I’m sure your news feeds have been pummeled with news about Dreamforce 2017, the biggest tech conference in the US. We’ve broken down and dissected what’s been announced so far, and what we find to be the most intriguing announcements.
(Be sure to hear it straight from the horses mouth, literally, by clicking on the bot to your right!) 
The time for lightning is now
As we highlight in this other blog post, the time to transition to lightning is now. The coolest thing we saw here was salesforce dynamic lightning pages. Dynamic lightning pages allow you to show or hide content based on data on the record. Watch the videos here for some quick recaps
Strategic alliance with Google
Salesforce and Google strengthened their relationship by announcing tighter integration with the G Suite and Analytics products. A few of the takeaways here are:
- Salesforce Lightning for Gmail: Salesforce Lightning and Gmail will deeply integrate, enabling users to surface relevant Salesforce CRM data in Gmail as well as customer interactions from Gmail directly within Salesforce. High priority emails will be identified and next actions will be suggested based on content within emails, allowing users to service and sell to customers faster than ever before.
- Our take: Have a look at the EC Bot to your right for our opinion!
- Salesforce Lightning for Google Sheets: Salesforce Lightning integrations with Google Sheets will allow users to embed Sheets within Salesforce. In addition, with a single click, users will be able to easily push data from Salesforce Records or Reports to a new Google Sheet. This data will be updated bi-directionally automatically, ensuring everyone has access to the most recent information.
- Our take: Have a look at the EC Bot to your right for our opinion
- Quip Live Apps for Google Drive and Google Calendar: With the new Quip Live Apps for Google Drive and Google Calendar, teams will be able to embed any list of Drive files, including Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, or their Google Calendar inside Quip, enabling users to access information in a more collaborative, open cloud environment.
- Our take: Have a look at the EC Bot to your right for our opinion
- Salesforce for Hangouts Meet: Users will be able to surface relevant customer and account details, service case history and more from Salesforce CRM directly within the Hangouts Meet interface so reps have the insights needed to drive a deal forward or solve a customer service request.
- Our take: Have a look at the EC Bot to your right for our opinion
AI takes front and center
Two of the most innovative features announced over the last couple days have been the Einstein Prediction Builder and the Einstein Bots.
As you can see from our little guy over here on the lower right, bots are taking the tech world by storm. The Einstein Bots claim to run as service chatbots that free up customer service agents to work on more complex edge cases as opposed to the more rote and routine support questions. Question is, can they get it right? The most important thing here is Natural Language Processing (NLP) so people can ask questions like people, and not feel like they’re interacting with a robot. Depending on the outcome, this will either been an enormous success or huge failure
The Einstein Prediction Builder allows companies to create prediction models on any object or field, showing a record’s likelihood to churn, renew, or have a positive experience. The selling point here is that it’s being done primarily with a point and click interface. I have a feeling that any of the truly innovative tasks will have to be done using code such as Einstein Language and Einstein Vision, a powerful set of APIs launched in June of this year.
