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Eva Sherwood Dreamforce Reflections
- 1. Dreamforce Reflections Eva Sherwood Hayter
- 2. It’s a Salesforce Conference right…?
- 3. Data + AI + CRM + Trust
- 4. Professional Services are going to change
- 5. How much change can you manage?
Editor's Notes
- I've worked with enterprise cloud platforms for 15 years, but I'd never made it to any of the big global tech conferences, usually held in the USA. That changed this year when I attended Salesforce's Dreamforce in San Francisco. Working with the Salesforce platform, I'm often educating people that Salesforce is not just a CRM and not only for sales functions. But I was confronted by my own nativity of what Salesforce has grown to become, when I arrived at Dreamforce, only to find I was at a Data and AI conference.
- What I knew heading into Dreamforce. Data is the heart of your CRM. But often, key information about your clients live in a number of different enterprise systems. Salesforce Data Cloud can now wrangle all this data, from disparate locations, and corrals it into your CRM seamlessly (excuse the ranching anology, I have been in the American West) to save you and your team valuable time. What I was about to realise, was that through the Generative AI revolution, the power of bringing your customer data together from across the enterprise, to drive productivity, deliver services faster, and ultimately improve the customer and employee experiences, is about to be unleashed.
- Takeaway 4: The old saying ”garbage in, garbage out” will be particularly apt in AI AI is smart, but only as smart as what you give it to learn. High-quality input data is essential for producing intelligent and valuable AI outputs. If the data is clean, accurate, and representative of the problem domain, the AI is more likely to make reliable and insightful decisions. Conversely, if the data is noisy, biased, or incomplete, the AI's performance will be unhelpful at best and incorrect or biased at worst. Takeaway 1: it is about to be drastically simpler to technically implement platforms Working in the professional services industry, I am especially interested in the effect of GenAI on development, configuration and integration of the Salesforce platform. Soon, developers and functional consultants will no longer need to spend months building components of an application, with only their knowledge, or the immediate team around, them to help. They will soon have the world at their fingertips, accessing the best code globally, that they can call on instantly using natural language processing.
- Takeaway 2: the types of skills I will need to employ could look drastically different than the resource mix I have today In addition to the changing landscape of developer and technical work, the consulting skills required for this AI driven future will shift too. Soon, focus will be placed on innovation and the application of new ideas to leverage the power of these cloud platforms and achieve much more ambitious goals. We will need to help our clients imagine a wildly different digital future than the constrained IT systems they use today. Our consulting services need to bring together the trifecta of deep industry knowledge, technical expertise and creativity. There will also be a deeper need for managing user adoption and change. Today, IT projects are often constrained to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) mentality based on budgets. Tomorrow, with less cost absorbed with development, MVP will be limited by what your users can absorb in terms of adoption and upskilling. We will need to support our clients with specialized services focused on changing organizational culture to empower stakeholders, supports continuous feedback and change cycles.
- Takeaway 3: the days of trying to convince organisations they need to be customer-centred and need a CRM are in the past Even the concept of 'Digital Transformation' is outdated. The next revolution is all about Data and AI. It was inspiring to see organisations from around the world leveraging Salesforce to run their businesses. The most powerful stories were not from organisations using Salesforce for an application here and there, solving one business problem or get one line of business digitally enabled in isolation. But those who took an enterprise approach to delivery with hundreds of applications that were joined up at the core. My final thoughts? Connect the data, empower the AI, get the benefits In 2021 the NZ Productivity Commission said New Zealanders work longer hours and get paid less per hour than most OECD countries, and that innovation and technological change are critical to productivity growth. But through GenAI we can instantly optimise the way we work, the speed at which solve problems and can deliver solutions. It will be revolutionary for our workforce, especially in a challenging economic environment, with ever increasing inequity, and the pressure to do more with less. And don't get me started on enterprise reporting with GenAI. Reporting on ALL of your enterprise data with one conversational prompt in seconds? That could change that world.