Salesforce Dreamforce 2024: Updates, Announcements and New Launches

The biggest Salesforce event happened this September; so much occurred in just three days. This week, thousands of Trailblazers were gathered to attend the Dreamforce event in San Francisco. The theme for this year was AI (Artificial Intelligence), and Salesforce did not disappoint with the Dreamforce 2024 Updates in AI. From the latest Agentforce platform integrated within every cloud to new features of the ever-growing Data Cloud, the updates were inspiring. The innovations are set to change how you work within your Salesforce org and quickly strengthen customer relationships.

In this blog, we have compiled a list of every update and announcement made at Dreamforce 2024.

Key Takeaways

• 45K Trailblazers were gathered in San Francisco for Dreamforce 2024 to witness the latest in Salesforce AI transformation.
• Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff announced Agentforce to become the 3rd wave of AI after copilots.
• A new Atlas Reasoning Engine will act as the brain of AI agents, making them more efficient and innovative than chatbots.
• The Agent Builder extension is an upgrade in copilot, where customization of AI-powered agents will become possible.
• With unstructured data formats, 50+ new connectors, and Data Kits, Data Cloud is set to retain its reputation as the most used and helpful cloud tool of Salesforce. 
• Slack will now use agents and purpose-built AI for more efficient collaboration and performance.
• Salesforce is planning to provide FREE AI certification training by the end of 2025.
• Salesforce’s collaboration with Saks, IBM, and Google will lead the way to AI in industries and enhance the business aspects of Salesforce.

Agentforce – AI Agents for Customer Success

The highlight of the event has to be the newly launched Agentforce Platform, which was mentioned in the main and almost all Dreamforce keynotes. As an upgrade to the Einstein Copilot Studio, the Agentforce will serve as a suit of AI agents as companions to humans. They will be able to handle sales, services, marketing, and commerce tasks to provide more time to employees for strategies and management. Agents will be able to analyze data to make swift decisions and enhance responses as per the query without withholding the customer. With Agentforce, any organization can easily build, customize, and deploy their own agents for any use case across any industry. There will also be agent coaches to help the humans excel at every step. Agentforce will bring together humans, AI, data, and actions that differentiate agents from chatbots. 

Atlas Reasoning Engine – Brain of the Agentforce

During the main Dreamforce Keynotes, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff mentioned that the Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brain of Agentforce. It equips the agents with the capabilities to respond naturally while adapting to situations faster. This is where your agents will receive their goals, roles, and data and then use them to execute tasks. It will leverage the data from Customer 360 to increase conversions, enhance solutions to customer queries, and perform tasks with little supervision. 

Agent Builder – Extension to Einstein Studio Builders

As Agentforce is an upgrade to the Einstein Studio, a new builder is incorporated to build Agents. The Agent Builder is an extension of the existing Model Builder and Prompt Builder to move beyond the copilot era. It will allow you to develop Agents with no-code and low-code tools and further configure them with Flows, Apex, APIs, etc. The organizations can customize their agents as per requirements and deploy them to multiple use cases such as customer service support, marketing automation, coaches, etc. This will be possible by defining topics and providing agents with natural language instructions for actions through agent builder.

Data Cloud – Improved With New Additions

Data Cloud is undoubtedly Salesforce’s most used and successful cloud platform. In fact, it has seen 130% growth year over year in paid customers and continues to grow. This year, it has been made clear that your AI is useless without data. With Data Cloud, Salesforce plans to merge Customer 360 and Agentforce across its platform, allowing it to automate actions and workflows. Here are some major Dreamforce 2024 Updates for Data Cloud:

1. There will be more structured and unstructured data formats available, such as video and audio formats. The Vector Database introduced last year will make it easier to document data beyond records and objects. The information that went unnoticed due to the unstructured format will become useful for analysis and insights.
2. As we know, the pre-built connectors are an essential feature of Data Cloud, and the repository is being extended with 50 new ones. These connectors will allow you to pull data into Data Cloud and unify it with data from other sources. They will be divided into three categories: Hyperscale, Horizontal, and Industry-specific connectors. 
3. The sub-second real-time capabilities combined with the latest data graphs will help with faster performance, segmentation, and actions based on ingested data to prepare data for Agentforce.
4. With the zero-copy partner network, data storage in different places is now preventable. This feature will allow you to fetch data as and when required through connectors. Packages of metadata called Data Kits will be available to speed up the installation process without writing any code. 

Purpose-Built AI, Data and Agents in Slack

Our favourite collaborative platform, Slack, will also have innovative feature updates per the Dreamfroce 2024 News. following are some of the features that you must look forward to:

1. Agentforce in Slack: With an improved UI and agents, Slack users can dig deeper into their data and gather insights through Agentforce. The agents will be available for tasks and actions tailored to your teams.
2. Third-party AI agents: If you want any specific AI agents from third-party applications or partners, then you can deploy the trusted ones. These will include partners like Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity and more.
3. Salesforce channels: A new Salesforce channel has been introduced to facilitate your teams’ collaborative work on specific accounts or opportunities. It will connect your CRM with channel-based conversations for increased alignment. Salesforce channels are also said to soon be integrated with the Salesforce UI.
4. New features with purpose-built AI: Search, templates, and automation will see upgrades with enhanced huddle notes and a search feature so that your team can work faster with improved focus.
5. Slack templates: Collections of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows will make work more productive in every department.

AI Certification Free For All

One of the biggest Dreamforce 2024 Announcements is about Free AI Certifications for all. To make AI available and increase awareness in education, Salesforce has announced that it will offer free premium instructor-led courses and AI certifications through 2025. More details will be released soon, but the news included the free of charge certifications to be accessible via Trailhead. 

Salesforce Collaborations – Saks, IBM, and Google

Another noteworthy moment of Dreamforce 2024 Updates is the extended collaboration with Saks Fifth Avenue and new partnerships with IBM and Google. 

• Salesforce has announced an extension in its collaboration with Saks, a luxury fashion destination. Saks has been using Salesforce to deliver seamless white-glove customer support. The plan is to integrate Customer 360 apps, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to transform the shopping experience further. 
• IBM is set to launch its autonomous agents to address the relevant industry problems. For example, banking agents will help with faster loan approvals, documentation and credit checks for their customers. These agents will be designed to comply with the region’s local tax laws to improve accuracy.
• Google is also collaborating with Salesforce to build Agentforce actions for Google Workspace. This will automate tasks such as generating docs, search efficiency and trigger-based actions in Google Calendar. 

All of these partnerships will foster trust in the newly launched agent force and other features. Salesforce will also be able to promote agents and AI innovations through the alliance’s results. 

Conclusion

To sum up, the Dreamforce 2024 event has revealed a lot about what’s coming in Salesforce and AI. The new updates in Data Cloud and Slack will improve the functioning of your Salesforce org. Meanwhile, the AI-powered agents, with the backup of Atlas, will bring forward the third wave of AI. Moving on from copilot, Salesforce is now motioning towards Agentforce, which will act as companions to humans, enhancing and maintaining customer relationships. This concludes that AI is the present and the future, and having a thorough knowledge of it will be beneficial in Salesforce and beyond.