Salesforce Dreamforce 2023: 8 Biggest Announcements

Einstein 1, Einstein Copilot and new integrations with AWS, Google and Databricks are among the biggest announcements out of Dreamforce 2023.

An artificial intelligence platform that promises safe application building. A conversational out-of-the-box AI assistant. And deeper integrations with the likes of Google and Amazon Web Services.

These are some of the biggest announcements to come out of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event, held in the San Francisco-based customer data platform vendor’s hometown.

The conference runs through Thursday.

Salesforce AI Updates At Dreamforce 2023

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff used his keynote address Tuesday to make bold attacks against other generative AI (GenAI) vendors, accusing them of not taking trust and hallucinations as seriously as his company.

He accused other vendors of stealing training data and wanting to use customer data for their own ends.

“We want to build the trusted AI platform for customer companies so that everyone is an Einstein and more productive,” Benioff said. “We think that trust is the highest priority here. We want to turn it over to you – but only with trust. We want to make sure it’s integrated. We want to make sure it’s intelligent. We want to make sure it’s automated. We want to make sure it’s low code and no code. We want to make sure it’s open. … This is our life’s work. This is what we’ve been doing for 25 years.”

Salesforce has about 6,000 active consulting partners, according to the vendor.

Here are the biggest announcements out of Dreamforce 2023.

Einstein 1 Platform

During Dreamforce 2023, Salesforce debuted the Einstein 1 Platform, an AI platform that promises the ability to safely connect any data for AI-powered application building.

The platform brings in capabilities from Salesforce Data Cloud, Einstein AI and the underlying Salesforce metadata framework, according to the vendor.

Einstein 1 supports thousands of metadata-enabled objects per customer, with each object capable of having trillions of rows. Customers can bring data onto the platform from other systems and made available as actionable Salesforce objects.

Users can trigger Flows by any change on any object at scale, including an event coming from an internet of things (IoT) device, a computed insight or an AI prediction.

The platform can handle up to 20,000 events per second and can interact with legacy and modern systems.

Einstein Copilot

Salesforce has launched a pilot of the Einstein Copilot GenAI out-of-the-box conversational AI assistant.

The tool is built into the user experience of every Salesforce application and promises users the ability to ask questions in natural language and receive relevant and trustworthy answers grounded in secure proprietary company data in the Salesforce Data Cloud.

Einstein Copilot will offer users the chance to take more actions beyond the query, including implementing a recommended action plan after a sales call or creating a new service knowledge article, according to the vendor.

Without Einstein Copilot, users might have to run other GenAI copilot products and services as separate apps not integrated with workflow. This could result in the user not easily or securely leveraging trusted company data to generate relevant and consistent results from large language models (LLMs), according to Salesforce.

Other potential use cases for Einstein Copilot include:

*Automatic sales email generation to fit certain tones, styles and customer contexts

*Automatic clause drafting and embedding into customer contracts

*The ability to surface specific details in customer calls instead of reading through transcripts

*Automatic marketing campaign email generation

*Automatic survey generation following an action a user takes online

*Assistance with building digital storefronts from natural language prompts

*Automated management of multi-product catalog data

*Creating product descriptions in multiple languages

*Generate metadata for search engine optimization (SEO)

*Scan for code vulnerabilities within a developer environment

*Faster Tableau data exploration through natural language

*Generate appointment summaries for health care professionals

Einstein 1 Copilot Studio

Einstein Copilot Studio will enter the pilot phase in the fall, according to Salesforce.

This offering promises to allow users the ability to build their own AI-powered applications with custom prompts, skills and AI models, according tof the vendor.

Users can leverage these AI apps for faster deal closure, streamlining customer service, auto-creating websites based on someone’s browsing history, turning a natural language prompt into code and other business tasks.

With Einstein Copilot Studio, users can make Einstein Copilot available across websites and other consumer-facing channels for real-time chats and messages with Slack, WhatsApp and other apps.

Copilot Studio will include a prompt builder for testing and deploying GenAI prompts that match company brands and styles without deep technical expertise, according to Salesforce.

