Salesforce, Dreamforce, + AI: 5 Big Takeaways

Bob Evans (0:00)

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. Had some time to digest the big things that happened at Salesforce's recent Dreamforce event. And I wanted to share with you some thoughts of what I think are the five big takeaways from that big combination of Dreamforce, AI, partnerships and Salesforce moving in some new directions outside the traditional CRM space. So first of these five things, I think that I was more impressed by the implications of the new technology Salesforce showed rather than just the technology itself. So their AIforce UI, which now they've put on top of their stack overall, the big promise from that that I took away from it was that it is going to unleash trapped data within Salesforce systems and other systems. This is a promise that business people have been hearing about, but not necessarily seeing delivered for quite a long time.

And I think that now specifically Mark Benioff's use of this term that when he's talked to customers about this, this notion of being able to unleash this or untrap this trapped data that they've got is going to create huge new opportunities. And I think we're going to see because of Salesforce leading the way on this, every big enterprise software company push in this direction. So I think for Salesforce customers using AIforce is going to be great. I think for customers across the board, this is going to be a trend that everybody has to keep up with. I also think that a big theme at Dreamforce that was a little bit understated, but I think is very important is this notion, make software do the dirty work. You know, don't have software come in and say, okay, I'll do these things that you used to do. But now in return, you've got to spend an equal amount of time doing some other stuff that the software can't or won't do or that, you know, complicated governance rules don't allow to happen.

And Benioff made a big promise about this, that this age of software doing a little bit, but not quite enough and forcing humans who want to get higher output to do more and more of that work to get the higher output is going to be over. I hope Salesforce keeps pushing on this. And again, I hope this is an idea that spreads to other software companies.

I think the tone of what Marc Benioff talked about in his keynote and that we heard throughout the Salesforce event was that Salesforce itself now, it's 27 years, they've been the CRM sort of category king and the dominant player in that. I think Salesforce is ready now with the rise of AI, with some new technologies like AIforce, with some of the new partnerships I'm going to talk about. I think they're going to spread beyond the traditional CRM boundaries. They'll still, of course, be the major player in CRM. But I think they're going to move into some other areas as well because this new wave of AI technology is making it possible for businesses to reinvent processes that don't map to the processes of the past. And so we want to just have these sort of clean cuts. CRM is here, ERP is here, HCM is over there. And I think that Salesforce is moving in this direction as an example of this. Number four, sorry, let me just sort of tie this back in here with number three. There was this huge Air Force contract that Benioff referred to at Dreamforce. So the Air Force has 84,000 vehicles in its fleet across almost 400 different locations. They put a value on this fleet of $13.5 billion.

Doesn't exactly sound like a CRM issue. Well, Salesforce's national public sector team put together a solution now. So they are managing this now, the logistics to operate fleet management. Does that sound like CRM? Well, the world is changing. We're going to see lots more things like this. I think that partnerships that I had talked about right during Dreamforce about the power of this, Salesforce has lined up extensive new partnerships with Google Cloud, with AWS, with NVIDIA, with Anthropic, and with OpenAI, which I'll talk about in a second here. I think these are because they've got new technologies that requires new partnerships to take full advantage of it. And also as they move into these new markets outside of CRM, they're going to need partners more than ever before. And I think Salesforce is very smart to be openly embracing those and moving them forward. And finally, I think Marc Benioff's Q&A with OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, was absolutely priceless because whatever side you choose to be on in this whole thing about the AI slowdown issue, Sam Altman has a very strong position on, he's one of the creators of the Let's Slow Things Down idea and that whole model. And I think Benioff's careful but straightforward, very simple questions really forced Altman to describe in plain language, what OpenAI intends to do, what his vision is for a slowed down future. And most importantly to me, who is going to be the, who is it that's going to be making these calls about, you know, what, who decides what's to be slowed down? How is it slowed down? Who do we trust? When do we trust? But Altman, in my opinion, was all over the place in trying to answer these very simple, straightforward, direct questions from Benioff. And I think that was a huge outcome of the whole event. And I think it also shows Salesforce continuing evolution to being, you know, a powerful thought leader for global business, not just the CRM space. Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.