2023 - Layoffs & AI & bears, oh my!
2023 started very badly for many in the technology industry, with layoffs happening all over the place. For once this included Salesforce, who went for a 10% reduction, most likely due to the influence of activist investors looking for better returns. Given the different level of worker protections in place, these layoffs hit Europe a month or two after the US, mirroring how Salesforce features are often rolled out. Ohana started to look more like a marketing tactic than an enlightened way to run a company, once it came up against the reality of a downturn.
After watching every move around the layoffs get leaked to the press, Salesforce restricted its annual company kickoff event to leadership only - a decision that was, in a delicious irony, immediately leaked to the press.And in the final shocking turn of events at the start of the year, a Salesforce release was delayed and bled into the working week, which in turn knocked lots of customer releases to take advantage of the new features into the next weekend. Was it all starting to go wrong for Salesforce after 23 years of relentless success?
The answer was, of course, no. The quarterly earnings call beat expectations for both earnings per share and revenue. Starboard Value’s CEO had described Salesforce as a ‘Subpar Mix Of Growth And Profitability’, but the upturn in performance spiked the guns of the activist investors and we didn’t really hear much from/about them for the rest of the year.
Outside of Salesforce, it was shaping up to be the year that AI went mainstream and governments started to think about legislating it. “I asked ChatGPT” became a theme of LinkedIn posts, Microsoft revamped Bing (also on OpenAI tech), and Google weren’t to be outdone, although at the time Bard was more of a press release than a software release. And it turned out not to be outside of Salesforce after all:
As it turned out, the most well received announcement at TrailblazerDX was the delivery of the 5 free integration user licenses announced at the previous year’s Dreamforce. In Salesforce world, that’s almost instantaneous. Around this time Silicon Valley bank collapsed and was saved in very short order, with both events seemingly engineered by the same tech bros.
There was also a blowup in the Salesforce community, as the company once again moved to start charging for the security review for free apps, effectively killing free apps. Luckily (once again) they listened to reason after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from their partners and customers. This crops up every few years, so we must continue to be vigilant lest they slip it through under cover of darkness.
The first signs that generative AI may not be a purely benevolent force appeared in April, when Samsung staff uploaded code and meeting notes to ChatGPT, then realised they couldn’t take them back again, thus potentially gifting trade secrets to competitors. Always read the Ts and Cs - learn from history, less you be doomed to repeat it when using Einstein for Developers.
Einstein GPT was quickly renamed to AI Cloud in June, and officially launched at (the first) AI day. This gave us our first glimpse of the Einstein Trust Layer, which still feels like a master stroke from Salesforce, even if I’d like to see it become a platform rather than a layer.
June also brought the latest edition of London’s Calling, which once again didn’t disappoint. It might just be me, but it feels like Salesforce are tightening up on community involvement in conferences like Dreamforce in favour of their product management, so I think community conferences will continue to play a vital role in providing training without the associated marketing, and presenting the reality rather than just the positives.
And finally, June brought the (next) AI day, as the London World Tour was rebranded (at extremely/ridiculously) short notice to showcase new features like Prompt Studio (which we’re still waiting for). Quite the change from our usual rehash of Dreamforce/TrailblazerDX announcements from months ago!
Sales and Service GPT did go GA in July - very rapid for Salesforce, and good to see something actually land in the products, but sadly quite limited in terms of our ability to influence/configure the prompts. Around this time I built my first integration to OpenAI, and quickly added a few more. As you would expect when everything depends on the prompt, the actual API is pretty much a single method, with the added excitement that the same request will probably give different results every time!
And just like that, it was time for Dreamforce again. In a turn of events that surprised nobody, it was all about the AI. AI Cloud must be up for the shortest lived product name in a very strong field of Salesforce candidates, as it became Einstein1 at Dreamforce, harking back to Salesforce1 in 2013. Once again there were demos of Prompt Studio and Skills Builder, but they still looked a bit smoke and mirrors when you got up close.
Not long after Dreamforce, Slack announced that they’d lost another CEO, with Lidiane Jones moving on to Bumble after less than a year in charge. This looks to have been a solo blip rather than a return to the exodus at the end of 2022, which is good news for those who like stability at the top of their tech behemoths. Governments finally started getting a hold on AI, with an executive order from President Biden and the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. We also had OpenAI’s Dev Day, which showed how any legislation will need to move quickly to keep up with the tech!
In November, out of nowhere, every tech story was eclipsed by the OpenAI three act play:
Act 1 - Sam Altman is fired
Not really what you want to be happening at the (allegedly) most important AI company, especially if you’ve put all your AI eggs into the OpenAI/ChatGPT basked, but all’s well that ends well. After this, we just wanted a quiet drift into the Xmas/New Year period, and by and large we got that.
To Absent Friends
No review of 2023 would be complete without remembering the stalwarts of the community that we lost this year:
Meghan Brodkey, Ohana Slack founder, in January.
Gemma Blezard, founder of Ladies be Architects, in November.
Amanda Beard-Neilson, London Salesforce Admins leader and co-organiser of London’s Calling, also in November.
Vaya con Dios ladies - you’ll all be missed.