway, and Einstein Voice Skills on Alexa. Service Cloud Voice is a new offering that is linked to Amazon Connect to provide service agents with the ability to deliver enhanced customer service support. Amazon Connect, a service center software suite that uses AWS AI services like transcription and translation, will be available as part of the Service Cloud Voice package.

AWS and Trailhead are partnering to provide free AWS online learning on Trailhead to address the skills gap. It will start with AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials learning on Trailhead, with additions later on. And the third announcement includes that of Alexa, integrating Einstein Voice Skills with Amazon Alexa.

Conclusion:

From trailblazers filling the Moscone Convention Center to cameras clicking pictures everywhere, from attendees interacting with Salesforce mascots to Keynotes and Fireside chats, from the loudest Dreamfest to the quiet moments with monastics, Dreamfest’19 ended in a blink. We came across some great announcements and not-so-revealed ones too. After all, it was a great time of fun and learning, waiting for Dreamforce 2020 already.

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