Dreamforce, the biggest event of 2022 at Moscone center in San Francisco witnessed about 1,71,000 people from around the world for this mega event, which is also a record-breaking moment for Dreamforce.
The Dreamforce main keynote, titled “The Great Reunion,” which was delivered with tremendous energy, witnessed about 40,000 attendees physically in San Francisco, apart from about 150,000 streaming online. Dreamforce had more than 2,300 sessions and so many other activities for the participants, including activities on the Dreampark.
Dreamforce was a great opportunity to express Salesforce’s big ideas, going into the future – not only featuring new technological innovations, but also conveying important messages to the Salesforce community around the world. Salesforce is projected to reach $31 billion in revenues this year.
The three days of empowerment, innovation, fun, and giving back to the community were remarkable. This year, Dreamforce focused on the ideas of customer Trailblazers, the organizations that are transforming the game and connecting with their customers in entirely novel ways. CloudFulcrum was also a part of Dreamforce-2022, the world’s largest software conference that has brought transformative success stories, sessions, innovation, problem-solving solutions and much more.
The keynote covered several topics, woven into a rich fabric of innovation and inspiration. Here are the highlights from the 3-day event from Oct 20-22, 2022.
1. Salesforce Genie
Salesforce Genie, touted as the greatest Salesforce innovation in the company’s history, leads the way for extremely personalized customer experiences, delivered in real-time. It is your command center about the customer and everything surrounding the customer. Genie absorbs and saves real-time data streams at large scale and blends it with Salesforce data with the result that it creates a unified, cleaned record for every individual customer, harmonizing the numerous identities an individual could have across the hundreds of apps an organization uses. It leads to personalization at hyper-scale.
Genie, which is an extension of the Salesforce Customer Data Platform, is flexible, adapting the single source of truth about the individual customer, akin to their data. Parallel to Einstein, you can run predictions and recommend the ‘next best actions’ along the way. Genie has been powering the end-to-end experience of Dreamforce, including Salesforce+, behind the scenes, and hence, it is tried-and-tested.
2. Net Zero Cloud & Net Zero Cloud Marketplace
Net Zero Cloud: A Salesforce product that aids companies meet their sustainability goals, manage sustainability data, automate tracking of supplier emissions, and forecast and reduce risk. The ‘What-if Analysis,’ powered by Tableau, and Einstein Recommendations also help drive the Net Zero Cloud.
Net Zero Cloud Marketplace: The Salesforce Net Zero Cloud Marketplace is powered by the Commerce Cloud and will connect buyers and ecopreneurs. It will, offer a host of projects together with a seamless e-commerce experience for purchasing them. The marketplace will launch with 90 projects in 11 countries.
3. Hyperforce & External Encryption Ecosystem
Hyperforce is a ‘re-visualization’ platform architecture to safely and reliably deliver the Salesforce ‘Cloud’ products on dominant public clouds, including AWS, Azure and Google. Hyperforce, which is presently available in 10 regions, will reach 17 countries by the end of next year, i.e., 2023.
Two principal aspects of Hyperforce are security and data residency, i.e., your data ‘resides’ in a particular country/region to adhere to certain compliance standards/requirements.
The new External Encryption Ecosystem was introduced when Salesforce aspired to expand Hyperforce into new regions but confronted more and more stringent data residency requirements. Using cryptography, Salesforce can deliver the key to the customer, who will then have total control over data. It is a great opportunity that will allow Hyperforce to operate in more challenging regions.
4. Slack Canvas & Huddles Co-working
Slack has witnessed increased innovation since they were acquired by Salesforce, and more so, in the year 2022.
- Slack Canvas: Parallel to a Slack channel, you have a Canvas. Slack Canvas is characterized as a ‘surface to acquire and share knowledge with the ability to access and act on Salesforce data directly in Slack.’ This is akin to Quip, which has been integrated with Slack. Slack Canvas can be considered as an interactive board that secures key information related to the channel.
- Huddles Co-working: Huddles enables you to get into quick conversations from any channel or Direct Messaging. Huddles has been improved upon to include video and screen share, pop-out window, reactions, chat in thread, and post-huddle threads.
5. The Expanding ‘Trailblazer’ Community
According to Salesforce, there are more than 17 million Trailblazers globally, which includes the ‘DataFam’ (Tableau enthusiasts), ‘Muleys’ (Mulesoft enthusiasts), and ‘Slack Stars.’ There are more than 2100 community groups across 100 countries.
It is no wonder that Trailhead continues to grow in popularity. More than 57 million badges have been earned on Trailhead!
Community Tags are also now available, which can be added to your Trailblazer.me profile to let the people who land there know who you are with just a quick glance. #AwesomeAdmin is also a popular one.
There is also an organization called ‘Refugeeforce’ that connects refugees with opportunities to learn Salesforce.
6. ‘True to the Core’ Program
The Salesforce community is more concerned about how they can address their day-to-day challenges. That is what ‘True to The Core’ is all about. This program is a transparent view into Salesforce’s futuristic roadmap, with the sessions working like ‘ask me anything’ to Salesforce executives and product managers. It is small wonder then that this is one of the most popular sessions at Dreamforce.
More than 300 innovations have been delivered as a result of the request-upvote program. Since last year, Salesforce has made significant efforts to integrate their acquisitions on to the core platform.
7. The Power of ‘Salesforce Flow’
About 44 billion Flow automations are run every day, saving companies about 100 billion hours of work every month that would have otherwise been spent manually updating Salesforce record data, and more. This is tantamount to approximately $2 trillion in customer value. Genie is built using the Salesforce metadata model that makes everything actionable for use with Flow.
8. The Power of ‘Salesforce Einstein’
The Salesforce Einstein engine makes about 175 bill predictions every day. Again, as Genie uses the Salesforce metadata model, it can access Einstein for real-time predictions.
