In fact, the concept that echoed through every session was the rise of the AI agent. Far from being just another chatbot, Salesforce’s powerful agentic technology, Agentforce, is positioned as a new face for the brand—a concierge, a personal shopper and a problem-solver, all powered by a company's unique data and content. This vision has the potential to reshape everything from customer service to a marketer's daily workflow.

So, let’s unpack the key announcements that build toward this vision. We’ll explore what it means to redefine customer interactions through AI agents, look at the underlying platform changes in Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud that make it possible, and contextualize how this could transform your day-to-day reality.

AI agents are transforming brand communication into a dialogue. 

For years, digital marketing has largely been a monologue where brands broadcast messages and hope customers are listening. The vision presented at Connections signals a definitive move away from this dynamic. The future showcased by Salesforce is one of dialogue, where every touchpoint becomes an opportunity for a meaningful, two-way conversation orchestrated by AI.

This marks the end of the "do not reply" email. Imagine sending a promotional email with a curated set of product recommendations. Instead of that being the end of the interaction, it becomes the beginning. A customer could reply directly to the email with, “I like those pants, but do you have them in blue?” and Agentforce, acting as a personal shopper, would respond with available options, check inventory and even help complete the purchase. This transforms a static campaign into a dynamic, personal shopping experience.

This shift also forces us to rethink the purpose of content. We’ve traditionally viewed content as a destination; the goal was to get a visitor to land on a blog post or a product page. In the new paradigm, content becomes fuel for the AI engine. That blog post about new product features is no longer just for human readers; it’s a critical input that teaches AI Agents how to intelligently discuss those features with a customer. Every article, every product description, every FAQ becomes a knowledge source that makes the brand’s AI smarter and more helpful. 

Ultimately, this leads to a new front door for your website. AI Agents will become the primary way visitors interact with a brand online, moving beyond static navigation and simple search bars. It will be a conversational interface that can answer complex questions, make nuanced recommendations and even take action on the user's behalf, like booking a meeting or making a reservation.

A unified platform makes all your data ready for AI.

This conversational future requires an immense amount of power running behind the scenes. The strategy presented at Connections rests on two pillars: unifying the marketer’s experience with the Marketing Cloud Next platform and making all data AI-ready with major enhancements to Data Cloud.

One of the key enablers of this vision is the forthcoming Marketing Cloud Next platform, built on Salesforce Core. It’s designed to solve the problem of platform fragmentation that has long challenged marketers who navigate disparate tools for different channels. Instead, the new vision is one of consistency, where the experience is seamless from one tool to the next. The HTML editor for building a web campaign will look and feel just like the one for creating an email. The same powerful product recommendation engine will be used across every channel, from web to email to mobile. And a single, unified AI brain—Agentforce—will power every interaction. This consistency will not only streamline workflows but also make it significantly easier to cross-train teams, allowing them to become true cross-channel experts.

Of course, any AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. This is where the enhancements to Data Cloud become critical. Salesforce showcased features designed to supercharge the process of getting data ready for AI agents and recommendation engines.

• A renewed focus on data foundations: While new features are exciting, they amplify the need for a solid data foundation. Without it, brands face common challenges like low-quality data that erodes trust, data sprawl across disconnected systems, and limited access that prevents teams from acting on insights. Getting the foundation right is the prerequisite to unlocking the true power of AI.
• Smarter, broader data resolution: We’re familiar with identity resolution for customer profiles, but a key enhancement is the extension of these resolution rules to all Data Model Objects (DMOs). Imagine being able to resolve your entire product catalog, ensuring clean, consistent product data for your AI to use.
• Making unstructured data usable: One of the most powerful announcements was the ability to "vectorize" unstructured data. In simple terms, this is a kind of technological magic that allows AI to understand the meaning and context of content without needing manual tags. The full text of a blog post can now be used as if it were perfectly structured data, allowing the AI to mathematically determine which parts are most relevant for answering a specific question.
• Secure, seamless collaboration: To further break down data silos, Salesforce announced Data Cloud-to-Data Cloud zero-copy connectors. This will allow different business units, or even different companies, to join their Data Cloud instances together. These “data clean rooms” enable data sharing for richer insights in a completely privacy-compliant way.

AI will become an essential co-pilot for every marketer.

