Dreamforce Day 1 announcements feature platform power-ups

SAN FRANCISCO - Salesforce kicked off Dreamforce 2016 with a slew of announcements around its product portfolio, introducing what it calls the “next generation” of its Customer Success Platform.

Alex Dayon, president and chief product officer, said the company is “paving the path forward” for its customers via its platform which spans sales, service, marketing, commerce, communities, analytics, IoT and app development.

“By delivering new levels of intelligence, speed, mobility, productivity and connectivity across the platform, we're empowering companies to get closer to their customers and achieve entirely new levels of success,” he added.

Notable announcements include Einstein, which will embed artificial intelligence (AI) in the Salesforce Platform. The AI layer is touted to enable customers to get closer to their customers, automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.

Einstein can leverage the data in Salesforce—customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and ecommerce; social data streams such as tweets and images; and even IoT signals—from participating customers to train predictive models.

AI predictive models can be customized automatically for individual customers. These models learn, self-tune and get smarter based on every relevant interaction and additional piece of data.

Everyone will be able to build AI-powered apps with the tools that millions of developers already use every day. With a few clicks, admins will be able to include Einstein-powered fields in any object, page layout or workflow, making every business process smarter. And data scientists and coders will be able to leverage Predictive Vision and Sentiment Services to train deep learning models to recognize and classify images and sentiment in text.

There are also improvements being made to Salesforce1 mobile app. The offering brings together all the functionality of CRM data and business processes, Chatter, custom apps, partner apps and more into a unified modern mobile experience. It currently boasts more than 1.5 million mobile monthly active users.

New innovations include:

• An easier process for customers to brand their Salesforce1 apps, and list them independently in mobile app stores.
• Forecasting tools which will give sales leaders a top-down view of their businesses, making it easy for them to manage their forecasts on-the-go. Executives and sales managers will be able to view and sort by forecast category to see how their teams are performing against quotas in real time, from any device.

The company also announced new innovations in its IoT Cloud, which includes:

• New IoT Profiles which will bring together critical data sources in real-time, including
• streaming event data from connected devices and contextual data from Salesforce, such as service history or open opportunities.
• New IoT Traffic Monitor will provide a real-time dashboard that empowers businesses to visualize the state of connected devices in relation to the customer experience.

The weeklong Dreamforce event, is in its 14th year and is touted as one of the biggest software conferences in the world. This year, 171,000 people have registered to attend the event, which will feature 3,000 breakout sessions and more than 1,500 hours of content.

The first day of events featured a keynote address by life and business strategist Tony Robbins. It also saw entrepreneurs and stars of ABC’s “Shark Tank,” Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca, along with Will.i.am and CEO of BroadbandTV Shahrzad Rafati judging the new Dreampitch competition. Competing startups will have the opportunity to receive an investment of up to US$150,000.

The second day will feature a keynote address by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a fireside chat with Melinda Gates and a concert by U2 to raise money for pediatric care and research at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals.

Disclosure: The reporter is being hosted by the conference organiser, Salesforce.