Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor At Dreamforce 2022: Genie ‘Changes The Game For CRM’

“Salesforce Customer 360 is the world‘s first real-time CRM,” Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor said during Dreamforce 2022.

Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor

Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor introduced the marketing and sales software giant’s new Genie feature during Dreamforce 2022, calling it “the most significant shift to the Salesforce platform” in 20-plus years and detailing how the feature works with cloud platform partners including Amazon Web Services and Snowflake.

“This changes the game for CRM,” Taylor said during his keynote, referring to customer relationship management software that Salesforce specializes in. “Salesforce Customer 360 is the world‘s first real-time CRM.”

Taylor shared the keynote with fellow co-CEO Marc Benioff. Benioff used part of his talk to say the company he co-founded more than 20 years ago was now larger than SAP.

[RELATED: Salesforce Co-CEO Marc Benioff At Dreamforce 2022: We’re Larger Than SAP]

Salesforce promoted Taylor from chief operating officer to co-CEO in November.

What Did Bret Taylor Say At Salesforce Dreamforce 2022?

In a recent interview with CRN, Gireesh Sonnad, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Salesforce partner Silverline said that his company expects 20-plus percent growth in sales year over year thanks to a recently introduced practice around the media and entertainment industry and growth in Canada.

“At 500-plus people, we’re probably the largest pure-play Salesforce practice that exists, or very close, which we’re proud of,” Sonnad said. “And certainly the biggest one that focuses entirely on an industry model. And so we’re going to continue to push on that as hard as we can. And Salesforce is lining straight up with that. Everything that they’re doing now is in the industry vein as well. And so I think that’s the best growth area for us.”

Silverline was also among a handful of partners that Salesforce last week named as bringing the first industry-focused Slack services to market – alongside consulting giants Accenture, PwC, Capgemini, Deloitte and KPMG.

During Taylor’s keynote, he said that Genie was even powering Dreamforce itself. “From Salesforce.com to [online-video-streaming service] Salesforce+, to every notification you‘ve gotten in the Salesforce events app, all of that is powered by Genie,” he said.

Here’s what else Taylor had to say at Dreamforce 2022.

44 Billion-Plus Automated Workflows A Day

IDC [International Data Corp.] estimates that the amount of data in the world is literally doubling every few years. And I can see all the engineers in the room wincing. There‘s a lot of challenges with that, right? There’s also a ton of opportunity.

And that‘s why we’re here at Dreamforce. It‘s why we introduced Hyperforce. Hyperforce is Salesforce’s trusted cloud platform. It enables you to deploy your Salesforce applications with data residency in 17 countries by the end of next year.

It has security, compliance, privacy and scalability built in. It‘s also why Flow is so important. … For all of you not familiar with Salesforce, this is our workflow automation platform. It’s about saving money, which is pretty relevant right now.

All of you are doing over 44 billion automated workflows every single day. You are saving your organizations 109 billion hours and $2 trillion in savings. That‘s pretty incredible.

Now let‘s talk about Einstein. … Einstein is doing 175 billion predictions every single day. Now this can feel abstract, but it’s not abstract at all. This is a personalized email. This is your customer talking to a chatbot so she doesn‘t need to talk to an agent and take their time. Or even helping an agent get their answer more quickly so she can help your customer be successful.

Salesforce Genie

Customers today, in modern times, are moving in real time. And despite all of these tools and technologies, many of you feel that you‘re not keeping up with the pace of customer expectations. When people walk into a store, they want it to be consistent to what they experience online.

On average, most of the companies in this room have 976 different software applications just to keep your company running. In the face of all this new technology and all this new data, what did we do? We threw a lot of software at the problem.

And 976 different applications means 976 different versions of me, your customer, and we feel it. We feel like we‘re a number.

Things are moving in real time. New devices. Data doubling. And the question is, how do we go from all that data to really find our customers? How do we see our customers in the midst of all that?

And that‘s the challenge that we gave to our engineering team. What if we could bring all of your customer data together into a single source of truth. Not just the data stored in a Salesforce database, but the data in all 976 of those different applications.

And what if your single source of truth was truly real time. It could stream data in and respond in the moment. And what if we coupled those technologies with artificial intelligence and automation so we could turn that real time data into true customer magic. … I think this might be the most significant shift to the Salesforce platform since Parker [Harris, Salesforce co-founder and chief technology officer] was on stage over 20 years ago.

