Salesforce World Tour 2024 - Sydney
What is Salesforce World Tour?
Salesforce World Tour is a global event series that brings together the Salesforce community, including customers, partners, employees, and Trailblazers. It provides a platform for learning, networking, and innovation, showcasing success stories and the latest advancements in the Salesforce platform.
What does Salesforce World Tour cover?
The event covers diverse topics such as CRM best practices, data-driven decision-making, AI-powered innovation, and customer-centric strategies over 140 sessions.
The event features insights from AI visionaries, showcasing how AI, automation, and analytics drive productivity and transform businesses. It includes plenty of success stories from iconic brands, highlighting the real-world impact of CRM and AI integration.
Who are the attendees?
Attendees include Salesforce customers, administrators, business leaders, developers, Trailblazers, partners, analysts and prospective customers.
The event caters to all business aspects, offering marketing, sales, commerce, service, IT, and data teams solutions.
The overall theme for 2024
As you would expect, with the booming of AI, GenAI and ChatGPT in the past year or so, the conference theme revolved around AI, Einstein AI and data. It has been often compared to the advent of the smartphone or even the internet connection. Almost nobody could have imagined them, and almost nobody can live without them today!
Sessions
The event featured insights from AI visionaries, showcasing how AI, automation, and analytics drive productivity and transform businesses.
The agenda was packed with main keynotes, expert-led sessions, product demos, customer solution showcases, testimonials and workshops, so much so that sometimes it made it difficult to choose which session to give up in favour of another one! I had to give up a few interesting ones myself.
Our highlights
Slack
We love and will continue to love Slack.
[Nerd Alert] After all, back in the day, I loved IRC and the programmable bots that you could create in tcl/tk! Which was Slack’s great grandfather. [/Nerd Alert]
Now Slack is owned by Salesforce and it is part of the toolset and ecosystem available. Slack has a lot of potential already for businesses, and it keeps on evolving, by investing in new features.
From what I have seen: more automation, workflows, canvas, more AI, its open API for any kind of integrations, and of course, the ever-evolving native Salesforce integrations!
It was even referred to as the UI for the CRM. It makes sense, with the aid of conversational AI.
Salesforce Data Cloud
Not an easy feat, not an easy problem to solve, a fully integrated CDP (Customer Data Platform). Don’t believe me? Well, look at these two posts from AWS about building a CDP, imagine how much it would cost you to build, run and maintain something like this yourself.
Yes, it has been an evolution of older products (Customer 360 Audience, Salesforce Customer Data Platform, etc) but nonetheless, it is not something easy to fully integrate natively with the rest of the SaaS application stack. And it connects with the most common external data sources out of the box as well!
Cherry on top, Gartner just released its new report that named Salesforce Leader in Customer Data Platforms.
AI, Einstein, Einstein 1 Platform and Einstein Copilot
Salesforce just announced the public beta availability of Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant for CRM. Think of ChatGPT on top of your business data and CRM, which is so cool! Salesforce’s employees often and carefully use the term “grounded with your company’s data”, which highlights the ability to interact with your own CRM, and your data, relationships and signals, knowing your customers and their behaviours.
Einstein Copilot can generate thoughtful responses, automate tasks, and enhance productivity. We have experienced that in multiple demos throughout the conference.
Our takes
AI is front and centre. Most sessions mentioning AI were packed with people, potentially fueling further the buzz around Generative AI. Is the FOMO taking over? Or is GenAI something that every company should embrace as quickly as possible, or as a minimum try out with proof of concepts (POCs)?
Salesforce is heavily investing in evolving cutting-edge tools that help businesses rise above the competition, confirming and reaffirming its market dominance well into the future.
Salesforce’s complete and integrated ecosystem is truly something special, as it covers all aspects and needs of a business. Salesforce Data Cloud contains all the normalised data and signals. Einstein Copilot on top of Data Cloud can make sense of the data and customer signals, before and better than humans can. We have seen it with the AFL customer showcase demo video and during the keynote linked below.
Creating fans for life. See how the AFL grows engagement | Salesforce
World Tour Sydney - Main Keynote | Salesforce
The GenAI technology is still quite new and can be a little scary (see biases, misleading results aka hallucinations etc.). That is why today’s approach mostly revolves around a copilot and not an auto-pilot. Meaning that the user is still needed for every interaction, to check that the messaging is accurate and on point, helping save time and being an enabler for the end-users to provide a superior customer experience.
Personally, I am interested to learn more about Salesforce Data Cloud. Can it be purchased as a standalone product and integrated with other vendors and systems? If yes, is that true in practice? If not, why not? It would feel like Salesforce could gain even more market penetration by opening the platform up. And if/when they do open up the platform, will other CRM vendors embrace this CDP or possibly attempt to steer away from it, with the worry of losing their customers to Salesforce’s worldwide dominance? Time will tell!
Do you need help with integration and automation across your business?
We help businesses integrate and orchestrate their systems together to improve efficiency and provide better customer service, boosting the bottom line.
You can find two straightforward and practical examples below.
Challenge: manual customer data management
Locating and updating customer entries in multiple systems is time-consuming and prone to errors, resulting in delayed responses and suboptimal customer experiences with potential loss of business opportunities.
A solution is to automatically gather information from multiple systems when a CRM event occurs (e.g.: Salesforce, HubSpot) or a Ticketing system is updated (e.g.: Zendesk, Freshdesk). Then the information can be summarised leveraging GenAI (ChatGPT or other service) and a notification can be sent via Slack to the relevant team members, to enable a prompt and improved customer experience
Challenge: periodic data review and update
Sifting through multiple systems, looking for existing records, and attempting to find the field level differences, for a weekly CSV list of records that a vendor sends you, can take days of effort per week, and many mistakes can happen in the process. Leaving you with delayed information and incorrect data that can cost you business opportunities.
A solution is to perform this operation automatically against your CRM, ERP, and Accounting systems, creating or updating records accordingly. The outcomes are then seamlessly communicated to you via Slack, eliminating the need for costly manual data entry and potential mistakes and duplicates, and providing near real-time updates instead of days old information
The improvement possibilities are endless. Interested?
Reach out for an obligation-free chat!
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