Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I talk about Salesforce’s TDX 25, the future of AI agents, and how companies are balancing apps and automation in a preview of a longer conversation with Salesforce’s David Schmaier.
Highlights
00:14 — I had an interesting couple of days this week at Salesforce’s developer event in San Francisco, TDX 25, and a very interesting chat with its president and chief product officer, David Schmaier. We talked primarily about the power of AI agents, its whole Agentforce campaign, the power of data, and the enormous changes taking place within customer organizations.
00:53 — One of the things that David talked about is the Trinity: the Data Cloud, the apps, and the Agentforce on top of that. There’s some discussion about the role that apps and agents will play together. You’ve got the Microsoft view, which is that apps are going to collapse, and agents will move up to fill their place. Oracle, SAP, and to some extent, Salesforce are saying, “No, it’s going to be the other way.”
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02:00 — Their unifying element is the data that they work off of. And that is all brought together in Salesforce Data Cloud, which David claims is a huge differentiator for them because of its size and the way it has been cleaned and harmonized. The other big thing that we chatted about a little was that customers are looking to move faster.
03:36 — The overall event at TDX 25 was interesting because it wasn’t just another developer conference where they said, “Hey, here’s the new cool stuff we have.” So many of the announcements and things discussed were: “Here’s how we can help you move faster. Here’s how we can help you do that more easily. Here’s how we can help you get out of the drudge work and up into some higher-level stuff.”
