Dreamforce 2023 has come to an end, and whether you streamed at home, attended in-person, or just had some serious FOMO on social platforms, there was a lot to take in. There were big announcements, celebrity sightings, parties, concerts, and more learning sessions than anyone could ever possibly take in. And swag. There was a lot of swag, though not as much as previous years, with a big emphasis on sustainability.

Feeling a little overwhelmed? Fear not! Read on for tips on how to digest Dreamforce, keep the learning going, and better yet — start taking steps to implement what you learned!

First, the big announcements

This year was all about AI, with Dreamforce ’23 even being billed as the AI event of the year. There were several big announcements that came out during the main keynote (and 65 new product announcements overall!), which you can watch (or re-watch) here if you missed it. The biggest of these announcements, is the Einstein 1 Platform. This is really a branding umbrella for all of Salesforce’s AI capabilities, but also brings all Salesforce apps into the core platform’s metadata framework for seamless integration.

My biggest takeaway was how much development and thought Salesforce is putting into what they’re calling the Einstein Trust Layer. There are valid concerns that these big LLM’s are taking your data and training their models with that data for anyone to use, leading to serious privacy and security concerns. The Einstein Trust Layer answers these concerns with data masking, zero data retention, toxicity detection, and an audit trail. You can watch just this announcement, explained by Parker Harris, on Salesforce+ here.

Einstein 1 Copilot was another exciting announcement. This is where we start seeing AI in action with examples given like AI driven automatic prospecting, automatically setup meetings, transcribe those meetings and then send out summaries and action items. Its important to note that these products are not GA yet, and will be in pilot over the next 2–3 quarters leading into 2024. 

One of the most exciting features of Einstein 1 Copilot Studio, is Prompt Builder, which will be GA in Q1 2024. Prompts, from a user perspective, are the hardest thing to get right when it comes to generative AI, and this service helps everyone hit the ground running with customizable prompt templates that set your team up for success.

Einstein 1 Copilot Studio takes this productivity even further, enabling admins to tap into the power of AI declaratively, spinning up custom websites, code, flows, and hundreds of other business tasks across the Einstein 1 Platform.

So, are you ready for AI?

We all have ideas about how we can use AI in our businesses, and now we’ve got these great tools to back them up — but is it really that easy to just hit go? I’m afraid not. A company’s AI strategy is only as good as it’s data strategy, and so that’s a great place to start. Here are some things to start thinking about before these products become generally available:

• Do you have an AI strategy?
• Do you have a data strategy? 
• Do you have clean and consistent data that is integrated across your company?
• Bring up data quality and data governance in your next 1:1 or at a team meeting — are you talking about these topics with your team?
• Start creating a plan with bite-sized goals — what can you accomplish in the next two weeks, and next two months?
• Start practicing how to write the best prompts. You can use free tools like ChatGPT to start asking AI questions. Ask, refine, and ask again until you learn how to get the results you’re looking for.
• Check out Slalom’s Guide to AI

Whenever I’m talking to anyone about AI, I just have to go back to the age old “garbage in, garbage out”. If you are training your models with bad data, even Einstein won’t be able to help you. It’s time to spend some time evaluating, cleansing, and preparing your data for the future. 

Dreamforce was more than just AI!

Of course generative AI was the topic on everyone’s brains, but Dreamforce was so much more than that! There were sessions on every topic you could think of and probably a lot that you couldn’t. You can watch over 120 Dreamforce episodes on Salesforce+, but most sessions weren’t recorded. If you feel like you missed out, try browsing the session catalog for things that look interesting, and then search those topics on Trailhead. It won’t be the same as a Dreamforce session, but you’ll still learn about the topic and have the opportunity to dive in deeper with additional resource links and documentation.

One really neat thing I noticed in the session catalog after Dreamforce, is that they recorded and transcribed a lot of sessions, and let Einstein work its magic to summarize it for you into key points. Use this feature to catch up on tons of sessions with just the key takeaways that you can use to research further.

In addition to the Einstein Summaries, most speakers have uploaded their slide decks as PDF’s, which are now attached to the session details for download. Check out the Einstein Summary for our Debug Like a Detective session, and download the resources.

What’s next?

If you’re anything like me, you walk away from Dreamforce with a zillion ideas swirling in your head. Things you learned in a session, a cool idea you saw online, or even some hot gossip you heard in the lunch line. Start making a a plan to implement some of these! For me, this looks like creating a Jira issue or a new epic so that it’s more than just a note in my notebook that says it’s a good idea. I’ve lost so many good ideas by just letting them die on notebook pages. Set up time for yourself to explore it more, do some Trailhead modules, or just document your ideas more thoroughly. Once you’ve done more brainstorming, set a goal and a timeline for when you’d like to have it implemented. Try to be realistic, but don’t put it off for so long that you forget about it.

On this same note — don’t let your big ideas stay with just you. Talk to people about them! Bring them up in your next 1:1 or staff meeting. Create a Dreamforce recap document and share a list of your ideas with your team so you can start getting buy-in. A document that outlines all the amazing things you learned and can now implement will also be a great way to sell going back to Dreamforce next year.

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The things you learned at Dreamforce will inspire you to learn more, think bigger, and interact with your teams in new ways. If you’re anything like me, you are reinvigorated and excited for what comes next — have fun with it!