Guess what day it is?  Welcome to Hump Day – both for the week and for Dreamforce.  While only a tiny fraction of the normal crowd is there in person, Salesforce has made it easy for everyone to tune in from around the globe.  If anything, attending remotely makes it easier to attend more sessions and gather insights from the industry’s experts.  Let’s hit the highlights from Day 2.

Big Names

Every Dreamforce has a note-worthy celebrity guest, musical guest, and product.  Despite being largely remote, this year is no different.  Day 1 had large doses of musical talent with Metallica, Lionel Ritchie, and Foo Fighters (featuring the Mascots) all performing.  Day 2 switched the focus primarily to business leaders from several different industries including Accenture, Deloitte, Mulesoft, Rocket Companies, and Williams-Sonoma.  However, Day 2 also included the event’s primary headliner – the Fresh Prince/Agent J/Ali portrayer Will Smith.  He spoke early in the day.

The Art of Transformation

Will Smith spoke with Jessica via video conference.  She dug into his vast career throughout television and movies, as well as his personal causes such as Storytellers of Color.  He is now dipping his toe into the writing world as an author.  He discussed how storytelling has been important to him throughout his career, and how important it is to continue to diversity who is creating new content and having a platform for others to see it.

“Humans are mass consumers of storytelling.”

Conversation with Special Guests

Soledad O’Brien also spoke with actress and comedian Wanda Sykes.  Not surprisingly, Wanda was hilarious in describing how she dealt with the craziness of the past 18 months.  She also discussed how the entertainment industry has changed over the years.  She covered how diversity in show business has changed more quickly for African Americans due to how economically successful the content has been (more so than diversity because it’s the right thing to do).  Hopefully this will lead to increased diversity for other groups in the industry as well.

Big Products

As far as products go, this year’s Dreamforce will be memorable for two primary products: Salesforce Plus and the Slack Acquisition.  Salesforce’s foray into the streaming world has been unleashed on the world over these three days.  This year’s Dreamforce is expected to draw a record number of attendees around the world, and the mixed model of in person and remote will certainly be the standard moving forward.  All of the sessions from Day 2 and for Dreamforce in the foreseeable future will live on the new (and free!) streaming platform.  It is still early, but after some initial buffering (due to everyone joining the opening comments), the feedback has been very positive.

Slack seems to be mentioned in some capacity in almost every session.  While not a replacement for Chatter, Slack should “augment” the long-standing Salesforce feature.  In an era of heavy remote work, Slack has already become a fundamental workspace for many organizations, and over the next few years the Slack-Salesforce integration should make life significantly easier.

Salesforce Brass Conversations

The second day kicked off with Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Parker Harris.  He sat down with reporter Soledad O’Brien, who has been moderating conversations throughout the event.  Parker has been there from Day 1 with Marc and friends.  During his conversation, Parker talked about his background and role at Salesforce, and touched in more detail the roadmap items that he initially covered the day before.  

The middle of the day’s sessions included a conversation between Marc Benioff and Jay Farner.  Jay is the CEO of Rocket Companies, the parent of Quicken Loans and Rocket Mortgage.  They spoke about Trust – a recurring theme throughout this Dreamforce.  Jay spoke of his 26 years with the company and how important Trust is to the organization, starting with the employees.  Both Jay and Dan Gilbert place enormous value on their employees.  Secondarily, they work to establish trust with their customers.  Part of this is the way that they manage their customers and private information.  Additionally, they take their feedback seriously to demonstrate that they truly care about them and their experience.

Shortly after this conversation, Marc sat down with another CEO, this time Williams-Sonoma's long-time leader Laura Alber.  Coming up through the Pottery Barn ranks, she has been at the helm of Williams Sonoma since 2010.  Marc and Laura discussed her career journey and the key roles she had that prepared her to take the helm, including a stint running the supply chain.  Given the challenges of 2020 and 2021, she discussed the decisive actions that the company took to make the company a digital-first organization.  As we begin to re-emerge from the pandemic time period, she emphasized that the brick and mortar locations are still critical to the brand experience and establishing customer trust, but with a full digital experience to amplify the in-store product.

