15 Big Salesforce Announcements from Dreamforce

The myEinstein platform is a collection of services designed to automate and abstract away the complexity of building AI apps and ML models. It's built for administrators, developers, and everyday business users who don't have coding or database expertise. Sinai said myEinstein uses declarative, point-and-click tools and wizards to walk users through building, training, and deploying AI models using structured and unstructured Salesforce data. The goal is to generate personalized business recommendations and predictions.

The two new tools, Einstein Prediction Builder and Einstein Bots, join a number of other Einstein AI services for salespeople and marketers, including Einstein Forecasting, Einstein Opportunity Scoring, and Einstein Email Insights. MyEinstein also includes Einstein Language and Einstein Vision, application programming interfaces (APIs) released in June. Einstein Language lets developers incorporate natural language processing (NLP) to determine intent and analyze sentiment in customer interactions to automatically route leads and personalize marketing campaigns. Einstein Vision uses image classification to bring object detection to CRM apps. Einstein Vision for image recognition is generally available now. Einstein Vision for object detection is in beta and is expected to be generally available in early 2018, along with Einstein Language for intent and sentiment.

Einstein Prediction Builder is Salesforce's version of Data Science-as-a-Service. The tool lets businesses create custom AI models on any Salesforce field or object to generate predictive analytics for scenarios such as the most effective action to take in a sales or service interaction.

Sinai described it as something "anyone in Salesforce can go into and create a prediction with a click" via the Prediction Builder wizard. The wizard is where all of the actual data science is automated under the hood. You can then take the prediction and embed it on a page layout, or drag and drop it as a component onto an app builder screen to give your team a custom prediction widget for a particular scenario.

Einstein Bots is more about playing catch-up, giving Salesforce a bot builder to create and deploy Einstein-powered chatbots. Tools such as the Microsoft Bot Framework and IBM's Watson Virtual Agent platform already do this. Now Salesforce, too, will let businesses and developers quickly build, train, and launch customer service bots and virtual agents within chat apps, websites, or anywhere you'd like to embed the conversational AI. Einstein Prediction Builder and Einstein Bots are currently in pilot and are expected to be generally available in summer 2018.

Whether or not Salesforce admits it, the Quip Collaboration Platform is an answer to unified collaboration apps, such as Atlassian Stride, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, that centralize a team's work and communication in one place. Rafael Alenda, Salesforce's Vice President of Marketing for Quip, said this release helps move Quip from a product to a platform.

"This platform extends collaboration beyond docs and spreadsheets, and allows teams to collaborate around the apps and tools they use every day but don't put into a document," said Alenda.

The Quip Collaboration Platform expands the Quip document format to include native apps, templates, and CRM data from Salesforce. The two biggest features rolled out in the new, supersized Quip are Workflow Templates and Live Apps. These are interactive, custom-built apps embedded in Quip documents.

Live Apps are apps built specifically for Quip and embedded into any Quip document. With Live Apps, users can add apps like calendars, polls, and Salesforce records, as well as Kanban boards into a Quip document for deeper planning or project management. Simply @mention "@calendar," "@salesforce record," or "@kanban" to launch a live app.

There's also a Live Apps API to integrate partner apps such as Atlassian Jira for agile software development, DocuSign, Lucidchart for online diagramming, New Relic for web and mobile app performance metrics within a Quip document, and others. Live Apps are generally available today. Calendars and Kanban boards are available with any Quip Business license ($10 per user per month) or Quip Enterprise license ($25 per user per month). The Salesforce Record Live App is available with any Quip Enterprise license.

Workflow Templates are prebuilt Quip documents and spreadsheets for specific industries, projects, and team functions. Templates contain the layout and Live Apps that are best suited for the task or project at hand—from developing a product road map to preparing for a new product launch to mapping out sales territories.

There are a number of templates already in development, including a Territory Planning Workflow for sales managers, a Launch Plan Workflow template for marketing teams, and a Product Roadmap Workflow Template for product managers. Salesforce also announced a Salesforce Files Connect for Quip integration (available with Quip Enterprise) to natively sync Quip documents and spreadsheets to Salesforce. Workflow Templates are generally available today with any Quip Enterprise license.

