Dreamforce is over, long live Dreamforce! Every single year the conference is different to me and this year was no exception, if for nothing else then for these two reasons – such a bright idea to do a mini vacation at Yosemite before the event and to record daily podcast during the event. Which forced me to take notes of those a few things I actually visited. It wasn’t the best thing I ever recorded, what would you expect from a piece which is being recorded at 11pm after drinks and just shortly before landing into a bed.
Yosemite
It was Dreamforce #6 or #7 but I never though about extending the event much. It was always a day or two in San Francisco, maybe Alcatraz visit or just walk in that huge park, but nothing more. This year I found out there are national parks just short (4h) ride away and the plan was born.
Sadly I wasn’t alone as 4 millions (or more?) people visit the park per year, so all the camping sites have been reseved as well as most of the hotels. But just outside of the park I found one of the very last rooms and booked it.
What can I say – the experience was totally worth it, the park is huge and even we lived just outside of the park we still drove about an hour or longer every day to get to the main spots.
30 000 steps per day was the norm, 3 days, 3 different locations and experiences. From waterfalls which didn’t have much water, compared to their spring versions, but were still awesome; to above the valley views where one cannot believe that the day before we’ve been 600m lower climbing up; to a completely abandoned valley where we’ve met just two hikers on our way back.
Experience to repeat, next year some different park. Yellowstone, Grand Canyon or something else?
Dreamforce Day #0 aka MVP day
While most people just arrive on this day, it is a long tradition that Salesforce MVPs have their own un-conference, where we meet each other (!) and selected product teams from Salesforce, giving first (or last before go-live?) feedback and being pretty direct.
We typically have several session to choose from and this year I decided to give (again) chance to Data Cloud, Agentforce and Revenue Cloud as I somehow didn’t feel I already have enough of those.
We spoke about the need for clean data, which is a topic Salesforce takes for granted and don’t really amplify it, customers are then surprised their results are slightly different to what they saw in demos. I’ve been also surprised by the huge ratio of zero copy approach (more than 30 % of data are served this way).
The need for additional and deeper enablement of partners and in general and the trouble of staying on top of the things with monthly or even shorten release cycle. And the final thing was Clean Room for possible partner collaboration on data which looks super promising but I wonder how many of my customers will have a usecase for that.
Speaking about Agentforce – 95% of POC will never make it to production, which might lead us to a question whether we should really be lean or less lean if there would be higher ROI.
New AgentBuilder with their own AgentScript as a configuration language which should be easier to use/debug as it won’t result in tons of always/never/before statements which contradict each other. Also new Prompt Builder with conditional control.
Revenue Cloud new features around contract management where I can upload the contract and then ask AI questions around it and what’s covered and what not, soon to be live Compliance Agent, agents which checks why some product is not available for users to choose and fix the potentional configuration issue. Plus it is API first and build on core.
The day is a lot about meeting others as well and it is so great to see all of them in person, at least once a year. For me also the main reason why I finally decided to go to Dreamforce, I’ve been really scared with the situation there, the stricter border control and also the government shutdown – at the end no problem at all.
One main experience of the day – rock, paper, scissors in groups – what an unexpected fun.
But besides meeting MVPs I also got the chance to meet CTAs and if I’m not mistaken this was the first official gathering since I became one of them. No picture probably survived, but the food was delicious and the talks great (even though I already had enough of social interactions by this time).
Day #1
After years I decided to skip the keynote (and I still don’t have a feeling I missed anything major) and rather ventured between sponsors looking for what might be interesting for me and my customers. I skipped a lot of booth immediately as most of them had some version of „we do AI“ on them and I already had enough of this.
But there were plenty of great things I saw:
- Copado and their Org Intelligence – this is high on my list of things to test as it is free (up to 50 queries per month) and looks like it can answer a lot of questions the admins might have and would be hard to find in the documentation of their org (doesn’t matter whether it in fact exists or not);
- Gearset and Sweep have potentially the very same capabilities and I need to check those as well;
- ChargeBee CPQ – as I haven’t heard the best feedback on the new Revenue Cloud (still want to try it somewhere on my own), this product looks really good, is directly integrated with billing and might be just enough for most clients;
- Blackthorn solution for events – so far we run CzechDreamin without any specializied app (if I skip Eventbrite) but we might want to try this, where all the data are at one place;
- GridMate was in my head always a shortcut for better list views, where I can edit data but also show them grouped and with conditional formatting. But I found out they do way more including Gantt Chart (which I just need for one client) and 30 other components which might be useful;
- I played with Hubble just before Dreamforce and need to spent more time with that. The best part for me is the indication whether we have the last version of package installed or not, because keeping on top of this is super hard for me as a lot of ISVs don’t even notify the admins that there is a new version to install;
- PDF Butler didn’t disappoint and their new contract management functionality looks really good;
- I have on my list of things to learn/test also the SPIFF tool from Salesforce to calculate commissions and I’ve been really surprised how many such tools have been between sponsors – Xactly, Everstage or CaptivateIQ – looks like I need to check more tools and compare them;
Data Cloud 10 tips from implementation wasn’t anything surprising and I would say they apply to all projects – understand what is the product about (this isn’t ESB/ETL while it can do a lot of that; understand data model & capabilities; involve stakeholders soon and often; have clear objetives; start with MVP and scale up; bring only needed data – I was never sure about this one, glad to have it confirmed from another person; think whether business really needs streaming data; use OOTB connectors; don’t forget that credits are counted from processed rows not returned rows and that data ingest from SF is now for free).