The skills builder feature will allow for the creation of AI-driven actions for specific tasks. Users can make competitor analysis skills, for example, that look at market data, sales figures and external databases and deliver important information.

The model builder feature lets users bring their own models for business needs. Users can pick a proprietary Salesforce LLM or integrate a preferred model and then train and fine-tune the model on data in Salesforce Data Cloud without moving or copying data.

Model builder will support integrations with Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and OpenAI, according to Salesforce.

New Net Zero Cloud Features

Coming in spring 2024, Salesforce Net Zero Cloud will gain new Einstein features to improve corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.

And in October, the vendor will roll out new report builder and materiality assessment features, according to Salesforce.

Net Zero Cloud promises to help users meet the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) rules that go into effect next year, according to Salesforce.

Einstein for Net Zero Cloud will add response suggestions based on prompts that are in line with specific reporting framework criteria.

A CSRD Report Builder promises to automate reporting related to those requirements. And the materiality assessment should help ESG managers find topics most material to the business. Hey can use a customizable survey to gather stakeholder input, rank topic importance, calculate scores and visualize the results in a matrix, according to Salesforce.

Salesforce And Google

Salesforce and Google expanded their partnership to further integrate their products, according to Salesforce.

Salesforce is the first partner to integrate with the Google Workspace Duet AI extensions framework. And Google Workspace is the first extensibility partner for Salesforce Einstein Copilot.

Users can bring in context from Salesforce and Google Calendar, Docs, Meet, Gmail and other productivity applications

Google Workspace users gained the ability to generate content in that platform and update records and trigger workflows in Salesforce.

Joint users can also bring PaLM 2 and other Google-hosted LLMs from Vertex AI to Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot Studio to build GenAI products and services in Salesforce Customer 360.

Salesforce and AWS

Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will pilot a series of integrations next year that promise to enable sharing of data lakes and large language models (LLMs) between the two vendors.

Users of Amazon Redshift, EMR, Athena, Bedrock and SageMaker can leverage foundation models within Salesforce with security, according to Salesforce. The process has zero extract, transform and load (ETL) processes, meaning no copying and moving data.

An existing integration between Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect allows users the ability to launch contact center services with Salesforce’s agent desktop with Amazon Comprehend, Transcribe and other services to improve agent productivity, according to Salesforce.

AWS has about 100,000 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2023 Channel Chiefs.

Salesforce And Databricks

Salesforce and Databricks expanded their partnership to allow for seamless merging of data from Salesforce Data Cloud with external Databricks Lakehouse Platform data.

The deeper partnership should reduce the cost and complexity of moving and copying data while keeping security, governance and trust standards, according to Salesforce. The companies promise zero ETL for applicable data.

Users can access Databricks data in Data Cloud and vice versa. They can use the data for AI model training and immediate access to unified customer data, according to Salesforce. Hey can use Databricks Machine Learning to build and train models and bring them into Data Cloud.

Databricks has about 1,000 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2023 Channel Chiefs.

Deloitte And Salesforce

Deloitte Digital revealed a series of new integrations with Salesforce, including bringing Einstein AI to its DigitalMIX platform and new services for biopharmaceutical (BioPharma) organizations.

DigitalMIX gained new abilities for automation, personalization, and analytics across sales, service, marketing and the back-office, according to the global systems integrator (GSI).

Users can leverage more predictive analytics, GenAI and visualizations for productivity, revenue growth and customer relationships, according to Deloitte.

DigitalMIX offers scalable, pre-configured services for multi-cloud finance implementations. The offering already works with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and other products.

Although the details were scarce on Deloitte Digital and Salesforce’s BioPharma alliance, a statement from Deloitte promised to “empower BioPharma firms to bring innovative therapies to patients faster” and “the next generation of innovations that help enable the rapid scientific and technological progress of this sector.“

They also promised “new engagement models for healthcare professionals and patients across the entire value chain from clinical to commercial,” according to Deloitte.