Salesforce, Dreamforce, + AI: 5 Big Takeaways

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how Salesforce plans to unleash trapped data, make software do more of the work, and expand beyond its CRM roots.

Highlights

00:03 — Had some time to digest the big things that happened at Salesforce's recent Dreamforce event, and I wanted to share with you some thoughts of what I think are the five big takeaways from that big combination of Dreamforce, AI partnerships, and Salesforce moving in some new directions outside the traditional CRM space.

00:40 — The big promise that I took away from it was that it is going to unleash trapped data within Salesforce systems and other systems. This is a promise that business people have been hearing about, but not necessarily seeing delivered, for quite a long time.

02:02 — And Marc Benioff made a big promise about this: that this age of software doing a little bit but not quite enough, and forcing humans who want to get higher output to do more and more of that work to get the higher output, is going to be over.

02:38 — I think Salesforce is ready now, with the rise of AI, with some new technologies like AIforce, with some new partnerships I'm going to talk about, I think it's going to spread beyond the traditional CRM boundaries. It'll still, of course, be a major player in CRM, but I think it's going to move into some other areas as well.

04:38 — And finally, Mark Benioff's Q&A with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was absolutely priceless. Altman's one of the creators of the "Let's Slow Things Down" idea and that whole model. And I think Benioff's careful but straightforward, very simple questions really forced Altman to describe in plain language what OpenAI intends to do.

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