Salesforce recently rolled out a major overhaul of its Trailhead platform. But the new myTrailhead product expands the online training tool from solely courses aimed at learning Salesforce products and services to being completely customized business courses. With myTrailhead, companies can create interactive, mobile-optimized, on-demand learning with custom content and branding to gamify employee onboarding and skills training. The product comes with five new tools: Trail Checker, Trail Maker, Trail Mixer, Trail Tracker, and Trailhead Profile. The myTrailhead product will be in pilot the first half of 2018, with generally availability coming later in the year.

Trail Maker is a new point-and-click system for creating custom learning content designed to render FAQs, slide decks, and static manuals obsolete. The guided setup tool lets companies use their own branding for the myTrailhead portal, and admins can either create custom content or pull from the library of public Trailhead content.

Trail Mixer lets employees build their own custom learning paths called Trailmixes. They can pull from public Trailhead content or incorporate their own presentations and videos into, for instance, onboarding materials that a manager can create for a specific role by using the guided Trail Mixer experience (rather than waiting for the human resources or IT department to build the training course). There's also a Trailhead Profile feature, which breaks down a particular employees skills and expertise, and lists their Trailhead badges, points, etc.

Trail Tracker is a management app that gives admins a console to track progress on personalized Trail Maker and Trail Mixer courses across a team or organization. So, a manager could assign a mandatory course and then track how far each employee has gotten individually or as part of a gamified leaderboard.

Salesforce introduced Lightning in 2015, its component-based app development and user experience (UX) framework that includes App Builder, Community Builder, Components, the Salesforce Component Ecosystem, and the Lightning Design System. The new myLightning offering makes Lightning completely customizable to a company's branding and design specifications at no additional cost. MyLightning comes with a new theme and design system, a re-designed app builder with "dynamic pages" containing automated logic and filters, as well as the Lightning Bolt framework and new Lightning Flow tool.

Lightning Bolts, introduced last year, are customized, out-of-the-box frameworks containing industry-specific Lightning Components and business logic built by partners such as Accenture, Appirio, and PwC. Bolts can now leverage the new Theming and Design System that offers branded images, colors, and page backgrounds, or you can choose from nearly 300 custom themes. The Lightning Bolt framework is generally available as part of any Community Cloud license, and partner-built Bolt solutions are available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Lightning Flow is a new wizard-based tool for building automated workflows. Salesforce's existing Visual Flow tools are now powered by Lightning, designed for admins to create guided visual processes with Lightning Components. They can easily add them to a record, app, portal, or console. Lightning Flow is generally available and currently included with any Platform, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Community Cloud license.

Formerly called the Salesforce1 mobile app, mySalesforce is a custom-branded, mobile low-code development platform. It lets businesses build custom Android and iOS apps and list them directly in the App Store and Google Play Store. The mySalesforce apps are built with the Salesforce Lightning App Builder, which has a drag-and-drop library of easily configurable components, such as calendars, dashboards, and task managers. All the components can be custom-branded with a company's logo and theme.

There's also a new Listings Wizard to speed up publishing, with step-by-step instructions, testing, and configuration to get your app approved by Apple and Google. MySalesforce will be available soon to any Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, or Salesforce Platform customer.

Finally, Salesforce today announced myIoT. This new platform, including the new IoT Explorer service, enables any Salesforce developer, IT admin, or business user to collect data at IoT scale. You can also trigger actions with real-time rules and feed that data into Salesforce sales and marketing processes. The myIoT platform is designed to operate a business-ready IoT by using low-code data orchestration, contextual business data, and proactive automation and engagement. MyIoT features a low-code orchestration tool to create point-and-click automation rules governing connected IoT devices, such as a component within a connected machine on a factory floor malfunctioning and triggering a service call to a technician.

There's also what Salesforce calls "Customer Context," meaning IoT data analyzed in Salesforce to predict, for instance, that a piece of equipment is in need of replacement and notifying a sales representative to email a lead. Through myIoT, Salesforce aims to then facilitate proactive engagement where, for example, a connected car manufacturer gets an alert to schedule a service call when a car passes a certain mileage marker.

Salesforce IoT Explorer is generally available as a platform service. It starts at $6,000 per month for any organization with an enterprise license or above.