So, what does this all mean for the marketer? Their role will evolve from a manual builder to something more akin to a creative director. Using Agentforce, a marketer will be able to generate campaign ideas, customer journeys and even certain components of creative assets simply by providing a strategic brief. Crucially, this output is fully editable. The marketer remains in complete control, but their time is freed up to focus on strategy, creative oversight and optimization, rather than the nuts and bolts of campaign setup and creative production.

Monks is also building tools that empower marketers to take their ability to scale content to the next level. Monks.Flow can be integrated into Salesforce to supercharge a marketer's ability to build net new creative assets that power these journeys and are incorporated into these HTML templates to support better, smarter dynamic personalization.

Collaboration will also become more fluid. These AI agents can be invited directly into Slack channels, acting as a new kind of teammate. Teams will be able to brainstorm with the agent, review its proposals in real-time and collaborate on campaign elements in the same digital space where they conduct the rest of their work.

Finally, this changes how we approach analytics. Instead of digging through complex dashboards and manually cross-referencing reports, marketers will be able to use AI dashboards to get instant, natural-language summaries of campaign and channel effectiveness. This boosts the productivity of not just marketers, but data scientists as well, allowing them to focus on deeper strategic questions instead of routine reporting.

Brands can prepare now for this conversational shift.

The message from Salesforce Connections was clear: the future of marketing is a shift from monologue to dialogue. This approach is built on the pillars of a unified platform that simplifies execution, smarter data that makes every piece of content valuable and AI co-pilots that empower marketers to work more strategically and creatively.

The key takeaway for brands isn't simply to "buy more AI." It's to start thinking differently today. How can we prepare our content to be AI fuel? How can we structure our data to be ready for these new conversational experiences? Those who begin asking these questions now will be the ones best prepared to lead in the conversational future. The time to prepare is now.

This iteration of Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama) has been completely rebuilt on the Data Cloud foundation, introducing advanced AI capabilities that transform how marketers manage their campaigns. This Data Cloud foundation immediately unlocks Agentic capabilities to interact with your marketing campaigns. Imagine the ability to pause campaigns that are low performing using natural language. What about asking your Agent to replicate top performing campaigns for a new audience segment? Marketing Intelligence on the foundation of Data Cloud makes this possible.

In addition to its powerful AI capabilities, Marketing Intelligence simplifies the complexities of modern campaign management by tackling key challenges, such as disorganized or low-quality data, time-consuming analysis, and the need for quick, consolidated insights. Let’s explore how the new Marketing Intelligence overcomes these obstacles, empowering marketing teams to achieve their goals with greater precision and efficiency.

Make your data work for you—not the other way around.

Marketers today must interact with myriad data sources and platforms to execute their campaigns. With information coming from various paid media sources—like Meta, LinkedIn and Google Analytics—marketers are tasked with unifying and harmonizing this data to truly understand campaign performance. Furthermore, they must continuously monitor customer behavior across platforms to understand the effectiveness of campaigns and organize everything into a cohesive strategy. 

Marketing Intelligence addresses this issue by making it easy to ingest, transform and map third-party data in just three clicks. Your data is automatically and intelligently mapped, solving common naming convention errors or data inconsistencies across platforms—and if your platforms don’t come with prebuilt integrations, a universal connector lets you ingest flat files without hassle. Even more exciting, you can easily add non-marketing data (like user-level or first-party data) to your marketing performance data giving you richer data sets to analyze. 

But what truly sets this platform apart is its AI-powered data enrichment, which automates the tedious task of categorizing and organizing complex datasets. For example, GenAI can group car brand names into broader vehicle categories, or social media platforms can be unified under a single label. The key here is that GenAI is integrated into the tool and with that comes the ability to automate manual tasks that marketers typically perform. The platform can even recognize patterns in campaign naming conventions to create new and meaningful categories automatically. Many will see this as a game changer in understanding paid media and marketing data. 

By reducing the time spent on manual data wrangling, Marketing Intelligence allows you to focus on what matters: driving results. With accessible and actionable data at your fingertips, you can approach your campaigns with clarity and confidence.

Instantly understand campaign performance with the help of natural-language insights.

Once your data is organized, the next step is understanding its story—and that’s where Marketing Intelligence shines. The platform offers out-of-the-box dashboards powered by Tableau Einstein, providing a clear view of campaign performance across all your channels.

