On March 7th and 8th was held 2023’s TrailblazerDX, not the “little” Dreamforce but THE Salesforce technical conference of the year.
The program was very rich, and even remotely, the opportunities to learn were numerous thanks to Salesforce+, the Salesforce streaming service.
In this article, in addition to our explanations and screenshots, you will find links to the various replays. As usual, we decipher the main announcements, we give you a maximum of resources and we take a step back. Let’s go!
Salesforce + AI = EinsteinGPT!
Major new features were unveiled during the main keynote, first of all, EinsteinGPT.
You’ve probably figured it out by now, EinsteinGPT is the derivative of ChatGPT for Salesforce! This new feature is also the result of a partnership with OpenAI, the inventors of ChatGPT.
GPT stands for ‘Generative Pretrained Transfromer’. It is a very advanced language model that generates content, and it is more commonly called “Generative AI”.
After the first Einstein features that we already know (Discovery or Einstein Natural Language Processing for example), AI is arriving in force on the different clouds! Sales, Service, Marketing (see example below of the generation of a landing page), Slack, all will benefit from generative AI, and even admins and developers who will be able, for example, to write test classes with EinsteinGPT.
A release date has slipped discreetly into a slide (cf. Roadmap): Winter 24. But does this correspond to the GA? Beta? We do not yet know its conditions of availability or its price. During the Platform keynote, we learned that the pilot will be launched later this year, which could very well correspond to Winter 24 (October 2023). Even before?
The rapid announcement of a tool such as EinsteinGPT is impressive, and its use cases shown at TDX are very convincing. What is even more interesting in Salesforce’s approach is that it is intrinsically part of the ecosystem of AI partners: this is normal, innovations are always in the process of being done (we saw it with the arrival last week of GPT-4), but their concrete applications are already there!
More information on EinsteinGPT by watching the dedicated keynote.
And if you want to take a step back from all this frenzy around AI, do not hesitate to read our article published earlier this year.
Find the main announcements by watching the replay of the Main Keynote.
Data Cloud, the new CDP!
After announcing Genie at Dreamforce 2022, which already looked a lot like a redesign of CDP, Salesforce takes it a step further and announces the release of Data Cloud, which officially replaces CDP.
Data Cloud offers better connection of systems and harmonization of data, and this is unprecedented, in real time:
It does this by giving the possibility to create data streams without development or ETL, based on data models (mappings in fact):
The recent announcements regarding the replacement of CDP at Salesforce may seem a little confusing, and somehow, that’s normal! it is a complex product.
In addition, the rebranding operation cannot be done in a day. As evidenced by these 2 different pages between French and English for the same URL:
Salesforce presents it very well themselves:
Actually, these developments also reveal a major orientation for Salesforce: to ensure that their CDP is no longer just a tool for “marketers”. They already explained it very well in June 2022: “At a time when all departments of the company must offer a consistent and irreproachable customer experience, it is essential to be in tune. The Customer Data Platform is therefore made for all teams. They find a unified vision of the interactions of a customer with the whole company. In addition, the issues of consent and data protection plead for their unification in a single system: how do you know that a customer no longer wishes to be contacted if two business units of a company do not speak to each other? »
https://www.salesforce.com/fr/blog/2022/06/future-customer-data-cdp.html
Data Cloud therefore becomes a brick accessible to all businesses, whereas CDP had a very strong marketing color.
Find the dedicated keynote here.
And more information here.
All hail the Automation king!
It’s no surprise to anyone, automation has been the subject of a lot of attention for several years now at Salesforce, with regular, important news on flows. This attention goes further now, with the first holding of a keynote dedicated to TDX23!
And it needed a new mascot to go with that! Meet Flo, the flying squirrel!
This keynote naturally provided details on the new features related to automation. Two features have particularly marked us.
Will admins soon be able to rely on EinsteinGPT to create flows?
In addition, Salesforce announced the beta release of dynamic screen components:
Thanks to this new feature, the screen feeds can update live, without having to click on “next”, here an example with the total amount that is updated when I check or uncheck items.
The Reactive Screen Components even got their own session.
The new Automation keynote was also an opportunity to review the history of new automation features. It’s been quite a journey!
Find all this and much more by watching this new dedicated keynote (and automation is so central to the SF strategy that you will see demos in other keynotes too!): https://www.salesforce.com/plus/experience/TrailblazerDX_2023/series/TrailblazerDX_Highlights_from_TrailblazerDX_2023/episode/episode-s1e25
True to the core
We had been missing the “True to the core” session! Indeed, we remain unsatisfied since Trailhead Live, which should have hosted regular “True to the core” sessions, is no longer active (Salesforce having decided to broadcast live content differently, in particular with Salesforce+). We therefore have to settle for 2 sessions per year, at Dreamforce and at TDX. And TDX23’s was excellent!
We remind you of the principle: True to the core, it’s 1 hour of exchanges between trailblazers and technical teams from Salesforce. No blah-blah, just direct questions and precise answers about the “platform”, the heart of Salesforce, what makes the daily life of admins and developers, beyond clouds or additional paid features.
This can be exemplified right from the start of the session. We learned that 5 licenses for “API” users will be granted free of charge to all customers – this means that each integration (up to 5) could have its own user, guaranteeing a better level of security and traceability, without using full licenses. A response to a strong demand from the community. The licenses should already be provisioned to your org.
Patrick Stokes himself gives us a very good summary of this session.
To review the session, it’s here.
Platform Roadmap
More generally, the “Platform” roadmap announced during TDX23 is very extensive! Many of these new features have been seen in detail in face-to-face sessions, but you can discover the essentials with the various keynotes, including that of the platform.
A great “sneak peek” of a face-to-face session, the specific permissions roadmap:
One of the most interesting novelties of this roadmap is probably the User Access Policies.
Also, here is a link to the closed beta of the new User Access Policies feature.
Furthermore, one of the TDX23 presenters was kind enough to share the slides from his specific session. And we are very grateful to him because it is an important subject: the end of object permissions on profiles! (to be planned for early 2026).
Par ailleurs, un des présentateurs de TDX23 a eu la gentillesse de partager les slides d’une des sessions. Et on lui en est très reconnaissant car il s’agit d’un sujet important : la fin des autorisations d’objet sur les profils ! (à prévoir pour début 2026) : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DWFxRlJ6nj6uhhzaXfEoGs3GEQ3R54qgpvz2KZ7utBo/edit#slide=id.g1d0065790ef_1_82
On espère que cet article vous aura été utile et vous aura donné envie de regarder les replays sur Salesforce+. Retrouvez-y près de 20 heures de replays de TDX23 !
On parle beaucoup de roadmap dans ce genre d’événement, et vous vous posez peut-être beaucoup de question. Ça tombe bien, on y répond dans quelques semaines avec notre prochain article !
