Five Things We Learned At Dreamforce 2018

Dreamforce Daze

As Salesforce's mega-conference wraps up, partners leave the frenzied spectacle that enveloped San Francisco all week with more insight into the CRM giant's product direction, channel goals and growth strategy.

Salesforce leaders emphasized throughout the event that integrating Salesforce's clouds with each other, and with systems from other enterprise technology vendors, is an essential capability for empowering customers to fully leverage their business data, understand their customers, and maximize their market opportunities.

To further improve the CRM experience, Salesforce introduced new artificial intelligence capabilities enabling its customers to dictate notes and conduct queries by talking directly to smart speakers.

As the portfolio becomes deeper and more powerful, Salesforce wants its partners to focus on gaining expertise across seven verticals, seeing the lion's share of growth in the coming years coming from those industries.

Click the slideshow to see five things that we learned at Dreamforce this year.

Marc's Message

Salesforce founder, chairman and now co-CEO Marc Benioff's Dreamforce keynote stood out for what wasn't in it.

On his birthday, Benioff delivered an impassioned call to better the world without mentioning a single Salesforce product, initiative or business strategy.

Benioff's dedication to advancing "inclusive capitalism" continued throughout the event. The 'fireside chats' he conducted during Dreamforce with other prominent CEOs addressed the need for corporate leaders to tackle social and environmental ills as the world is transformed by the fourth industrial revolution, and artificial intelligence becomes pervasive.

Just weeks after reaching a deal to purchase Time Magazine, a prestige media platform that will propel him further into the national spotlight, Benioff seems more focused than ever on larger local, national and global issues, and how he can motivate other business leaders to join him in making the world a better place.

Integrating Clouds And Integration Cloud

As expected, Salesforce delivered its Integration Cloud at Dreamforce, the culmination of its acquisition of MuleSoft, the largest deal in the company's history.

But incorporating MuleSoft technology was presented as part of a larger vision that Salesforce calls Customer 360 that aims to offer Salesforce users a more-comprehensive view of their customers.

Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris introduced the new capability available by default to all customers.

Customer 360 offers a point-and-click interface connecting data across all the Salesforce clouds—Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce. It delivers richer customer profiles, with unique identifiers and attributes, and pre-built packages for creating cross-channel experiences, Harris said.

MuleSoft then does the work of connecting Salesforce's portfolio to other technologies in the enterprise, such as human resources and ERP systems.

Salesforce Cloud PRM masthead

Salesforce Cloud PRM masthead

Industry Alignment To Drive Salesforce Beyond $20 Billion

Salesforce has identified seven industries it wants partners to develop expertise in—financial services, healthcare and life sciences, communications, non-profit, retail, manufacturing, government and higher education.

Salesforce has hired executives previously from each of those seven industries to lead those efforts.

As Salesforce looks to scale to $20 billion in revenue and beyond, 88 percent of the growth potential comes from those verticals. Together they represent an untapped opportunity of more than $80 billion, Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, senior vice president for industries, said in the Dreamforce partner keynote.

That opportunity further breaks down to $26 billion for B2B customers, and $55 billion for B2C, which spans all seven verticals, not just retail, Taychakhoonavudh said.

AI Advances

Since artificial intelligence was introduced to Salesforce's portfolio two Dreamforces ago, the Einstein platform has seen a number of advances in its capabilities.

At this year's Dreamforce, Einstein found its voice with the introduction of natural language capabilities that allow users to ask their CRMs for relevant data, dictate notes, and build chatbots that speak to customers.

The "first step" for Einstein Voice is to tackle three use cases, Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher.

Einstein now enables Salesforce customers to conversationally log notes, interact with Apple's Siri voice assistant and smart speakers from Google and Amazon, and access data from analytics dashboards through the spoken word.

Philanthropy And Activism Bolsters Partnerships

The only big partnership announcement at this year's Dreamforce was an alliance with Apple revealed the day before the mega-conference kicked off.

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC Mad Money Host Jim Cramer in an interview on the Dreamforce exhibition floor that he's had "Apple in my veins" since he worked as an assembly language programmer for the personal computing pioneer in 1984.

The two technology stalwarts are now working together to "bring together" their developers and customers, Benioff told Cramer. Salesforce is integrating its mobile apps with Apple's Siri voice assistant, and the companies will jointly improve the Salesforce experience on iOS.

But in his Dreamforce keynote, Benioff referenced the emerging partnership by acknowledging the work Apple CEO Tim Cook has done to combat gender discrimination. Benioff also praised Google, Amazon Web Services and IBM—three important Salesforce technology partners—for working to benefit the public good.

Dedication to causes Benioff cares about seems a good approach to fostering closer technological alliances with Salesforce.