5 key takeaways from Dreamforce 2024

As Salesforce’s 2024 Dreamforce conference rolls up the carpet for another year, here’s a look at a few high points as Salesforce pitched a new era for its customers, centered around Agentforce, which brings agentic AI to enterprise sales and service operations.

“We want to be the first to welcome you into the future,” said Salesforce cofounder and CEO Marc Benioff during his opening keynote, “and we look at our Salesforce platform as ‘your future as a service.’”

[ Related: Dreamforce 2024 coverage ]

Enter the Agentforce era

Agentforce, Salesforce’s platform for building and deploying autonomous AI agents, is about humans with agents driving customer success, Benioff said, touting agents as the third wave of AI.

Agentic AI is a rising trend in the enterprise, and Salesforce is entering the fray alongside competitors such as ServiceNow by enabling enterprises to deploy agents capable of analyzing data, making decisions, and taking action without human intervention. Agents built on the Agentforce platform can, for example, be deployed to answer customer service inquiries, qualify sales leads, and optimize marketing campaigns all on their own, according to Salesforce.

As Benioff put it in his keynote, Einstein Copilot — itself the product of a decade-long evolution — has been “officially upgraded” to Agentforce.

Along with the autonomous agents, including those for sales, service, marketing, and commerce, Salesforce unveiled Agent Builder, a low-code tool that, as part of Agentforce Studio, works in conjunction with Salesforce’s Model Builder and Prompt Builder tools to enable customers to quickly build and customize their own agents.

The poster child on stage for Agentforce Studio was high-end department store Saks Fifth Avenue, which, Benioff said, built and deployed its Agentforce agent, dubbed Sophie, in just one week.

Sophie not only answers questions in the way of a traditional chatbot but can also perform actions such as understanding that a customer ordered the wrong size and arranging product exchanges without having to hand the customer off to a human service agent. During a demo, Salesforce showed how the AI could be quickly extended to perform other tasks, such as checking that a store has stock of an item and asking the customer whether they would prefer to pick the item up or have it shipped.

A new ecosystem, the Agentforce Partner Network, provides extensions allowing third-party products to be used in chains of complex actions required of an agent. Launch partners, the company said, include Amazon Web Services, Box, Google Cloud, IBM, Workday, Zoom, and more.

Agentforce will be generally available in October.

Data Cloud at the core

Last year, Salesforce rebuilt its Data Cloud to support Einstein Copilot, the company’s first full foray into generative AI. This year it is calling Data Cloud “the heartbeat of the Salesforce platform and foundation of Agentforce.”

According to Benioff, Salesforce’s Data Cloud processes 767 trillion records per month. All Salesforce Customer 360 apps have been rewritten to live in Data Cloud, as has Tableau.

Additionally, the company announced a number of new Data Cloud features at the conference, including additions to unstructured data support, including native processing of audio and video content, such as webinars and calls; a standardized semantic data model that enables Agentforce Agents and humans to interpret and use data consistently; improved search capabilities factoring in customer context to allow for quicker information discovery; real-time data activations to respond instantly to changing customer needs; and additional data security and governance features to, the company said, “ safeguard operations and prevent unnecessary data exposure.” 

“When we encouraged you to use Data Cloud, what we didn’t realize is we were preparing you very well for AI,” Benioff noted.

More AI in Slack

Salesforce has already infused Slack with AI, but with Agentforce for Slack, the company demonstrated humans and AIs collaborating in a Slack channel. New Salesforce channels in Slack can bring information from Salesforce directly into Slack, without launching another application.

Slack’s new user interface for agents not only talks to Agentforce agents, it can interact with third-party agents from Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and more.

Other new goodies include huddle notes, simplified automation, improved search, and collections of templates for channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows.

A new AI ventures fund

Salesforce Ventures is throwing another $500 million into its AI investment pot with the establishment of a new AI Fund. The company’s commitment to AI innovators now totals $1 billion over the past 18 months. So far, Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than two dozen AI companies, including Anthropic, ​​Cohere, Runway, TogetherAI, Mistral AI, and Hugging Face.

“Our expanded investment deepens our commitment to helping the most dynamic and expansive innovators win the market by accelerating their growth through our customer network and delivering trusted AI that earns the confidence of the biggest companies in the world,” Paul Drews, managing partner of Salesforce Ventures, said in a statement. “Values drive value, and we know trust and responsibility are good for the world — and good for business.”

Free AI training

To help address the AI skills gap, through the end of 2025, Salesforce will offer its AI training and certifications free of charge on its Trailhead online learning platform.

It will also offer in-person community and employee skills development in its San Francisco headquarters, and in other locations worldwide.

“The advent of AI and agents represents the biggest technological shift of our generation, and will radically change how people work,” said Brian Millham, president and chief operating officer at Salesforce, in a statement. “We need to ensure everyone is equipped with the skills they need to succeed in this new AI world.”

Salesforce said that these initiatives represent a $50 million investment in AI skills growth. It hopes to reach 100,000 more students through the program.

And one more thing

At the end of his keynote, Benioff acknowledged that everyone doesn’t necessarily use all of Salesforce’s products, and highlighted Salesforce Foundations, announced on Sept. 5 and available now, that gives customers using the enterprise editions of Sales Cloud or Service Cloud free access to Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Data Cloud features, all in a new, enhanced UI. Agentforce agents will be added to the mix later this year.

There are caveats, however: It is “subject to regional availability,” email campaigns are limited to 2,000 sends per month, it includes 10,000 Data Cloud segmentation and activation credits, Commerce Pay Now transaction fees apply, and free Data Cloud credit limits apply.