TechRadar Pro is on the ground in San Francisco for Dreamforce 2022, the annual conference hosted by CRM giant Salesforce.
As ever, the first day will start with a keynote address hosted by co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor, featuring various special guests.
It’s safe to say we’ll be hearing about the latest updates across the Salesforce Customer 360 portfolio, as well as news from the company’s other properties, like Slack and Tableau.
Welcome to Dreamforce 2022
We’re live in San Francisco for the first day of Dreamforce 2022 and this reporter will be battling through the jet lag to bring you all the latest products announcements, as well as coverage of the main keynote sessions.
We’ll also be hearing directly from spokespeople responsible for handling the various branches of the Salesforce Customer 360 portfolio, who will no doubt be eager to share what they’ve been working on.
Over the course of the three-day event, we’ll be updating this blog with everything you need to know about the show, so bookmark this page or stay tuned.
In the meantime, here’s some reading on the latest news to come out of Salesforce:
- Salesforce launches simplified CRM to help customers ‘do more with less’
- Salesforce wants to bring a whole lot more force to your sales
- Salesforce doubles down on UK support
- Salesforce launches NFT Cloud despite protests
- Salesforce launches toolkit to help developers build custom apps for Slack
So what’s up first today?
As per usual, this morning’s keynote will be led by Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor.
The opening Dreamforce keynote is always a sight to behold, and often features celebrity cameos and music performances alongside the latest tech updates and news.
If you want to tune in to watch online, there’s a link here.
Primed and ready
TechRadar Pro has navigated the mosh pit outside the Moscone Center and the multitude of security checkpoints to make it to the main hall, ready for the opening keynote (starting at 10.00am PT/6.00 pm BST).
A Hawaiian blessing
This is my first Dreamforce, so I wasn’t expecting the show to begin with a Hawaiian blessing. But I’m told this is Salesforce tradition.
Huh, Lenny Kravitz is here too, with a rendition of Fly Away. A classic…
Here we go
Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor hit the stage to kick off the 20th edition of Dreamforce, delivering a few awkward high-fives and fist-bumps to members of the audience on the way.
The title of the keynote: The Great Reunion, to mark the first in-person Dreamforce since before the pandemic.
“This is a new day for Dreamforce,” says Benioff. “We need to approach this new day with a ‘beginner’s mind’, asking what do we really want? What’s important to us?”
The crowd looks as equally bemused as I am, but I assume this is going somewhere…
Benioff goes on to talk about the kinds of values important to both Salesforce and its customers: trust, customers success, innovation, equality and sustainability.
“We want to help you connect with your customers in a whole new way, by building a whole new version of Customer 360,” he says. “You’ll see that new version today.”
ANNOUNCEMENT: Salesforce Carbon Credit Marketplace
Salesforce has announced the launch of a carbon credits marketplace, with the ambition to clear the path to net zero emissions for customers.
The new Net Zero Marketplace is said to make the purchasing of carbon credits simpler and more transparent, connecting buyers with pre-vetted carbon credit providers, whose projects have been audited by third-party ratings agencies.
The marketplace is not designed to replace organic means of cutting back emissions (like minimizing travel or localizing supply chains), but rather supplement existing projects.
One trillion trees
Separately, Benioff provides an update on the company’s plan to plant one trillion trees to help offset the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
“We now feel confident we’ll achieve this objective by 2030,” he announces.
Slack time
It’s time to hear about Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce last year, and the new integrations between the collaboration platform and the Customer 360 portfolio.
Benioff invites to the stage Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s Chief Product Officer, to talk about the latest developments.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Slack Canvas
Slack has lifted the lid on a major new addition to its platform, which it says could go some way to addressing a number of common bottlenecks for customers.
Slack Canvas gives collaborators a new way to collect, organize and share data, using persistent and highly customizable information panels. These so-called “canvases” are attached by default to every channel and can be created manually for one-off projects or events.
Not only can users embed contextual information, data and multimedia content into canvases, but they can also complete everyday tasks in situ, courtesy of the third-party integrations already available in Slack.
“Canvas will help people to be more productive in their digital HQ, by giving them a surface that makes it easier to access the information they need to get their job done,” Yehoshua told TechRadar Pro ahead of the show.
“We hope people will be able to onboard employees more quickly, to close deals faster, to resolve incidents faster, by having that information more readily available in a consistent location in this persistent layer.”
For more info, read our full write-up here.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Video conferencing comes to Slack Huddles
Slack has also announced it is expanding its impromptu meeting feature, Huddles, which will now support video conferencing.
Designed to simulate informal office conversations, the Huddles feature is moving away from its original audio-only format and towards something a little more complete. Not only can users now enable video, but they’ll also benefit from multi-person screensharing, emoji reactions and more.
For more details, click here.
There are also 15 new Salesforce integrations for Slack, specific to various products housed within Customer 360 (e.g. Sales Cloud for Slack, Flow in Slack etc.).
Customer 360
Bret Taylor returns to the stage to talk through the new developments across the Customer 360 portfolio.
“I’ve never been more excited about the strength of our core platform,” he says. “The pace of innovation has never been faster.”
ANNOUNCEMENT: Salesforce Genie
Salesforce has detailed what it describes as the “biggest innovation” to come to its CRM and sales enablement platform in the last two decades.
The new addition, Salesforce Genie, is a service designed to unify customer data typically siloed across different channels and applications into a single multi-use profile.
The objective is to help its users enable a personalized experience for each of their customers, informed by the most complete and up-to-date set of information on previous interactions with that individual.
We’ll have more on this later.
Real-time, real-time, real-time
“We’ve completely reimagined our CRM from the ground up to enable applications that simply weren’t possible before,” says Taylor.
“With Genie, we’ve added a foundational new feature: a real-time hyperscale 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 CRM. Salesforce Customer 360 is the world’s first real-time CRM.”
Salesforce Genie is available as of today, Taylor confirms.