While tech-industry mega-events have traditionally been defined by the new stuff that’s introduced, Marc Benioff took a new path by focusing this year’s Dreamforce on the creation of new capabilities for customers that will surely push Salesforce out of the CRM silo it created and has long dominated.
To be sure, the recent Dreamforce extravaganza showcased lots and lots of powerful new enterprise-AI technologies. But, my overwhelming impression of the show is that the new AI-centric Salesforce is fully prepared to meet and exceed every one of the passionate promises Benioff made to the world during his evangelistic keynote.
In addition to the benefits customers can expect to gain, the slew of innovations at Dreamforce from Salesforce and its partners also give Benioff a great opportunity to push his company beyond the broad but ultimately finite confines of the CRM category. Some of the big customer stories showcased at Dreamforce — and I’ll talk about one of those in a moment — were about supply chains and logistics and ITSM.
That’s important because if all of what Benioff foretold at Dreamforce comes to pass, then the wildly new ways that work gets done will no longer be managed by software designed for a different time and different functions and different outcomes.
Against that backdrop, here are five examples of the Salesforce transformation showcased at Dreamforce.
1) “Unleashing trapped data” will become industry norm.
If AIforce is able to do what Benioff has claimed, then its real magic will be its ability to allow business customers to quickly and easily mine their massive stores of Salesforce and third-party data for new insights and opportunities. And if that happens, customers can expect every major software vendor to rapidly develop similar capabilities, with the overall result being significant new growth and innovation opportunities for those customers. Here’s how Benioff described it as outlined in my recent analysis, “Marc Benioff’s Masterpiece: Claudeforce and Anthropic Turbocharge Salesforce“:
Many, many times has Marc Benioff talked about the unmatched power of customer data captured by and stored in Salesforce systems — but to the best of my recollection and research, never before has he described that Salesforce data and knowledge and insight and potential as being “trapped,” with its enormous potential business value lying dormant.
Later in the call, Benioff returned to the theme of “trapped” potential for innovation and growth, and described how both Salesforce and Anthropic will be able to use Claudeforce to drive new opportunities not only for customers but also for each other.
“I really saw it myself, as I said, in Europe, where we would really show these exhaustive demos to customers and when they could see that all this value that they have in their systems that has been trapped becomes untrapped.”
2) A Big Promise: making software — not people! — do the dirty work.
Pretty simple proposal, isn’t it? And it’s certainly not the first time a software company has made such a pledge. But Benioff chose to make this dream a core element of his keynote speech and of the broad messaging across Dreamforce, so expect we’ll be hearing much more from Salesforce about the customer benefits that will accrue when applications and agents and platforms spend more time driving great business outcomes and less time telling humans what to do.
3) Does helping the U.S. Air Force manage 84,000 vehicles sound like CRM?
With 84,000 vehicles valued at $13.5 billion and operating across 389 locations, the United States Air Force earlier this year was looking to modernize the software that helps manage that massive fleet. While that’s hardly a classic CRM challenge, Salesforce won a $72-million contract through its Missionforce National Security team. From that announcement, which Benioff touted at Dreamforce:
“The 441st VSCOS is a masterclass in how a lean, mission-focused team paired with Salesforce can drive real global impact. By consolidating onto a single, interoperable platform with Missionforce National Security, the Air Force has turned fragmented logistics operations into a strategic advantage. This is delivering improved visibility for commanders, reduced service downtime, and helping ensure vehicles are ready to roll when the call comes,” said Kendall Collins, CEO of Missionforce and Government Cloud at Salesforce.
4) Aligning with powerful partners to amplify business impact for customers.
Two separate but tightly related factors are driving Salesforce’s intensified collaborations with partners: (a) its new AI technologies are creating huge opportunities for partners to help customers do things they were not able to do in the past, and (b) the company’s unmistakable push into new markets beyond traditional CRM are requiring it to align tightly with partners to build end-to-end solutions and capabilities. I analyzed this in detail recently in a piece headlined “Salesforce’s Killer AI Bundle: Great New Tech Plus Google Cloud, AWS, Nvidia, Anthropic.”
5) Marc Benioff’s interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Regardless of where you might stand on the “AI slowdown” issue, Benioff’s interview with Altman is an essential classic in understanding not just some of the key points for the industry but also Altman’s outlook on that debate, on the role his company is playing in it (WARNING: wear a neck brace to avoid getting whiplash while trying to follow Altman’s thinking), and on what/who he and the pro-slowdown community are putting forth as the arbiters and adjudicators of the future of enterprise AI. Marc Benioff deserves an award for creating this opportunity for the world to hear Altman’s unfiltered perspectives on this world-shaping topic.
