Salesforce CEO Benioff Does AI 'My' Way, With More Customization And Data Science Powering Products

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff introduced new Salesforce capabilities Monday that allow partners to offer clients highly customized solutions branded and geared for their unique businesses.

After spending much of his opening keynote at the 2017 Dreamforce conference roaming the aisles and talking about social issues, Benioff shifted focus to the company's new line of products that add the prefix "my" to several popular solutions.

Those include myTrailhead, myEinstein, myLightning, myIoT, and mySalesforce, which take Salesforce's evolving customization capabilities to a level at which they appear they were natively, explicitly developed for the customer.

[Related: Salesforce And Google Forge Strategic 'Preferred' Partnership]

"This platform is getting richer and deeper and more capable every day," Benioff said, adding Salesforce development and product teams focus both on the core products and creating next-generation capabilities.

Last year at Dreamforce, Salesforce introduced its Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) platform. Now, myEinstein adds functionality sought by partners, including custom AI models, bots, and a prediction builder that spits out sales projections and attrition predictions.

"Everybody knows we've got to move forward on artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, all types of data science," Benioff told Dreamforce attendees.

AI is the future of all Salesforce applications, he said. And Einstein delivers advanced data science to all users, allowing them to create smart apps "with clicks, not code," he said.

You can even get Einstein recommendations on which sessions to attend at the Dreamforce conference, he added.

Salesforce Lightning already offers a framework for developing unique user interfaces. The new myLightning solution takes that further with more dynamic components and layouts that make interfaces look entirely like they were built by the customer, not Salesforce. Customers can select custom themes, branding, colors and background images.

Salesforce has been "working really hard" to build out the Trailhead learning environment, Benioff told attendees. He said Trailhead is often the first thing customers bring up when they meet him.

"People say they wish they had their own Trailhead, with their own logo and identity, to enable their partners and customers," Salesforce's CEO said.

That's why myTrailhead is "exactly for you," he said. "Trailhead with your brand and your content."

"It is the learning cloud, it is the enablement cloud, it is the community cloud all in one," Benioff added.

With mySalesforce, partners can take customized Salesforce applications and move them almost immediately, using declarative functionality, onto a mobile phone. They simply appear as a brand app available through Google Play or the App Store.

The fourth industrial revolution is all around, Benioff said, bringing connectivity to products like motorcycles, elevators, and soda coolers.

The "my" series extends into that realm through myIoT, a rebuild of Salesforce's platform for interconnected devices that puts IoT directly into the core Salesforce environment customers are familiar with, Benioff said.

"We're going to keep giving you new functionality, new technology, three times a year, magically," Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder, and CTO told attendees.

Whether customers choose no-code, low-code or code, it's "always going to be easy" with Salesforce, Harris said.

The "my" series continues a product development path of enabling customization of Salesforce products with minimal coding, Kai Hsiung, chief revenue officer at Silverline, a Salesforce integrator based in New York City, told CRN.

"But this iteration feels more meaningful," Hsiung said after the keynote. "As a Salesforce user, we would likely use all of them internally and recommend them to our clients."

That includes the myTrailhead customized learning paths, which Silverline will likely deploy for its own employees and clients, Hsiung told CRN.