Ahoy fellow Salesforce Treasure hunters! The energy of Dreamforce was upon us this past week. It was exciting with the information coming from Dreamforce. And I am still collecting more treasures from the event. The AgentForce keynote and the main Dreamforce keynote were top of my list to uncover. I wanted to share some of my key takeaways from these sessions.
Agents are the New Einstein
The word of the event was ‘agents’. Which was different from last year’s emphasis on Einstein. As Salesforce is known to do, the previous branding of all AI and intelligent automation in Salesforce as ‘Einstein’ has now been rebranded to AgentForce. As more CRM tools market themselves as AI ready and the focus of the industry being more on AI agents my feeling is that Salesforce is trying to position themselves as the top AI CRM. The pairing of tasks and AI is helping to shape a better understanding of what AI is truly geared towards. Which is specific areas and dividing those up into sections to allow for AI systems to get better at one particular task. With Salesforce making this distinction and leaving behind the ‘Einstein copilot’ and ‘copilot builder’ branding they are focusing more on what they are building into the platform. Which is focused AI systems on sales, service, commerce, marketing, etc.
Addition of Atlas
The feature element that I felt was really the new added layer to Salesforce’s AI offering is the Atlas reasoning engine. This is meant to help with better understanding of users prompts and chats from a Salesforce perspective. Which I think when it becomes more widely available ( GA October 2024 ) will be the true highlight of Agentforce.
Clicks not Code
Salesforce is doubling down on their use of flows in the platform. Which they even intend to use with Marketing Cloud instead of the journey builders, a reference back to the original ExactTarget SAAS system that was brought into the Salesforce system in 2013. Flows already are making up part of the copilot builder. And with this Dreamforce, the idea of using your existing flows to partner with your new AI agents was their key to faster and less complex AI advancement for companies. My thoughts are that many companies are still in the process of building out their flow processes and will need to increase their focus on flows in the future to really use these features to their fullest potential.
Data
The Data cloud feature from last Winter release is the final piece to bring Salesforce and AI into the future. Being able to source data from multiple data clouds, data lakes as well as within Salesforce brings together the foundation layer that AgentForce and Salesforce AI will need to really be efficient and meaningful. The AgentForce will need to be trained on sound data. Setting up Data Cloud with AgentForce will be key to companies being successful with Salesforce and AI.