This is more than just a dashboard; it’s an intelligent assistant. Marketing Intelligence uses AI-generated, natural-language summaries to offer an instant overview of your program’s health. Imagine logging in and being presented with plain-language insights that tell you exactly what’s working, what isn’t, and what you should do next based on your goals. This feature eliminates the guesswork and ensures you’re always equipped with actionable insights. The combination of advanced visualizations with intuitive summaries helps you make informed decisions quickly, without having to navigate through complex datasets.

Optimize campaigns in real time, backed by intelligent recommendations.

Achieving campaign goals often requires constant monitoring and adjustment, but that’s easier said than done. Marketing Intelligence simplifies this process with proactive goal-setting and agentic optimizations.

For instance, if you’re aiming to drive leads at a specific cost, Marketing Intelligence allows you to set that goal upfront and continuously track your progress. If the platform detects you’re falling short, it doesn’t just alert you—it provides actionable recommendations. Using Agentforce’s paid media optimization skill, the agent might suggest reallocating budget, autonomously pause under-performing ads, or shift focus to better-performing channels.

This feedback loop ensures you’re not just reacting to results after the campaign ends but actively improving outcomes as they unfold. With plans to expand Agentforce’s capabilities, Salesforce is further investing in tools that enable marketers to stay agile and effective.

Turn your biggest marketing challenges into opportunities.

Marketing Intelligence is a solution designed to transform the way marketers interact with their campaign data. Are you spending too much time wrangling data into usable formats? Struggling to make sense of performance metrics across platforms? Searching for ways to optimize campaigns without wasting valuable resources? Stuck in repetitive, manual processes? This platform offers a streamlined approach to tackling these pain points, helping you achieve faster, smarter and more impactful results.

As a Salesforce Consulting Partner, we’re here to ensure you get the most out of Marketing Intelligence and other Salesforce tools. From implementation to enhancement of the entire Salesforce product stack, our team is ready to guide you every step of the way. Let us know how we can help!

A Legacy of Strategic Partnership

For years, Monks has partnered with Google to elevate our clients' marketing strategies to unprecedented heights.  

Driving Innovation Through Commitment

These certifications underscore our pursuit of excellence in expanding our Google Cloud knowledge base and adopting innovative solutions. Achieving the Data Analytics specialization demonstrates our ability to excel in data ingestion, preparation, storage and analysis using Google Cloud technology. Meanwhile, the Marketing Analytics specialization highlights our capability to transition clients from fragmented datasets to data-driven marketing strategies that yield measurable results.

"This enables Monks to support partners in developing both technical solutions and data strategies that drive their success" my colleague Mikey adds.

Setting the Stage for AI and Machine Learning

These specializations not only validate our expertise but also prepare us to leverage the latest advancements in AI and machine learning. By combining cutting-edge technologies with our deep understanding of data analytics and marketing analytics, we’re poised to unlock even greater value for our clients.

Expanding Capabilities & Innovating with Looker

As we celebrate these achievements, Monks is already looking ahead, leveraging tools like Looker to empower our clients with actionable insights and seamless data visualization. Mikey says, “Looker's semantic layer translates raw data into a language that both downstream users and LLMs can understand. By utilizing LookML to provide trusted business metrics, we create a central hub for data context, definitions and relationships, powering both BI and AI workflows to drive our clients’ businesses forward.”

A Commitment to Client Success

At Monks, our mission is simple yet profound: to empower clients with innovative, data-driven solutions that deliver tangible impact. For years, we’ve championed the importance of breaking down silos, enabling seamless data accessibility across organizations, and building pathways for activation (Optimizing Workflows with First-Party Data). 
These specializations are more than milestones—they embody our dedication to excellence and our pursuit of success for our clients.

“To put it bluntly, we focus on delivering tangible business value to our clients by applying both our technical and marketing expertise,” says Hayden Klei, VP Data Consulting. “We don’t focus on shiny vanity projects for the sake of industry accolades, rather, we define success by the impact we deliver to our clients’ top and bottom lines.”

As we continue to invest in Google Cloud and our talented teams, we are setting ourselves up for even greater achievements, driving value through expertise, innovation and a shared vision of success. Together with Google, Monks is ready to lead the charge into the future of marketing analytics and data-driven solutions.

For organizations seeking a trusted partner to navigate the complexities of data and marketing, Monks stands ready to deliver unparalleled expertise and transformative results. 

