Dreamforce 2024: All the news and announcements as they happened
ITPro was live on the ground in San Francisco for Dreamforce 2024 – catch up on all the announcements at the annual Salesforce conference
AgentForce was announced ahead of Dreamforce this week, with the company clearly aiming to raise interest around the new service. You can read more about how this could benefit customers and Salesforce's approach in our Dreamforce 2024 preview below.
• Salesforce wants to show what Salesforce wants to show what “AI was always meant to be”
Arriving in San Francisco yesterday was an interesting experience to say the least. The city is absolutely awash with thousands of attendees. Every second person on the street seems to have a lanyard on - myself included.
With the conference held at the Moscone Center, it really feels like the heart of the city is just all-in on Salesforce.
As mentioned, Salesforce clearly wanted a head start in raising the hype around AgentForce ahead of the opening keynote. Last week's press briefing was a lively affair, but there was one key talking point that stood out.
Klarna, which is making a name for itself banging the generative AI drum of late, recently revealed it had cut ties with Workday and Salesforce in a bid to cut down SaaS spending.
It's a bold move, but one that CEO Marc Benioff seemed rather perplexed at. You can read all about what's going on there below.
• Marc Benioff questions Klarna CEO's move to scrap Workday, Salesforce in SaaS ‘consolidation’ drive
Things are picking up now at the Moscone Center - a steady flow of attendees making their way into the conference
It feels like a lifetime since Dreamforce 2023. Last year's conference took place during while generative AI was still very much in its 'non-starter' period. Concerns over hallucinations, data privacy, and security were rampant.
One year on, and these concerns are still lingering, but we're seeing adoption rates accelerate and investment surging.
With under two hours to go until the opening keynote here at Dreamforce 2024, catch up on our roundup of last year's conference.
Wouldn't be Dreamforce without some chilled music before the opening keynote. The conference hall is filling up rapidly now - what was a steady flow is now a torrent here at the Moscone Center.
Even the queue for pictures with the Einstein mascot is at least 30 people.
We have our first speaker of the day on stage here at the Moscone Center. Lynne Zaledonis, EVP for partner and customer success at Salesforce kicks things off with a welcome for attendees.
Zaledonis has welcomed Keir Dowden, CTO Salesforce Digital at Credera onto stage now to talk about how AI is helping improve productivity for partner organizations.
We had a short snappy promotional video showing workers using the Einstein AI tool to fine tune email, and simplify client communications.
"The first thing is to embrace it {AI], this is the future of work," Dowden says. AgentForce, Dowden adds, is a potential game changer for customers.
The next partner success story we're hearing about this morning is OpenTable, one of the biggest hospitality booking providers on earth. One billion diners, tens of thousands of restaurants globally, and they've got to keep both users and clients happy.
To achieve this, OpenTable has adopted AgentForce - we're going to hear a lot about AgentForce this week - to automate processes and help improve productivity for operations teams.
It's just about time to welcome Marc Benioff to the stage now. Excitement building.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff takes the stage to a rapturous applause.
"This Dreamforce is really like no other Dreamforce we've ever had. This is about humans and robots driving customer success together."
There's 45,000 people here today at Dreamforce, Benioff says. Going by the cramped conditions on the streets earlier on today, that seems about right.
Benioff is making his way through the crowd now, as is customary.
"Through Dreamforce's for the last 10 years, we've been talking about the emergence of AI and how AI has been a critical part of our future. We've introduced you to Einstein," he says.
"As we've added to our own technology, in AI this became clear to us - this was a moment of change. We saw this first generation of AI happen, and it was predictive,"
Salesforce helped pioneer predictive AI with Einstein, Benioff says. But we're at an inflection point in the age of AI. We've moved into the 'copilot world', but it's not quite what we expected.
The Copilot world has been a 'hit or miss world', however. "We don't see how this copilot world is going to get us better business results that we've been looking for," he adds.
We’re now reaching the ‘third wave’ of AI, according to Benioff. This period of evolution will be dominated by autonomous agents.
"We're now all going to be using agents, but we're going to do it all within our Salesforce platform," he says. "We've rewritten all of our customer 360 apps into a singular platform.".
"This platform has the best AI in the world, and the best agents. And the reason why that's so important is because it's going to empower you and enable you to bring that to your customers, your customers, to yourselves."
The wide reaching nature of AI agents will be profound, Benioff says. Applications spanning sales, customer service, marking, data analytics, and commerce.
This is a 'high wire act', Benioff says. Salesforce is really leading the charge here with autonomous AI agents, but if it pays off the impact could be profound.
Early indications are very promising though. Businesses are unlocking marked benefits through AgentForce.
