Salesforce Dreamforce 2024: The Biggest News

“We just don't see copilot as that key step for our future,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says.

A partner network for Salesforce’s Agentforce artificial intelligence agent builder tool. Updates to the Data Cloud unified data offering. And deeper partnerships with the likes of IBM and Google Cloud.

These are among the biggest announcements to come out of the San Francisco-based customer relationship management (CRM) tools vendor’s annual Dreamforce conference, which runs through Thursday in Salesforce’s hometown.

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff kept up his attacks on Microsoft’s copilot model of AI in favor of Salesforce’s agentic AI approach during his keynote address Tuesday.

“We don't see how that copilot world is going to get us to the real vision of artificial intelligence, of augmentation of productivity, of better business results that we've been looking for,” Benioff said. “We just don't see copilot as that key step for our future.”

Salesforce Dreamforce 2024

Salesforce has about 12,000 partners worldwide.

Microsoft and ServiceNow are among the vendors to tout agentic AI capabilities with their wares recently.

Here are more revelations from Salesforce Dreamforce 2024.

Agentforce Partner Network

Salesforce has launched the Agentforce Partner Network to enable a variety of partner types including system integrators to bring AI agents to customers, as a way to get to a billion AI agents enabled over the next year.

Some of the earliest SI Agentforce Partner Network members include 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500 members Accenture, Capgemini and Slalom, plus Deloitte Digital and PwC. Users on average adopt emerging technologies 31 percent faster when using a consulting partner, according to Salesforce.

Some of the first Agentforce Partner Network vendor members include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM, OpenText, Zoom and Workday, according to Salesforce. The partners will bring new agent actions, pre-built agent templates and their own agents for planning and taking actions across multiple systems.

Salesforce plans to release partner-built agent actions and templates for native use through its AppExchange. The Agentforce Partner Network brings customers a catalog of third-party AI skills, actions and agents that can answer customer service inquiries, qualify sales leads, improve marketing campaigns and more, according to the vendor.

Salesforce, IBM Expand Partnership

Salesforce and IBM have inked a new partnership that involves providing pre-built AI agents and tools for organizations to use in their own IT environments–with IBM’s Granite AI models set to become available within the Salesforce ecosystem in October.

Along with the technology vendor partnership between Salesforce and IBM, Salesforce and IBM Consulting have an agreement to joint users with Agentforce and IBM Consulting’s AI-powered Advantage delivery platform.

IBM Consulting–No. 6 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–will work on AI agent selection, customization, deployment and scaling for specific industry challenges to help customers.

The pre-built agents–which leverage the Salesforce Agentforce suite of autonomous agents and IBM’s Watsonx AI suite–can use organizations’ data while maintaining system controls for improved productivity. The agents can reason, understand, and make decisions around multi-step tasks based on triggers and chats. Agents request approval for tasks that exceed an assigned scope or authority.

The agents will have the ability to help with identifying new sales leads, speed up sales training, improve onboarding experiences, speed up billing processes and other tasks important to businesses in various industries, according to the vendors.

Coming soon is the ability to integrate Watsonx.ai and Salesforce Model Builder for customized large language models (LLMs).

IBM users also gain the ability to use Slack to converse with agents, automating routine tasks and chatting with agents in natural language within the communication platform.

The two vendors will work on integrations between Salesforce Data Cloud and IBM Data Gate for Watsonx that will allow IBM Z mainframe and Db2 database users to leverage that business data for agents, data analysis and AI workflows across Salesforce Agentforce, according to the vendors.

Salesforce Agentforce will integrate with that Watsonx Orchestrate business process automation AI product and use Granite models for enterprise-grade use cases.

Watsonx.data users can now bring mainframe datasets to AI use cases on Salesforce, according to the vendors. This applies to Db2 data on distributed platforms.

Salesforce, Google Cloud Unite On Agents

Later this year, Salesforce Agentforce and Google Workspace will allow users to build custom agents with skills across the vendors’ platforms while maintaining pre-established privacy and user data protections.

Agentforce Sales Development Representative (SDR) agents, for example, can engage with prospects at any hour, answer questions, manage objections, schedule meetings and more. Agents will have the ability to generate Google Slides and Docs from templates and use context from pre-existing Docs and Gmail to update records and trigger workflows, from saving signed contracts to Salesforce to generating a win-loss report.

Agentforce agents can leverage Google BigQuery data without moving or copying data. Users can ground agents with data from BigQuery and Salesforce Data Cloud for increased accuracy in AI-generated responses.

In an example of this AI at work, online ecommerce organizations can ground merchant agents on purchasing data, ad spend, customer segmentation and more. Agents can use retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to work on real-time data.

Salesforce Data Cloud Updates

During Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce revealed new innovations within its Data Cloud unified data offering and other advancements across the portfolio. Now generally available (GA) are customer-managed encryption keys and a sub-second real-time layer within Data Cloud.

That layer will power Einstein Personalization, built on Data Cloud, with real-time AI recommendations, analytics and automations.

Later this month, MuleSoft Direct for Data Cloud will enter beta, requiring a MuleSoft Anypoint Platform license for use. In October, Data Cloud users will gain the ability for data support for unstructured audio and video content from webinars and calls, a capability now in pilot.

Data Cloud One, a way to extend Data Cloud functionalities across Salesforce instances across departments, regions and business units, will also go GA that month.

In November, hybrid search–which combines vector search and keyword search to speed up the finding of PDFs, pictures, audio, video and other content through terms such as product names and acronyms–will leave pilot and enter GA.

Private Connect for Data Cloud will enter GA in November, and AI tagging and classification and policy-based governance will enter beta.

Private Connect for Data Cloud aims to allow users safe sharing and integration of data between Data Cloud and public cloud environments with direct network connections.

In February, Tableau Semantics will leave pilot and enter GA. This will allow users to organize data based on meaning and relationships.

Among the Data Cloud enhancements, the offering gained a standard semantic data model for Agentforce agents and improved search capabilities that consider customer context for quicker information delivery.

Updates to Data Cloud include real-time data activations to speed up customer need response and more data security and governance features to prevent unnecessary data exposure.

The offering also improved its policy-based governance to improve control over sensitive data sharing with Agentforce agents. The new controls include AI tagging and classification to categorize data and Private Connect for Data Cloud for secure data sharing with external public clouds.

Slack Advancements

Salesforce has made third-party agents now available in the Slack Marketplace, with more on the way, according to the vendor.

Slack AI became available as a paid add-on for paid Slack plans, and Slack Sales Elevate users can now leverage new Salesforce channels, with Salesforce Starter Suite getting channels “in the coming months.”

Slack AI gained enhanced huddle notes and improved search capabilities.

These channels connect Slack conversations to Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) records, according to Salesforce.

Agentforce will become available in Slack as a beta in October, and users will gain access to Slack templates for channels, canvases, lists and automated workflows then as well.

Agentforce in Slack will serve as a user interface (UI) for agents for gaining insights and assigning tasks based on data. Users will also have the option of deploying third-pary agents from Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity and others from within Slack.