From cutting-edge AI solutions to enhanced cloud capabilities, Dreamforce 2024 showcased a vision where data-driven insights and intelligent automation lead the charge in boosting innovation and efficiency. So, let’s dive into the most exciting revelations from this year's event, highlighting how these advancements are set to empower businesses to reach new heights in building meaningful and enduring customer relationships.

Agentforce introduces intelligent agents across enterprise use cases.

One of the most exciting announcements at Dreamforce was the reveal of Agentforce, an autonomous agent platform that lets brands build AI agents that support their customers and employees. The idea is that when working together, humans and the AI agents who augment their abilities can drive customer success together.

These agents fulfill key, specialized roles that range from supporting marketers as they build campaigns and journeys to serving as a coach that helps employees practice their pitching. On the customer side, Agentforce can serve as a personal shopper who makes recommendations based on customer preferences, a sales development representative who engages leads on behalf of the sales team, or a service agent who can resolve cases in natural language. These agents are grounded in your data, ensuring accuracy as well as an experience that greatly surpasses standard chatbots that customers are used to.

At its core, Agentforce is a Salesforce innovation that answers the critical question of how to integrate AI into business operations. It goes beyond traditional chatbots by incorporating a higher level of intelligence, powered by your Data Cloud data, allowing it to complete repeatable tasks more effectively. Therefore, it’s essential that you have data foundations to support these intelligent actions.

Agentforce and our own Monks.Flow represent a dynamic duo of AI solutions that can significantly enhance how businesses interact with customers and manage internal processes. Together, these platforms exemplify how assistive AI technologies are crucial in helping brands scale their operations and elevate customer interactions. The synergy between Agentforce's customer-centric AI agents and Monks.Flow's operational efficiencies enables businesses to operate smarter and at a larger scale, without sacrificing personalization or effectiveness. Learn more about Agentforce in depth here.

Data Cloud puts even more insights at your fingertips with wider unstructured data support.

Speaking of Data Cloud, Salesforce announced a handful of new features to help make your data far more insightful than ever before. Perhaps the most exciting new feature is additional unstructured data support, including native processing of audio and video content.

This is transformative because it unlocks new data sources, providing a more complete understanding of customer preferences, pain points and behaviors by analyzing content like customer calls, webinars or product demos. By revealing nuanced insights into customer sentiment and intent, companies can enhance customer profiles and enable personalized, data-driven marketing strategies.

Moreover, applying AI to these sources allows for more accurate predictions of customer needs, improving customer service interactions and fostering loyalty. Once processed and searchable, this content becomes a valuable asset across business functions, enhancing operational efficiency and decision-making accuracy. For example, examining customer service chats can help support teams or sales reps identify frequent issues and improve response strategies, leading to increased customer satisfaction or higher conversion rates.

Find—and act on—information you need with enhanced search.

Despite so much data coming from so many sources, finding what you need will become a lot easier thanks to hybrid search. Hybrid search combines vector search with keyword search, bringing information together from across different media. These improved search capabilities enable faster information discovery by considering the customer's specific situation, preferences and history, thereby reducing the friction often encountered in traditional searches that rely solely on exact matches or keywords.

With personalized customer interactions, searches become more tailored to individual needs, allowing service representatives and sales teams to provide faster, more relevant responses, which enhances customer satisfaction. This leads to enhanced efficiency for teams, as quicker access to relevant customer data lets employees respond to inquiries more efficiently. As a result, customers enjoy an improved experience, receiving seamless, fast, and accurate service that effectively resolves issues or recommends products.

Additional governance and security features keep your data safe—including prevention of data leaks when using AI.

Security and governance have always been crucial to storing data, but the use of external AI applications have raised new concerns about eliminating data leaks and reducing risk. Salesforce has implemented additional data security and governance features to help keep your data safe, including the prevention of exposure to unauthorized parties when using AI. These enhancements are vital for compliance with regulations, as privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA are becoming more stringent.

Preserving customer trust is crucial, as customers expect their data to be managed securely and responsibly, and additional security measures reassure them that their data is protected. Moreover, these features mitigate risks associated with growth and innovation, providing a secure foundation for companies to expand operations and introduce new products or services without increasing vulnerabilities. You can find more details on added security, along with more info on all of the Data Cloud features discussed above, on Salesforce’s website.

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition helps small and medium-sized businesses do more with less.