I‘m so excited to introduce today Salesforce Genie. Salesforce Genie is the real-time platform for customer magic. We’ve completely reimagined our CRM from the ground up to enable the real-time capabilities that will enable all of you to build applications that simply weren‘t possible before.

Genie ‘A Foundational New Capability’

With Genie, for the first time in 20 years, we‘ve added a foundational new capability to this platform. We’ve introduced a real-time, hyperscale data platform natively built into our platform.

And because it‘s hyperscale, it’s near-infinite scale for all of your data. And because it‘s real time, you can stream events in real time. And every aspect of the platform on top just got real time as well.

Einstein can personalize in milliseconds. Flow automation can respond to real time events and automate all of your real-time workflows for your employees, for your customers and your partners. And every single cloud in the Customer 360 just got real time as well.

So how does it work? Well, first, with Genie, it‘s all about the data. You can connect to all of your data – your mobile app, your website. That connected thermostat? That can stream into Genie, too.

But it‘s not just about real-time data sources. We can inject historical data sources, your proprietary data lakes, your transactional systems. And we can bring it all together into a single source of truth.

But as I said, it‘s not just about data. It’s about your customers. Genie has harmonization built in. What does that mean? We can resolve all of this data into a single view of the people behind it and create a real-time customer graph of all of your customers and all of their interactions with your business with privacy, consent and compliance natively built in.

And on that, we built amazing new ways to engage with your customers in real time, to do real-time sales calls and sales bots. To do predictive customer service to prevent customer service cases from happening in the first place.

And we‘ve natively integrated into our platform, so all of you can build amazing, magical customer experiences. This changes the game for CRM. Salesforce Customer 360 is the world’s first real-time CRM.

Expanded AWS, Snowflake Partnerships

I am so excited to show you this platform. Real-time sales means your customers can talk to a sales bot. Your salespeople can get real-time analytics to help them close deals.

Real-time service means every agent is getting real time answers to the question, empowering your customers with new self-service platforms. It‘s incredible. You’re going to be able to build apps that you never thought possible before.

We‘ve integrated with the entire Customer 360. And we’ve also integrated with every single one of our industry clouds as well. … Genie changes everything. Genie is generally available today. Now, here‘s the cool part about Genie. Genie is not just a product. Genie is a platform. Genie is open and extensible by design.

For you data geeks out there, it uses what‘s called a lakehouse architecture. It’s natively compatible with Snowflake. You can integrate it with Snowflake without copying your data around.

It‘s natively integrated with all the first-party advertising so you can activate audiences on all the ad networks you already use. And for those of you who have built your own proprietary artificial intelligence models, if you want to use Einstein, great.

If you want to bring your own AI, it is natively integrated with AWS SageMaker as well. … I have never been so excited about the future of Salesforce customer 360 powered by Genie, the world‘s No. 1 and first real-time CRM.

Slack, Sales Cloud And More Genie Integrations

It has transformed every part of the Customer 360, starting with Sales Cloud. Real-time sales mean you can deploy in real time things like bots for sales to help move opportunities along, which you‘ll see in some of the upcoming demos.

It means that your sales reps are actually getting insights from real-time activity that your customers are taking so they actually understand what conversation they‘re going to have when they walk into that sales meeting. … And of course, there’s Marketing Cloud Genie. With Marketing Cloud Genie, you can create a single source of truth of all of your consumer data. This is the world‘s best CDP [customer data platform] integrated with the Customer 360 – end-to-end ending integration with your entire customer experience.

And then there‘s Commerce Cloud Genie. If there’s one place where milliseconds matter, it‘s in commerce. You know the difference between someone abandoning that shopping cart and getting the real-time, personalized experience they need to actually complete that transaction and get that order to their house.

Now, of course, we can‘t be talking about data if we’re not talking about Tableau. You can just open up Tableau and point it at Genie, and you‘ll get visualization.

And then, of course, there‘s MuleSoft Genie. We talk a lot about really fancy things like API [Application Programming Interface] and real time. With MuleSoft robotic process automation … you can integrate all of your data with Genie, from the green screen all the way to your new mobile app. … And then there is Slack Genie. … When you think about automation, you think about intelligence, and you think about real time, who are we serving? We’re serving our employees and our customers.

And with Slack, you can bring all of that real-time information and all those real-time workflows together and find the stakeholders who can make decisions. This new Customer 360 platform is automated, intelligent and real time so you can save money, save time, and grow your revenue.