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Salesforce Touts New Data Platform ‘Genie’ at Dreamforce

Salesforce used its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 20 to unveil a new hyperscale real-time data platform, available now, that it said will now power the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

Salesforce Genie will enable every company to “turn data into customer magic, delivering seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs in real-time,” it said in a news release.

What the company’s “engineering team has put together … might be the most significant shift to the Salesforce platform” in over 20 years, according to Bret Taylor, who was speaking at Dreamforce for the first time since being named co-CEO nearly a year ago.

“We’ve completely reimagined our CRM from the ground up to enable the real-time capabilities that will enable all of you to build applications that simply weren’t possible before,” he said during the first keynote that kicked off the 20th Dreamforce conference.

The company’s Customer 360 platform already had features including Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence and Salesforce Flow workflow automation, he pointed out. “Those are all powering what we call Customer 360 sales, customer service, marketing, and e-commerce,” he said.

“With Genie, for the first time in 20 years, we’ve added a foundational new capability to this platform,” he told attendees and those viewing the keynote online. “We’ve introduced a real-time, hyperscale data platform natively built into our platform. And, because it’s hyperscale, it’s near infinite scale for all of your data. And, because it’s real-time, you can stream events in real-time. And every aspect of the platform on top just got real-time as well.”

As a result, Einstein can now “personalize in milliseconds,” he said, adding: “Flow automation can respond to real-time events and automate all of your real-time workflows for your employees, for your customers and your partners, and every single cloud in the Customer 360 [platform] just got real-time as well.”

Explaining how Genie works, he said: “With Genie, it’s all about the data. You can connect to all of your data, your mobile app, your website” and even a connected thermostat “can stream into Genie too.”

However, he said: “It’s not just about real-time data sources. We can inject historical data sources, your proprietary data lakes, your transactional systems, and we can bring it all together into a single source of truth. But, as I said, it’s not just about data. It’s about your customers.”

Meanwhile, “Genie has harmonization built in” also which he explained means that “we can resolve all of this data into a single view of the people behind it and create a real-time customer graph of all of your customers and all of their interactions with your business, with privacy consent and compliance natively built in.”

That means organizations can build “amazing new ways to engage with your customers in real-time to do real-time sales calls and [use] sales bots to do predictive customer service, to prevent customer service cases from happening in the first place,” he said.

Using Sales Cloud Genie, every sales rep can receive real-time guidance from Einstein during customer video and voice calls, according to Salesforce. That allows reps to adapt to the conversation and automatically receive real-time recommendations to offer customers, the company said.

With Service Cloud Genie, meanwhile, each service rep from the contact center to the field can offer proactive service with real-time alerts, and reps can “intervene, engage the customer, and resolve issues,” Salesforce said.

With Marketing Cloud Genie, each marketer can “deliver personalized messages across channels that adapt to customer activity across various brand properties in real-time,” the company noted.

Using Commerce Cloud Genie, each retailer can build “tailored shopper experiences that adapt to real-time customer actions, including abandoned shopping carts or actions taken on a website or mobile app,” Salesforce said.

With Tableau Genie, each organization can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time to “inform action across the business, including real-time purchase data for sales, real-time case spikes for service, and real-time web traffic for marketing,” according to Salesforce.

Using MuleSoft Genie, each business can unlock real-time data across any modern or legacy system, Salesforce said.

And, with Slack Genie, an IT leader can “immediately increase efficiency by enabling teams to automatically view real-time data from any channel with intelligent workflows,” according to Salesforce.

Also at Dreamforce….

Salesforce and its Slack division unveiled new product innovations they said make it even more productive for teams to work together in Slack, pull in actionable data directly from Salesforce Customer 360, and get more value from their digital HQ.

Slack canvas, for example, is a new surface in the digital HQ that the companies said will “transform how teams can curate, organize, and share critical resources.” Combined with the Slack platform, anybody can customize a canvas with time-saving automations, and also pull in data from systems of record, including Customer 360.

Canvas will be available in 2023, they said.

Slack huddles, meanwhile, now builds on its audio-first experience by providing teams lightweight video, multi-person screen sharing, message threads and more to “power live coworking sessions in their digital HQ,” the companies said.

The new features started rolling out Tuesday and “will be generally available to all users in the coming weeks,” they said.

Salesforce also introduced Net Zero Marketplace, a trusted platform that the company said “makes carbon credit purchases simple and transparent, allowing organizations to accelerate climate positive impact at scale.”