Salesforce Lets Genie Out at Dreamforce 2022

At Dreamforce 2022 this week, Salesforce made a series of announcements that aim to improve the cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor's platform.

Among the biggest announcements at the conference was the launch of Genie, a data platform that will serve to underpin all of Salesforce's data-led efforts, including its customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

Slack, which Salesforce acquired for $28 billion in 2021, also made news at Dreamforce with its digital HQ initiative and new feature previews.

Rounding out the big news at Dreamforce is Salesforce's sustainability effort called the Net Zero Marketplace, where businesses can buy carbon credits to help fight climate change.

For Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff (pictured), Dreamforce and his company's announcements are all about rethinking the way people work, with a focus on the Japanese concept of shoshin, which means the beginner's mind.

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"We need to have a beginner's mind, especially when it's a new day like this. A beginner's mind has every possibility, but the expert's mind has very few," Benioff said. "So how do we cultivate our beginner's mind when it's a new day for business? We have to start to think about what we really want."

Salesforce Releases Genie at Dreamforce 2022

Underneath all of Salesforce's SaaS applications is some form of access to data as a foundational component. The new Genie platform is an effort to bring a real-time data infrastructure to Salesforce.

"Genie is a high-speed, hyperscale data lake infrastructure that powers all of Salesforce's applications," David Schmaier, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, said in a press briefing. "Genie makes all of the Salesforce applications better."

Genie benefits from multiple capabilities already present in the Salesforce platform to help enable real-time data delivery. It can use the Salesforce Flow automation platform to enable faster workflows. It also takes advantage of Salesforce's Einstein AI technology to help make better decisions and predictions.

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Genie is needed is because most organizations have data in many different places. At a foundational level, Genie provides a high-speed data lake that allows enterprises to ingest data from all their different systems in order to provide a unified customer experience.

"Genie is the platform that allows organizations to deliver magical customer experiences," Schmaier said. "They're actually not magical — we use science to deliver this magic, and we use our Flow technology to provide better, faster, easier automation."

Slack Gets a New Canvas for Collaboration

Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack, explained during the press briefing how her company's technology has enabled a digital HQ for many organizations.

At Dreamforce, Slack previewed Canvas, a new feature to help companies share more information within conversations and channels. Canvas can be created and attached to a specific channel to help collect and share information. It will also be able to integrate with other enterprise tools such as Tableau analytics software, Atlassian Jira, and Google Workplace to pull in additional information.

"Canvas is a persistent layer of information that captures answers, and it complements the real-time nature of Slack channels," Yehoshua said.