Dreamforce 2024: Key Announcements and a New AI Era with Agentforce

At Dreamforce 2024 this week, more than 45,000 Trailblazers from over 140 countries will gather in person in San Francisco, with millions more watching on Salesforce+. Together, they’ll see how Salesforce is ushering in a new era of AI with Agentforce, a groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce, driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction. Agentforce enables companies to augment their employees and scale their workforces on demand with a few clicks. 
AI agents can analyze data, make decisions, and take action on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. With Agentforce, any organization can easily build, customize, and deploy their own agents for any use case across any industry. 
Agentforce’s out-of-the-box agents are easy to customize and deploy with clicks, not code, and can be set up in minutes. The first Agentforce wave includes agents for sales, service, marketing, and commerce. For example, Service Agent replaces traditional chatbots with AI that can handle a wide range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios, improving customer service efficiency. Sales Development Representative (SDR) engages with prospects 24/7, answering questions, managing objections, and scheduling meetings based on CRM and external data, allowing sellers to focus on building deeper customer relationship, and Merchandiser assists ecommerce merchandisers with site setup, goal setting, personalized promotions, product descriptions, and data-driven insights, simplifying daily tasks.
Read the Agentforce press release.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce will empower attendees to build their first AI agents in minutes, live and on-site at the ‘Agentforce Launch Zone.’ Attendees will receive one-to-one guidance from the Agentforce ‘advance force’ experts to develop their first Agent prototype, using a cutting-edge, AI-powered Slack app that interfaces with a Large Language Model (LLM), facilitating the creation of an autonomous agent. 
 More information:
Customers like Wiley, Saks, and OpenTable are already exploring Agentforce.

Agentforce Studio is a suite of low-code AI builders that enable teams to customize agents. 
Agentforce Partner Network is an open ecosystem that enables a company’s Agentforce to complete complex tasks that require chaining together actions across Salesforce and a broad network of third-party systems and agents. Customers can easily install these trusted third-party extensions from the Salesforce AppExchange to customize Agentforce’s out-of-the-box agents, build new agents with specific skills, or deploy partner-built agents for specialized industry, line of business, or functional use cases. Launch partners include: Amazon Web Services, Box, Google Cloud, IBM, Workday, Zoom, and more.
New AI Models from Salesforce Research, including xGen-Sales, a proprietary model trained and designed to power autonomous sales tasks with Agentforce, and xLAM, a new family of Large Action Models designed to handle complex tasks and generate actionable outputs. Together, these models will allow Salesforce customers to quickly set up and deploy autonomous AI agents that take action, driving unprecedented scale.
Data Cloud, the heartbeat of the Salesforce Platform and foundation of Agentforce, unifies and harmonizes customer and business data to deliver more personalized, contextually relevant, and timely customer experiences across Customer 360 applications, Flow, analytics, and Agentforce, Salesforce’s groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents. 
New Data Cloud innovations debuting at Dreamforce include additions to unstructured data support, including native processing of audio and video content — like webinars and calls — to unlock deeper customer insights; a standardized semantic data model that enables anyone, including AI, to interpret and use data consistently; improved search capabilities that factor in customer context and allow for quicker information discovery; real-time data activations to respond instantly to changing customer needs; and additional data security and governance features to safeguard operations and prevent unnecessary data exposure.
Salesforce Customer 360 apps have a common foundation that enable AI-powered, personalized experiences across every customer touchpoint, from sales to service to marketing to commerce, with analytics and collaboration through Tableau and Slack. Built on the Salesforce Platform, Customer 360 apps can work together seamlessly, leveraging shared data and services to deliver a cohesive customer experience.
New Customer 360 app innovations recently introduced include: 
Tableau Einstein opens up the power of business intelligence (BI) and analytics to everyone that wants to make data-driven work scalable, efficient, and more valuable. It is designed to intelligently embed data and insights across the flow of work — including Customer 360 apps, Agentforce, Pulse, and Slack — so it becomes second nature to use data to drive action. Because Tableau Einstein is built on the Salesforce Platform, any team can use analytical insights to make strategic decisions more quickly and effectively. More on Tableau Einstein
Slack debuted a new user interface for agents. Users can now talk to their data, surface insights, and get help with tasks with both Agentforce Agents and third-party AI agents from partners like Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and more. In addition, a new type of Slack channel that connects Salesforce CRM records to channel-based conversations gives teams a unified space to collaborate and a real-time view of the customer so they can stay aligned and move work forward. More on Slack innovations
In addition to two sales agents built on Agentforce —  Agentforce SDR and Agentforce Sales Coach, Sales Cloud added new data and AI-powered capabilities to accelerate how sales teams drive revenue with account planning, prospecting, forecasting, and compensation management. These innovations give sellers a complete view of their customers and business by unifying Salesforce and external data with Data Cloud, and surfacing AI-powered insights in the flow of work. More on Sales Cloud innovations
New Service Cloud innovations were released to provide step-by-step resolution plans for service representatives, help them track customer sentiment, and get AI-based recommendations to improve customer experience. In addition, Agentforce Service Agent  is able to offload or “deflect” and resolve customer cases 24/7 grounded in trusted data, like a company’s knowledge base, so it can have accurate, fluid conversations with customers, and escalate cases to human representatives when necessary. More on Service Cloud innovations