"AgentForce has to be the biggest breakthrough in our technology, and the biggest breakthrough in a long time in artificial intelligence," he says.
Benioff is pulling no punches with his criticism of AI copilots. Data privacy and security-related issues are pervasive. Hallucinations are still an issue.
This won't be the case with agents, however. Salesforce has invested heavily in placing the fundamental building blocks for agents as far as safety goes.
"You're going to have the most accurate AI in the world. The platform also has all these customer 360 apps. The apps are inside the platform, it's one reason why the AI is so accurate - it's because it understands what's coming out of the apps," he says.
AgentForce will be generally available in October this year. “The early customer stories are blowing my mind.”
Wiley is a great example, Benioff says. They’ve been a long-term partner and have unlocked significant benefits from AgentForce so far.
“WIley is already reporting that they’re resolving 40% of cases through AgentForce,” he says.
Disney is another big client for Salesforce, and they're using AgentForce extensively to support customer services and to improve experiences for visitors at Disney Land.
"AgentForce looks across the whole park. It looks across the whole park and says 'what rides have long lines, how do we do flow control and keep the park moving?'" Benioff says.
Using AgentForce, guides are able to curate visitor experiences in a more efficient manner.
"When I think about Salesforce today, I think about it in three layers, maybe four. I think about the last 25 years we've been automating every customer touchpoint," he says.
"Anywhere your customers are coming in, we're connecting. We're also building a data cloud so that you have a data lake that is able to absorb all of that customer connectivity, federated that data cloud out, but to other types of data lakes.
"We're able to take all of that data and bring it down into customer 360. Now we want to wrap that with agents and make you even more productive and more capable."
It's an extension of Salesforce's core platform here, when you really boil things down, just with agents woven into everything.
Benioff is back having a pop at AI hype over the last year, comparing a lot of what's out there to a 'DIY' approach.
"We've all struggled these last two years with copilots and LLMs, and how we're putting this all together," he says. Again, agents are the antidote to this AI solutions overload many organizations are dealing with right now.
With AgentForce, however, this new approach aims to combine chatbots and copilots and building out from there. A complete all-rounder, automated, and easy to use.
This will be a major shift, not just for Salesforce, but for customers, partners, and clients. So next up today we've got Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI to look under the hood and explore how these will work in action for customers.
"The very first thing we built in this journey was our Einstein Trust Layer," Shih says. Salesforce is keen to emphasize the safety element within AgentForce. This will likely be a key differentiator for the firm in helping drive adoption of agents and pry potential customers away from copilots.
"We're seeing amazing results," Shih says. AgentForce agents are 33% more accurate compared to comparable 'DIY AI' solutions out there on the market right now. Data insights through AgentForce are also twice as relevant, helping users cut out the chaff.
We're getting a run through how AgentForce can be used in a customer service context. Ever tried - and failed - to get through to a real human customer service agent to query an order?
Looks like you'll probably be interacting with an AI agent soon enough. And if we're being honest, it'll probably be easier. No more 'case deflection', according to Salesforce.
We're back with Benioff now.
"Are you getting jacked? You can see why we're so excited," he says. "It's not just about what's possible, it's about what you can make possible."
"Our goal is simple. For you to augment your employees, create better experiences for customers, and deliver high revenue for your companies."
AgentForce is outperforming OpenAI on Azure in terms of pricing, Benioff says. Big statement, and he's doubled down on it, telling customers to call them out on this.
Salesforce's big push on its Data Cloud offering in recent years has, inadvertently, it appears, laid the perfect foundations for this next stage in AI innovation, Benioff says. With customers flocking to Data Cloud and consolidating all their customer 'touchpoints', this creates the perfect scenario for AgentForce adoption.
Sanjna Parulekar, VP of product marketing, is up on stage now to give us a run down on how enterprises are maximizing the use of their data in the age of AI.
We're getting a run down of how the AgentForce prompt builder functions. Low-code, easy to use prompt engineering capabilities. This looks very much like a 'plug in and play' approach to AI, and will likely resonate with customers.
AgentForce is prompting a big overhaul of workflows and data environments. It's also resulted in a big re-write of Tableau, Benioff says.
"We've got one consistent interface, one platform for the whole customer," he adds.
We're starting to reach the end of the opening keynote session here. It's been a lot.
"We really think this is an unbelievable opportunity," Benioff says. "You can see this vision is starting to unfold".
Salesforce is all-in on AgentForce, that's for sure. The company looks keen to frame this as a far easier experience for enterprises to ramp up AI innovation - and also safer. No more 'DIY AI' and fumbling around with cumbersome large language models (LLMs) and irritating chatbots.
