Salesforce Connections ‘24 concluded Thursday, rife with announcements across Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Data Cloud. Data and AI were the themes of the show, with Salesforce showcasing a slew of innovations with the aim to help businesses scale AI for their enterprise safely and securely.
There were far more than 24 announcements made at the conference across multiple keynotes, roadmap sessions, theater presentations, and roundtable discussions, but here are 24 of our favorites that we think will resonate with Salesforce customers.
AI Copilots for Marketing and Commerce
1. Three heads are better than one, and Salesforce announced separate but connected AI assistants (Copilots) for Marketers, Merchants, and Shoppers at Connections ‘24.
2. Einstein Copilot for Marketing will be generally available (GA) in June ‘24 and will help marketers create campaigns, draft content, and even send emails and SMS messages. Pilot customers are “so excited” about the time-savings, efficiency, and productivity these features enable, according to Kylie Yancie, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce.
3. Einstein Copilot for Merchants is a commerce user’s personal assistant boasting a number of features including generative product descriptions and SEO copy and assistance in creating promotions (B2B/D2C).
4. Einstein Copilot for Shoppers is a shopper’s personal chat-based concierge with multimodal support. Salesforce demonstrated the tool’s ability to receive a photo from the consumer and recommend the desired product, in addition to natural-language-based shopping assistance.
Data Cloud Takes Center Stage
5. While Connections is traditionally a Marketing and Commerce conference, Data Cloud might have been mentioned more than either. It’s clear Data Cloud is integral to Salesforce’s strategy and product innovation moving forward for Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and every cloud.
6. Data Cloud for Commerce was announced, with general availability for B2B and D2C Commerce in June and B2C Commerce in October. This integral position for Data Cloud was amplified as roadmap items like Commerce Intelligence will require Data Cloud to work. Customers will easily be opted in to this during renewals but can also opt-in early.
7. Data Cloud will continue to employ a consumption-based license model, which means customers will be charged based on their usage (including data consumption). This is important as Salesforce announced over 200 connectors to Data Cloud including other Salesforce Clouds, Zero Copy connectors to data lakes like Snowflake, and third party services like AWS, Oracle, and more.
8. Large enterprises should be careful with consumption-based-licensed products, to control costs. Salesforce is unveiling advanced tools to control granular data costs between B2C Commerce and Data Cloud later this year.
Astound’s Launch360: Data Cloud is a tremendous accelerator optimized for different industries including retail and consumer goods. With prebuilt calculated insights, segments and flows, we offer a head start to your Data Cloud journey that can see time to value in 8-12 weeks.
Marketing Cloud Innovation
9. The segment creation that Einstein Copilot for Marketing offers will help brands achieve personalization, timeliness, and relevance in the consumer messaging.
10. Waterfall segmentation will enable marketers to make sure consumers aren’t oversaturated with your messaging. Marketers can prioritize segments to make their campaigns more precise and meet customer expectations.
11. Einstein Personalization powered by Data Cloud will enable consistent customer messaging and experiences across many touchpoints and channels, from brand-operated systems like commerce and service to external channels like social media.
Commerce Cloud Innovation
12. Order Management receiving Delivery Estimates provides a much-improved customer experience during checkout.
13. B2B Commerce store setup received more and more innovation and faster time-to-value. You can now set up a storefront in as soon as 30 minutes with a ten-fold reduction in clicks compared to earlier stages of the product.
14. Commerce App 2.0 reorganized the administrative area of B2B Commerce and D2C Commerce with an optimized and refined UX.
15. Granular replications for B2C Commerce - my favorite announcement from all of last year - will be GA in Summer ‘24 after 9 months of beta testing. Here’s to shipping smaller and shipping faster.
16. Composable Storefront is continually chasing feature parity with Salesforce’s traditional B2C application, Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA). From a technical perspective, Composable Storefront is also receiving plenty of love, with a refactored extensibility framework coming soon that will look familiar (a la cartridges) to a lot of SFCC developers. A productized integration to SiteGenesis for hybrid storefronts is also in the works. And observability is improved with Managed Runtime logs feeding into Log Center, which itself is getting JDBC-based SQL query support so teams can run their own reports off that data.
17. Salesforce B2C Commerce Business Manager is getting modernized, a much-needed uplift. It is a two-year journey that starts in September of this year with an open beta for the 24.9 release. One standout enhancement is the context-preserving Site-switcher. Say you’re a merchandizer working on a promotion, and you want to change Sites. In the current Business Manager, this would take several clicks, including a painful re-navigation to return to the promotion screen. In the new Business Manager UI, the Site-switching dropdown is evergreen, and when you change Sites, your current page is preserved while switching your context to the new Site. This simple change is a very welcome productivity enhancement.
18. Salesforce unveiled plans to move B2C Commerce to Hyperforce, its public cloud infrastructure, which will provide a more modern and scalable foundation. This is a multi-year, eight-figure investment from Salesforce. One customer in North America will be moved this year.
19. We asked Salesforce if the move of B2C Commerce to Hyperforce implies changes to quota limitations, realm setups, and more, and learned that they’re still in the early days of understanding these implications with more information to be shared soon.
Astound Digital is a B2C Commerce expert and Commerce Cloud partner of 20 years, offering several commerce accelerators across B2B and B2C Commerce. If you’re interested in going Composable we can achieve time to value in 2-6 months.
Community Innovations, Results, and Predictions
The big reason people head to Connections is to, well, connect! Hearing from customers and partners can be just as insightful as the innovations Salesforce is baking into their products.
20. Retail digital experiences are evolving, with ISV partners like Obsess powering customer journeys for brands like J. Crew and Ralph Lauren that span augmented reality and spatial computing with Apple Vision Pro.
21. Several case studies were shown around the power of adopting Salesforce’s Composable Storefront. In addition to Forrester’s recent Total Economic Important (TEI) report, where a 271% return on investment was calculated.
22. Generative AI is influencing customer behaviors as much as product features. Among its top five predictions for retailers this holiday season, Salesforce suggested that shoppers will embrace generative AI to help them search for the perfect gift.
23. Gen AI is also impacting the product roadmaps of just about every ISV in the ecosystem; it seemed every booth had an AI angle. Some of the innovation was straightforward and necessary, such as AI-powered productivity features in Product Information Management (PIM) tools like our partners Akeneo and Pimly. Others were more innovative, at least to us, with generative AI integrating into commerce user experiences in other ways besides a chatbot. We think that trend will continue.
24. Finally, brands are embracing Generative AI. 32% of marketing organizations have fully integrated AI into their workflows, and an additional 43% are experimenting with it, per Salesforce. We hosted a roundtable of Commerce Developers and Architects and learned how customers and partners are experimenting with generative AI to optimize Commerce Cloud development and merchandising, using tools ranging from ChatGPT, Github Copilot, Einstein, and more.
If you’re looking to implement any of these new features, or just to talk to Astound Digital experts and learn more, please get in touch.