Best. Dreamforce. Ever.

First things first - how on earth has it been 6 months since I wrote anything on Substack? I knew I wasn’t hitting my target of once a month, but a gap of half a year came as a big shock. There were many reasons for this - some personal, some professional, all of them good (at least in my eyes). But I’m back now, and boy have a few things happened since I last published.

Golden Hoodie

Starting with the one I’m happiest about - being awarded the Golden Hoodie at Dreamforce.

This has ruined me for any future event - I’ll be expecting to be followed around by a film crew, have all the perks of fast track entry and reserved seating, and be invited up on stage to ramble on about AI.

Clearly none of this will ever happen again, still one day like this isn’t too shabby.

Agentforce

It wasn’t all about me though :)

The other big news at Dreamforce was the launch of Agentforce. In typical Salesforce fashion, this is an amalgamation of new apps, existing apps, a developer tool and a platform, all with the same name. Come back Copilot, all is forgiven - while that was also confusing, at least there was only one inside Salesforce.

Agentforce does look very cool - especially the Atlas reasoning engine. This is a combination of Large Language Models, Large Actions Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation and integrations that allow Agentforce to “think” more like a human. Another key improvement is the agentic loop, where if the evaluation part of the reasoning engine determines that it doesn’t have enough information to satisfy the request, it can go back to the user and ask for more details. We’ve got a bit longer to wait before experiencing the full power though, with some aspects of the Atlas engine not launching until Feb 2025.

The developer tool is Agentforce for Developers (catchy name!) and represents quite an improvement over the initial Einstein for Developers (equally catchy) release. I was lucky enough to get on the beta and the multi-turn chat capability really is a game changer. I also found that I didn’t need to keep reminding it that (for example) I had a data factory to create data for unit tests - after its first attempt I directed it to use the factory and it carried on using it for other test cases. I find the experience now is very much like working with a junior dev - I ask it to do something, review and tell it what is wrong and it learns from that. It was also much better at taking the object metadata into account - no more attempts to insert records with null master-detail relationship fields.

To help us all get up to speed on the new AI features, Salesforce are waiving the fees for training and (first attempt at) certification.

Data Cloud

As the theme continues to be AI + Data, and Data Cloud continues to be the fastest growing organic product in Salesforce history, it’s no surprise that this jostled (unsuccessfully) for the spotlight with Agentforce.

Data Cloud One allows a single Data Cloud instance to be shared across multiple Salesforce instances through low code tools - the source of truth becomes even more singular. Support for unstructured audio and video content opens up a whole new world of AI request grounding, while Hybrid Search makes keyword searching possible on all those documents that have been ingested.

There was also the announcement of sub-second real-time processing in Data Cloud. Slightly surprising given the initial announcement about Genie at Dreamforce 2022 talked about it being real-time, although this was shortly followed by a whistleblower lawsuit suggesting this wasn’t the case. Will this be Lightning Experience performance Mark 2, where we are still talking about big improvements a decade after the launch, but in spite of that users aren’t overly impressed with the speed? Only time will tell.

Catch Up

If you weren’t able to make it to Dreamforce in person there’s loads of content out there to catch up on, both on Salesforce+ and Youtube. You can catch my Trailblazer video there too!

If you’re in London, the Agentforce World Tour lands next week (at the time of writing) on October 8th 2024 - sign up here!