Salesforce unveiled the following AI-driven innovations for Field Service, including Agentforce for Dispatchers which empowers dispatchers to quickly address urgent issues with appointments, and Field Service Operations Home, which equips dispatchers and supervisors with an AI-powered home page experience that uses real-time data to identify patterns and critical trends, allowing users to quickly see what’s important and take immediate action. More on Field Service innovations
New Marketing Cloud innovations to help customers unlock data from across their businesses and use Agentforce Agents and automation capabilities to engage customers on their terms. Marketing Cloud Advanced, an upcoming edition of Marketing Cloud with advanced automation and AI capabilities, will enable marketers to connect marketing journeys with sales, service, and commerce workflows to personalize every moment in the customer relationship. And, Einstein Marketing Intelligence gives marketers one place to manage and optimize cross-channel campaign performance with ready-to-use marketing insights and automated data harmonization, enrichment, and visualization. Marketers can also measure campaign performance and continuously improve ROI.  More on Marketing Cloud innovations
The next generation of Commerce Cloud unifies every element of commerce — B2C, DTC, and B2B Commerce, Order Management, Payments, and more — on a single, integrated platform powered by enterprise-wide data and trusted AI. In addition, Commerce Cloud announced three Agentforce Agents — Merchant, Buyer, and Personal Shopper — which can autonomously manage a range of tasks, including product recommendations and order lookup, without the need for direct human supervision. More on Commerce Cloud innovations
Industries AI Salesforce launched more than 100 customizable, out-of-the-box industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across 15 industry clouds — all underpinned by Data Cloud and supported by the Einstein Trust Layer — that address unique industry tasks like optimizing inventory management in consumer goods or increasing student recruitment in education. These Industries AI capabilities will also serve as the foundation for creating industry-specific Agentforce agents that will transform the way work gets done across every role and workflow, at massive operational scale. Coming soon to every industry cloud, they can be set up in minutes, work around the clock, and autonomously perform industry-specific business tasks and actions. More on Industry Cloud innovations

MuleSoft announced a comprehensive set of integration solutions that enable developers and admins to easily integrate structured and unstructured data from their CRM and external systems to ground AI agents and assistants in trusted data. Using these integrations, companies can also leverage the full power of Data Cloud and Agentforce, personalizing experiences, augmenting employee workloads at scale, building deeper customer relationships, and ultimately, driving revenue. More on MuleSoft innovations
Salesforce also announced Data Governance for the AI Enterprise, a new suite of tools with advanced data management, enhanced data security, and increased data privacy to help IT teams quickly prepare for current and future AI-related regulations. More on Data Governance for the AI Enterprise
Salesforce Ventures is expanding its investment in AI with a new $500 million AI fund, amounting to a total of $1 billion committed to AI innovators in the past 18 months. Salesforce Ventures has invested in two dozen AI companies, including market leaders such as Anthropic, Cohere, Runway, TogetherAI, Mistral AI, and Hugging Face. The new investments will continue to build on the organization’s stake in many of these companies, providing patient capital alongside unmatched growth opportunities and industry expertise from its enterprise ecosystem.

Salesforce is committing $23 million in new grants to U.S. school districts and global education nonprofits to equip students with the skills needed for future success. The funding will provide students with career readiness opportunities and help them learn new skills — like AI and STEM — to prepare for the future, while providing educators with the latest technology in the classroom. The new grants will also support nonprofits that are helping widen access to AI training and increase pathways to meaningful careers. Since its founding, Salesforce has given $150 million to education.
In addition, Marc and Lynne Benioff will donate an additional $3 million to DonorsChoose to support public education in Hawai’i, building on two decades of philanthropic giving in the state. This builds on a two-decade-long commitment by the Benioffs to giving philanthropically in Hawai’i, totalling more than $250 million.
In addition, Dreamforce itself will generate an estimated $93 million for the city of San Francisco.
To help widen access to AI skilling opportunities, Salesforce will offer its premium AI courses and AI certifications to anyone free of charge through its free online learning platform, Trailhead, through the end of 2025. In addition, the company will open new spaces at its San Francisco headquarters, including a pop-up AI Center for in-person community AI training courses and a dedicated floor for employees to skill up on AI tools and agents. Salesforce also plans to add these spaces in other global towers.
Together, these commitments represent a more than $50 million investment in helping skill up the workforce and address a growing AI skills gap.