Chief Technology Officer Parker Harris and Chief Engineering Officer Srini Tallapragada then sat down to discuss Hyperforce.  While not as sexy as Salesforce Plus, Slack, or Tableau, the product may be the most significant to the organization.  By reimagining the architecture to utilize the public cloud, performance is vastly improved.  Organizations have flexibility to determine where they store data and advanced security measures ensure that the right people have access to the right things at the right times.  Best of all, the system is backwards compatible to every salesforce application, leading to a seamless roll-out across the platform. 

Sales Sessions

Salesforce in general and Dreamforce specifically always do a great job returning to the core of their business – helping organizations maximize sales efforts.  These sessions focused on that most important area.

Getting Back to Growth:  B2B Sales Reimagined

Key leaders from Accenture talked in detail about how they are leveraging Salesforce and AI to maximize sales efforts.  With the vast amount of data available, they are discovering new ways to use information on Business Customers and Contacts to provide their sales teams with complete in-depth pictures that set them up to succeed with their most important opportunities.  Using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, their system does the work to weed through massive amounts of data to present clear and actionable information that can be used in their world.

“With a new technology, people overestimate the value in the first two years.  They underestimate it the next ten years.  AI has been around forever and now people are actually underestimating what it can do.”

Service Sessions

Should companies put the customer first?  Of course.  However, there is often a gap between what customers expect and companies deliver.  Service-based sessions focus on closing and eliminating that gap.

Designing the New Era of Experience

Key leadership from Aerial discussed how customer expectations have changed and companies need to utilize the latest technology to meet those expectations.  Customers expect companies to understand diverse needs and interests.  Plus, the last 18 months have led to nearly all companies needing to provide service remotely, and companies have adjusted quickly.  The Salesforce platform has helped them to continue to improve in a difficult environment.

“Every company is a tech company.  We have all advanced at light-speed . . . if there are any silver-linings to this tragic pandemic, it's that it has forced us all to advance our technologies to service our clients.”

With respect to returning to the office . . . “There’s no manual.  There’s no playbook.  We have to figure things out, so we’re going to try different things . . . and see what works.”

Other Platform Sessions

There are of course a variety of other conversations and sessions at every Dreamforce.  Here are a few others.

The Future of Admin Success

Geared towards Admins and Trailblazers, this session focused on acknowledging the life of an Admin – solving Business Problems but customizing the platform for their organization.  They discussed tools and the community that is there to support them in their individual growth and provided a roadmap of some upcoming items the #AwesomeAdmins should be aware of.

Protect Yourself from 99% of Security and Data Loss Incidents

Executives from Own{backup} discussed the modern challenges of avoiding a “security incident”.  With massive amounts of data, various API’s between different platforms, customer facing public interfaces, and more sophisticated crooks all increasing, data protection and encryption are more important than ever.  They discussed taking action before an incident occurs, rather than using a security breach as the motivation to take action.  They discussed applicable practices and features that help companies staff safe and protect their clients and their information.

Tableau: Unleash the Power of Your Data

Tableau’s own CEO and other Executives discussed how the application’s advanced data management and analytics can leverage the information they have regarding customers in Salesforce to build truly actionable intelligence.  By integrating Tableau with Salesforce, the speed, analytics, and intelligence exist where the employees are working, making it significantly more useful in the place and time they need it.  Tableau has been a Salesforce product for a few years and this year’s focus has been on further integrating with the platform.  These updates have made the connection between them even closer and allows users to stay where they are at in the system without fully existing one to go into the other. You can find more on this, here.

Innovation & Draw-Along with Disney’s StudioLAB

One of the coolest sessions of the day happened in the mid/late afternoon depending on where it was being viewed.  Salesforce Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer Christina Jones interviewed Alice Taylor, the VP, Content Innovation and StudioLAB for Disney.  StudioLAB is a physical location in Burbank, California, where the Disney team explores new technologies to implement new solutions to content creation challenges.  It also refers to projects that the team there is working on.  The tour of the lab showed interactive wall screens, an augmented and virtual reality living room, and tons of iconic Disney items both past and present.  The motion capture technology room was used in some of the most iconic Disney/Star Wars/Marvel films.  It was amazing to get animating lessons from a legendary Disney animator who worked on films dating back to the original Lion King.  Not sure my version of Mickey was as good as his.  

But perhaps the coolest tech of the tour was the computer screens replacing one window in the office – it looks like every other window in the building, but rather than backlot side streets, a peek out this window reveals elephants drinking in a safari!  What a way to bring the day near its conclusion.