Dreamforce 2022 Takeaways: Innovation and Data
Dreamforce, the world’s largest software conference, had another fantastic event filled with incredible speakers, new features, and lots of customer success stories. The three-day event held the attention of the business world as Salesforce hosted more than 40,000 attendees and millions of online viewers. Dreamforce 2022 brought together thought leaders, industry pioneers, and Trailblazers from all over the world. With over 1,000 sessions, the Corrao Group team was active to ensure we captured the most important announcements and partnerships. Here are our top 5 takeaways from Dreamforce 2022.
1. Salesforce Genie
Salesforce has announced what they describe as its “biggest innovation” to its CRM platform in the last two decades. Salesforce Genie, a real-time hyper-scale data platform, unifies customer data across different applications and channels (mobile, web, APIs) into a single source of truth. With Genie, every company can turn data into customer magic, delivering seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real time.
Brett Taylor, Co-CEO of Salesforce, stated in his main keynote, “With Genie, we’ve added a foundational new feature: a real-time hyper-scale data platform. It’s all about the data; you can inject real-time and historical data to create a single source of truth. This changes the game for CRMs. Salesforce Customer 360 is the world’s first real-time CRM.”
How Does Salesforce Genie Work?
As the heart of real-time Customer 360, Salesforce Genie consumes and stores real-time data streams at a massive scale and connects it with Salesforce transactional data. Genie includes built-in connectors that bring in data from every channel, legacy data through MuleSoft, and historical data from proprietary data lakes. Genie transforms and harmonizes the data into a real-time customer graph – a unified customer profile record.
With Genie, Einstein AI and Flow automation services can harness the power of hyper-scale real-time data to enable more dynamic and responsive actions and engagement. Einstein, which generates over 175 billion predictions every day, can now deliver personalization and predictions based on real-time data. Flow automation, which saves customers over 100 billion hours every month, can now use real-time data to trigger actions automatically.
2. Consumer Goods Cloud Innovation Continues
The Consumer Goods Cloud Keynote, Drive Profitable Growth, focused on industry challenges today and how Salesforce is being utilized by brands to operate faster across different teams with profitable growth. Industry and economic challenges mentioned included inflation, supply chain, changing consumer behaviors, the war for talent (Great Resignation), connected modern tools, disconnected systems, and lack of real-time data. During the keynote, Salesforce brought out Mondelēz Global LLC to demonstrate how they are using Consumer Goods Cloud to become more customer-centric and data-driven to drive more insights across the organization. Innovations in Retail Execution and Trade Promotion Management have allowed them to execute and grow, and deliver a consistent consumer experience on the shelf.
Retail Execution
One connected offline and online view has helped Mondelēz unlock productivity and empower their field teams. With one single source of truth, Salesforce Retail Execution is helping Mondelēz prioritize and schedule store visits with the key tasks needed to complete in the field to optimize every visit. KPIs in real-time provide insights into how to make their shelf performance better. Learn more about Salesforce Retail Execution.
Trade Promotion Management
Originally running their trade promotion management on spreadsheets, Mondelēz was able to utilize Salesforce TPM to optimize their trade activity. With one single view truth, Mondelēz was able to invest in the right activations at the right time to build more effective promotions. Salesforce TPM helped Mondelēz improve revenue growth, maximize trade spend effectiveness, deepen trade promotion analytics, manage funds and claims, and more. FYI, we were honored to be selected as the exclusive US-based launch partner for Salesforce TPM. Learn more about Salesforce TPM.
3. New Slack Innovations
Salesforce and Slack announced some major product innovations that will make it even more productive for teams to work together in Slack, pull actionable data from Salesforce, and get more out of their Digital HQ. The major announcement was Slack Canvas, a surface in slack that transforms how teams can organize and share important resources in real-time. Ali Rayl, SVP of Product at Slack, said “The new Slack canvas will complement the real-time collaboration experience in Slack today by offering a persistent, customizable place for files, multimedia, powerful integrations, and more. It will better empower teams to say organized, aligned, and productive in their digital HQ.”
Here are the new product innovations from Dreamforce and Salesforce:
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- Slack canvas is a new surface in the digital HQ that will transform how teams can share, curate, and organize essential resources. Paired with the Slack platform, anyone can customize a canvas with time-saving automation, plus pull in data from systems of record, like Customer 360. Canvas will be available next year.
- Slack huddles now builds on its audio-first experience by offering teams lightweight video, multi-person screen sharing, message threads, and more to power live coworking sessions in their digital HQ. These features will be generally available to all users in the coming weeks.
- The new Slack platform is available to developers. With a new set of developer tools and modular, reusable building blocks, it’s now faster and easier for them to create, customize, and share workflows that automate work for their teams. Developers can get started today.
- Slack Partner Industry Solutions helps customers across industries navigate this new era of digital transformation. Slack-certified consulting partners — including Accenture, Atrium, Capgemini, Deloitte, Globant, IBM, KPMG, NeuraFlash, PwC, Silverline and Slalom — are launching the first wave of solutions for industries such as financial services, manufacturing, communications, retail, media, and technology.
4. WhatsApp Partnership
According to Salesforce, messaging is the next customer frontier and preferred customer engagement channel as 90% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services, with 66% of online adults globally preferring messaging as a way of communicating with a business. WhatsApp’s first business messaging brings the company’s in-class capabilities to deliver a convenient, integrated, personalized, and modern experience between businesses and people worldwide. Salesforce says the integration will transform how businesses connect with consumers through conversational engagement, marketing, service, and commerce interactions.
5. Net Zero Marketplace
Salesforce announced Net Zero Marketplace, a trusted platform that makes carbon credit purchases simple and transparent, allowing organizations to accelerate climate impact at scale. “The uptick in extreme weather events shows that no one is spared from climate change — we need smart climate solutions now,” said Suzanne DiBianca, EVP and Chief Impact Officer, Salesforce. “Businesses aiming to achieve long-term emission reductions can complement their efforts with high-quality carbon credits. Net Zero Marketplace brings together Salesforce’s values, technology, and commitment to ecopreneurs to accelerate climate action.”
Net Zero Marketplace, built on Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud, connects buyers and ecopreneurs by offering a catalog of third-party-rated carbon credits and a seamless eCommerce experience for purchasing them. Net Zero Marketplace also features a climate action hub where anyone can learn about climate issues.
Dreamforce 2022 Conclusion
Mark it down as another successful Dreamforce event by Salesforce. We want to give a big shout and thank you to Salesforce as they put on an extraordinary event that featured some incredible guest speakers like Matthew McConaughey, Bono, Al Gore, and Jennifer Hudson. The energy around the city of San Francisco was electric, as more than 40,000 attendees gathered to witness and learn what new features Salesforce will release next. We are already getting excited for Dreamforce 2023!
If you would like to learn more about any of the new features from Dreamforce 2022 and how it can relate to your business, please contact us.