And that's the opening keynote finished. There was a lot to digest there at times, but there certainly seems to be an optimistic outlook at Salesforce for the months ahead, and AgentForce is the big focus right now.
We'll be back tomorrow with more rolling coverage from the day-two keynote, so make sure to keep tabs on this live blog for more updates and announcements.
More coverage of the conference will be rolling in throughout the week, so keep checking in!
It's safe to say yesterday saw an explosive start to Dreamforce, with Marc Benioff kicking things off in the opening keynote. We heard all about Salesforce's new sharpened focus on AgentForce, its platform which allows enterprises to create autonomous AI agents.
The company appears to be all-in on AI agents, and has grand plans to strike in a lead in what some industry figures are touting as the next evolutionary step in the generative AI race.
Salesforce isn't alone in terms of driving AI agents adoption, however. Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled plans to launch its own Copilot agents. We could have a battle brewing between these two early proponents.
You can read all about AgentForce and Benioff's explosive comments about Microsoft below.
• Salesforce CEO wants to “break the hypnosis" coming from major AI vendors
We've got another big crowd heading into the keynote theatre ahead of the afternoon session here at the Moscone Center. The atmosphere is still electric. Let's see how people feel after Dreamfest tonight though.
It's been a busy, busy day here at Dreamforce, and the early keynote gave attendees a deep dive into how AgentForce is being used by enterprises to great effect.
Adam Evans, SVP of product at Salesforce, led the charge this morning, echoing CEO Marc Benioff's comments on agents representing the 'third wave' of AI. Predictive AI had its time, generative AI had its boom, and now we're moving into the autonomous era.
Gary Brandeleer, senior director for product management at Salesforce, gave attendees a glimpse under the hood of AgentForce with a series of demos showcasing the intuitive capabilities of the service.
We're now in a live panel discussion on AI and the future of work, featuring Salesforce chief people officer, Nathalie Scardino, Slack CEO Denise Dresser, and Box chief technology officer, Ben Kus.
You can't have a conversation about AI in 2024 without the topic of job losses inevitably coming up. But will this really be the case? Scardino doesn't think this will be the case.
Take accountants, for example. With the advent of spreadsheets, scaremongering would've had many believe the end of the accountant was nigh. But this apocalypse didn't quite materialize.
They instead turned their attention to more meaningful tasks and high-level work.
AI can be a facilitator of innovation and greatly improve productivity for workers, Dressers notes. We're seeing the tangible benefits of AI helping to drive employee productivity and team synergy in Slack, for example.
AI adoption can be tricky, and scary, for workers. But this is where communication is key during the adoption journey, according to Scardino.
Dresser echoes her comments, noting that leaders at enterprises need to be supportive and clearly communicate their intentions.
"This is a leadership moment," she says. "It's really important to have a truthful conversation about using AI and really bring that out. And then also understand that we have to change the way we work in the age of AI."
"This is something that we all have to lead from the front."
Dresser notes that research from Slack's Workforce Lab showed that enterprises are keen to adopt AI in the workplace. But there are some challenges. Chief among these is trust.
A question from the audience now, and an interesting one. If we're using AI to take the 'drudgery' our of work, then what happens to individuals at enterprises who specifically tackle this 'drudgery'.
Box CTO Ben Kus notes that younger generations are going to be essentially AI native workers upon entering the workforce.
"Some of the new workers will come in and it's more intuitive to them," he says.
Scardino adds that this will require greater transparency in education. This will be about understanding how to get the workforce ready for this evolutionary period in the era of AI.
Workforce development will also be key, Scardino adds. Salesforce has its pathways scheme, for example, that is helping provide apprenticeships.
There will inevitably be new jobs, Dresser adds. We've heard a lot about this in recent months.
AI may take jobs, but it will also create new opportunities. Have we really seen this in action yet though?
We've moved onto misuse of AI tools in the workplace now. It's definitely an issue that's been growing in scale over the last few months. Rogue workers using unauthorized tools in the workplace can create security nightmares for the enterprise.
Dresser says firms need to be clear on what is acceptable to use.
We're coming to a close here. A great panel session so far and it's ending on an interesting note.
With AI expected to change how we work and impact how we measure productivity, this raises questions about enterprise KPIs on worker productivity. Prior to the age of AI, many workers looked busy and productive, but with these new tools alleviating workloads, this could throw things up in the air.
It's up to management, therefore, to also upskill to contend with these new changing trends.
That's all from us here at Dreamforce today, but we'll be back tomorrow with more rolling coverage throughout the day. Be sure to come back and keep tabs on the live blog for all the latest updates.
