As Salesforce’s 2024 Dreamforce convention rolls up the carpet for one more 12 months, right here’s a have a look at just a few excessive factors as Salesforce pitched a brand new period for its clients, centered round Agentforce, which brings agentic AI to enterprise gross sales and repair operations.
“We wish to be the primary to welcome you into the longer term,” mentioned Salesforce cofounder and CEO Marc Benioff throughout his opening keynote, “and we have a look at our Salesforce platform as ‘your future as a service.’”
[ Related: Dreamforce 2024 coverage ]
Enter the Agentforce period
Agentforce, Salesforce’s platform for building and deploying autonomous AI brokers, is about people with brokers driving buyer success, Benioff mentioned, touting brokers because the third wave of AI.
Agentic AI is a rising trend in the enterprise, and Salesforce is coming into the fray alongside opponents such as ServiceNow by enabling enterprises to deploy brokers able to analyzing knowledge, making selections, and taking motion with out human intervention. Brokers constructed on the Agentforce platform can, for instance, be deployed to reply customer support inquiries, qualify gross sales leads, and optimize advertising and marketing campaigns all on their very own, in keeping with Salesforce.
As Benioff put it in his keynote, Einstein Copilot — itself the product of a decade-long evolution — has been “formally upgraded” to Agentforce.
Together with the autonomous brokers, together with these for gross sales, service, advertising and marketing, and commerce, Salesforce unveiled Agent Builder, a low-code software that, as a part of Agentforce Studio, works together with Salesforce’s Mannequin Builder and Immediate Builder instruments to allow clients to rapidly construct and customise their very own brokers.
The poster little one on stage for Agentforce Studio was high-end division retailer Saks Fifth Avenue, which, Benioff mentioned, constructed and deployed its Agentforce agent, dubbed Sophie, in only one week.
Sophie not solely solutions questions in the way in which of a conventional chatbot however also can carry out actions comparable to understanding {that a} buyer ordered the unsuitable measurement and arranging product exchanges with out having handy the client off to a human service agent. Throughout a demo, Salesforce confirmed how the AI might be rapidly prolonged to carry out different duties, comparable to checking {that a} retailer has inventory of an merchandise and asking the client whether or not they would favor to choose the merchandise up or have it shipped.
A brand new ecosystem, the Agentforce Accomplice Community, supplies extensions permitting third-party merchandise for use in chains of complicated actions required of an agent. Launch companions, the corporate mentioned, embrace Amazon Net Providers, Field, Google Cloud, IBM, Workday, Zoom, and extra.
Agentforce can be usually accessible in October.
Knowledge Cloud on the core
Final 12 months, Salesforce rebuilt its Data Cloud to support Einstein Copilot, the corporate’s first full foray into generative AI. This 12 months it’s calling Knowledge Cloud “the heartbeat of the Salesforce platform and basis of Agentforce.”
In line with Benioff, Salesforce’s Knowledge Cloud processes 767 trillion data per 30 days. All Salesforce Buyer 360 apps have been rewritten to dwell in Knowledge Cloud, as has Tableau.
Moreover, the company announced a number of new Data Cloud features on the convention, together with additions to unstructured knowledge help, together with native processing of audio and video content material, comparable to webinars and calls; a standardized semantic knowledge mannequin that allows Agentforce Brokers and people to interpret and use knowledge constantly; improved search capabilities factoring in buyer context to permit for faster info discovery; real-time knowledge activations to reply immediately to altering buyer wants; and extra knowledge safety and governance options to, the corporate mentioned, “ safeguard operations and forestall pointless knowledge publicity.”
“Once we inspired you to make use of Knowledge Cloud, what we didn’t notice is we had been getting ready you very effectively for AI,” Benioff famous.
Extra AI in Slack
Salesforce has already infused Slack with AI, however with Agentforce for Slack, the corporate demonstrated people and AIs collaborating in a Slack channel. New Salesforce channels in Slack can carry info from Salesforce straight into Slack, with out launching one other utility.
Slack’s new person interface for brokers not solely talks to Agentforce brokers, it will possibly interact with third-party agents from Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and extra.
Different new goodies embrace huddle notes, simplified automation, improved search, and collections of templates for channels, canvases, lists, and automatic workflows.
A brand new AI ventures fund
Salesforce Ventures is throwing one other $500 million into its AI funding pot with the institution of a brand new AI Fund. The corporate’s dedication to AI innovators now totals $1 billion over the previous 18 months. Thus far, Salesforce Ventures has invested in additional than two dozen AI firms, together with Anthropic, Cohere, Runway, TogetherAI, Mistral AI, and Hugging Face.
“Our expanded funding deepens our dedication to serving to essentially the most dynamic and expansive innovators win the market by accelerating their progress via our buyer community and delivering trusted AI that earns the boldness of the most important firms on this planet,” Paul Drews, managing companion of Salesforce Ventures, mentioned in a press release. “Values drive worth, and we all know belief and duty are good for the world — and good for enterprise.”
Free AI coaching
To assist handle the AI abilities hole, via the tip of 2025, Salesforce will supply its AI coaching and certifications freed from cost on its Trailhead on-line studying platform.
It’ll additionally supply in-person group and worker abilities growth in its San Francisco headquarters, and in different areas worldwide.
“The appearance of AI and brokers represents the most important technological shift of our era, and can seriously change how folks work,” mentioned Brian Millham, president and chief working officer at Salesforce, in a press release. “We have to guarantee everybody is provided with the talents they want to reach this new AI world.”
Salesforce mentioned that these initiatives signify a $50 million funding in AI abilities progress. It hopes to achieve 100,000 extra college students via this system.
And yet one more factor
On the finish of his keynote, Benioff acknowledged that everybody doesn’t essentially use all of Salesforce’s merchandise, and highlighted Salesforce Foundations, introduced on Sept. 5 and accessible now, that offers clients utilizing the enterprise editions of Gross sales Cloud or Service Cloud free entry to Gross sales, Service, Advertising, Commerce, and Knowledge Cloud options, all in a brand new, enhanced UI. Agentforce brokers can be added to the combination later this 12 months.
There are caveats, nonetheless: It’s “topic to regional availability,” electronic mail campaigns are restricted to 2,000 sends per 30 days, it contains 10,000 Knowledge Cloud segmentation and activation credit, Commerce Pay Now transaction charges apply, and free Knowledge Cloud credit score limits apply.
