Dreamforce 2016 Takeaways – Part 1 of 3 (General Announcements)

Here are our observations from DF 2016, posted in three parts. These are observations coming from our client and partner interactions, and sessions we attended at Dreamforce 2016.  This is obviously not a comprehensive coverage of the event but from the lens through which we viewed it. Our areas of focus were:

• Sessions targeted to Executive and Salesforce Admin roles
• Sales, Service, Marketing, App Cloud & Community Salesforce products
• Customers spanned across small, mid-market and enterprise segments
• Industries included Retail, Higher Education, Non Profits, Healthcare & Financial Services
• Sessions targeted to Salesforce Consulting Partners

In this first part, a list of the most significant announcements among the General Announcements:

• Salesforce Einstein was the major product announcement this year
  • The premise is that systems are smart enough to learn from our interactions and data. The positioning of AI by Salesforce is that we are already consumers of AI in our interactions with Google, Facebook, Amazon (through product recommendations, suggested newsfeeds etc). Salesforce’s play will be AI to make CRM smarter, a ‘Data Scientist’ on your staff so to say
  • Examples presented include – a salesperson benefiting from predictive algorithms to prioritize leads and respond to high value opportunities, service organizations being able to identify customers who are at risk for churn, so that agents can renew or upsell with personalized offers and marketers being able to utilize predictive intelligence to segment and build audiences based on likely future actions. These are use cases that stay close to the core of CRM functionality.
• Significant recent acquisitions have included Quip for content creation and document sharing, Demandware now rebranded as Commerce Cloud.
• A recent IDC study estimates 1.9 million net increase of jobs produced in the “Salesforce economy” between the end of 2015 and end of 2020. This comes from designing, marketing, selling, servicing the products to Salesforce customers. For every dollar Salesforce makes, the company’s ecosystem will achieve $4.14.
• Salesforce has raised Full Year Revenue Guidance to $8.325 Billion. It is expected that FY’18 will yield revenues of >$10B