Anyone can become an architect but not everyone can be an architect
What a great statement and the way how to become an architect is to get more involved in things outside of your main area – ask for additional responsibilites, invest your time. Don’t be afraid to use AI, ask it questions and let it explain things to you, become a great builder, learn the clouds and know more about many areas – thank you Steve for the ideas! BTW – isn’t it weird that we don’t trust code which juniors generate with AI but we trust the same code when it has been generated by senior developer?
Day #2
Nonprofit breakfast? Most likely, was interesting to see that nonprofit community groups (and developer groups are pretty much the same) count for 10 % of the total number of community groups. Also celebration of 10 years of Community Sprints (if I’m not mistaken, it is written on the shirt I put somewhere).
Developer keynotes and Agentforce Vibes – but how to vibecode to production? That’s the crucial question I see again and again and where the low code platform doesn’t really help much, as users and admins can get really far with their needs and then have the last small request which means you need to redo everything!
Is it Agentforce 360 or 36O? The letter O at the end is so obvious when you hear it for the first time.
How to design UX for something we don’t know would be the usecase? That’s the crucial question today with the agents and the answer is conversational UX but not in the form of the small box we are used to now on all those websites but fullpage view. But where to put it? You guessed right – Slack!
Scale Center and ApexGuru available now for all customer, another tools I probably should check.
30 000 customers already run on the new Cosmos UI which is pretty incredible to me and one of the numbers I don’t really understand – Salesforce still reports 150 000+ customers for last X years, I didn’t really expect that a lot of existing customers would switch and having 30K new customers would be reason to report, right?
Also concert day? And that arrogant guy I will remember for a while!
Day #3
I took a trip to „SalesforceBen HQ“ for their breakfast talk about blended teams – something I see very often and which they didn’t really bring to the edge. Internal blended team (developers, admins and consultants) are definitelly challenge in what people want to do and where they feel should be handovers (don’t overcomplicate it!) but I see the same with customers whom you cannot really control but would wish for the same approach to documentation, deployment, testing, etc.
75% of admins also use coding tools, being it „just“ SOQL or all the way to Visual Studio Code. The new „vibing“ approach looks fantastic, but doing the right thing (no matter whether vibe or not) should be more important
Final advice – slow down to speed up -> take your time to absorb the learning from Dreamforce or any other event, so you can properly utilize them later.
I’ve probably never been to Marketing keynote and it was super interesting. I just wish to really meet a team who would be able to implement all of that!
Conversational marketing, where you can really reply to the email (good bye „noreply@“ addresses) and you’ll get reply back. No wonder the email should have „This email can talk back, hit reply“ somewhere visibly as we aren’t used to this approach. The whole ping-pong about scheduling a meeting and later rescheduling was fantastic and I wonder how much it takes to prepare.
Which was actually the next thing they showed – so far it takes about 8 weeks to prepare marketing campaign. The whole journey, branding, wording, emails, etc. With Agentforce you can do it in minutes, but would the management be really ok with the emails generated by AI if now they are happy to fight over every single word? Would it sell enough and whom to blame if not? I understand it can be real helper, but doubt we will be brave enough to let it run the whole campaign on its own.
BTW: why they still happily use the „ExactTarget“ reference when speaking about specific cloud, if they bought it 12 years ago? (I’ll skip why it still looks the same)
What is also slightly confusing to me is the new Marketing Cloud Next/Growth/Advanced and how the flow is involved. It was great to see how they redid the campaign layout, but I still struggle when to use Journey builder and when to go with flow and why flow should decide which journey will be triggered it this can be decided in the journey.
Which is nice seque to the presentation about 5 learning from real implementation of MC Next, the most crucial (to me) was that admins need to be involved and marketers should not be the one who will design the flow structure.
Day #4
Go home! It was a long week, so last day in San Francisco, bridge, Painted Ladies, Waymo and back to Europe! Try to catch up with all the news and bits on social networks and there Leanne is the winner with her own summary of Dreamforce – what a week!
