“It’s a new day for Dreamforce,” said Salesforce co-CEOs Bret Taylor and Marc Benioff as part of the Dreamforce 2022 kickoff keynote. “We’re here to inspire, to energize, to motivate, and to connect,” they said to a sold-out in-person Dreamforce audience totaling around 40,000 and over 150,000 virtual attendees. 

Among the numerous Salesforce-backed initiatives designed to promote education, environmental change, and sustainability, Benioff and Taylor shared news of Slack tool enhancements for Salesforce customers and a new product launch that will enthusiastically help define “the next generation of CRM.” 

Here are some of the keynote highlights. 

Salesforce Genie

Do you wish for a Salesforce instance more responsive to changing customer data? Wish granted. Introducing Salesforce Genie. 

Genie captures at least two sizable pieces of innovation: Uniting data on a single platform source and adding real-time capabilities. 

Before Genie’s launch, data was scattered among different cloud products. By gathering customer data that Salesforce has collected for decades, users can build centralized customer profiles, thus simplifying personalized sales and marketing interactions. With Genie, changes in collected data are seen in real-time. 

“At the foundation we have Hyperforce, and we built on Hyperforce our transactional database— Einstein, artificial intelligence, flow automation— and those are all powering what we call customer 360,” explained Taylor. “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.”

Housed on a more robust infrastructure, Genie can offer reliable and secure real-time service. “Real-time sales means your customers can talk to a sales bot your salespeople get real-time analytics to help them close deals,” said Taylor. “Real-time service means every agent is getting real-time answers to the question empowering your customers with new self-service platforms.”

Salesforce integrated the entire Customer 360, making it the world’s first real-time CRM with out-of-the-box integration among industry clouds. 

“Einstein can personalize in milliseconds. Flow automation can respond to real time events, and automate all of your real time workflows for your employees, your customers and your partners. And every single cloud in Customer 360 just got real time as well,” said Taylor. 

Since acquiring Slack in 2021, Salesforce customers have used Slack to expand their single source of truth to connect with employees, customers, stakeholders, and partners within existing workflows. 

“We’re enhancing Huddles to make coworking better and more effective. And we’re announcing Slack Canvas,” said Tamar Yehoshua, chief project officer at Slack. Here are some notable innovations within these tools: 

Slack Canvas 

Canvas is a persistent layer of information that supports real-time messaging. Canvas can be associated with a channel, or users can create a canvas and share it in a DM or a channel. Users can use Canvas for files, multimedia clips, customized integrations, etc. “For those of you who know Quip, it might look a little familiar,” said Yehoshua. “We took Quip, and we integrated it natively into Slack.” 

With Customer 360 integration, users can remain within the Slack platform while accessing sales assets, documents, and workflows and collaborate in real-time with team members relevant to the account through the Slack Huddle tool. 

Slack Huddles 

Huddles is a lightweight live communication tool in a channel or as a DM. Huddles default to audio first, but users can select to join via video within the platform. Now teams can collectively view assets stored in Canvas, collaborate on tasks with multiple shared screens, create a workflow, etc. Then the notes, shared links, and workflows from the meeting are stored in Canvas. Slack’s goal behind simplifying workflows is to help users “get context, then take action.” By offering more valuable and accessible tools, teams will spend less time chasing down information and focus on impactful tasks. 

Salesforce Genie, Slack Canvas, and Huddles are available to Salesforce users now.