Switching focus to Marketing Cloud, Salesforce revealed Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, which we recently examined in depth. This edition is crafted to empower smaller marketing teams to achieve more with less, thanks to its innovative features that streamline AI-driven efficiencies, enhance user journey experimentation, and bolster cross-team collaboration. Notable additions include a reimagined campaign home, robust AI-powered tools like Einstein Engagement Scoring and Frequency, and advanced dynamic content creation. These tools are set to transform how marketers engage with customers by predicting user behaviors, optimizing messaging strategies, and personalizing interactions.

Moreover, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition introduces event-driven messaging and two-way conversational capabilities, enabling seamless, interactive communications triggered by specific customer events. For those curious about path experimentation, the Advanced Edition supports testing various campaign paths to refine strategies further. These features are designed to address the evolving challenges marketers face today, ensuring businesses can deliver impactful, personalized marketing experiences.

From free training to product upgrades, additional goodies were shown off.

A connecting thread across the news dropped at Dreamforce is the use of AI and the crucial roles it plays across connecting with customers, understanding their needs, and ultimately building content and touchpoints that keep them engaged. Beyond new product features to support this trend, Salesforce will also offer free, hands-on AI courses and training for anyone. This is to help ensure that everyone can gain the skills they need to excel in a world transformed by AI. Learn more about the training here.

Finally, as reported earlier in September, Salesforce is offering its free Foundations upgrade to Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Enterprise Edition customers. Foundations provides a new, enhanced UI that gives brands a unified view of their customer. Read more about that update here.

Dreamforce 2024 was an incredible step forward in advancing AI-driven business growth and customer engagement.

This year’s Dreamforce left us with a wealth of insights and innovations that promise to reshape how businesses operate and interact with customers. From the transformative powers of Agentforce to the enriched capabilities of Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, the announcements this year underscore the pivotal role of AI in driving forward-looking strategies and enhancing business efficiency.

The emphasis on AI as a cornerstone for customer engagement and operational excellence reflects a broader industry shift. Salesforce's commitment to equipping businesses with the tools and knowledge to harness AI's potential is evident not only in its product offerings but also in the free educational resources made available to the community.

By fostering an ecosystem where technology and human ingenuity work hand-in-hand, Salesforce continues to empower brands to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. As we look forward to the future, it is clear that the advancements unveiled at this year's event will serve as catalysts for growth, enabling brands to forge deeper connections with their customers and lead with confidence into the digital age.

First, Salesforce has announced its new product, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, which is designed to put data at brands’ fingertips to help them grow. Second, Salesforce is extending no-cost access to Data Cloud to Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement customers with Sales or Service Enterprise Edition (EE) licenses or above, giving them access to tools they can use to fuel stronger business outcomes with Einstein 1. This includes increasing speed to market, generating more relevant content, increased conversions, and the ability to connect conversations across the entire customer relationship. Both announcements roll out to the Americas this February and the EMEA region in the second half of 2024.

Whether you’ll just be trying Marketing Cloud for the first time or are firmly established on the platform, the news has promising implications for everyone. Read on to learn what the announcements mean for your team.

Data Cloud helps brands of any size prepare and streamline generative AI capabilities.

This is an exciting time to be a marketer; generative AI has ushered in an era of marketing-led transformation and new workflows that help us do our jobs smarter and faster. According to Salesforce’s Generative AI Snapshot Survey, 71% of marketers say generative AI will eliminate busy work and allow them to be more strategic. But AI is only as good as your data; high-quality data is essential for fueling accurate models and insights in the Einstein 1 platform.

And that’s where Data Cloud comes in. No-cost access to Data Cloud opens the door for even more businesses to use the platform for the first time, helping them build a solid data foundation that will service and streamline their AI transformation journeys.

Data Cloud is quickly becoming the leading customer data platform thanks to its ability to connect across sales, services, marketing, commerce, loyalty, third-party advertising and legacy applications. Previously, Salesforce announced no-cost access for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud customers.

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition applies marketing automation to help brands grow.

The launch of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition will expand the platform’s access to the small business market for the first time. In fact, this new edition of Marketing Cloud is designed to help brands grow their business. From delivering campaigns and content faster with trusted AI to better personalizing customer relationships with data, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition applies marketing automation to help small businesses connect their teams and drive revenue on a single, intuitive platform.

Benefits of the platform include helping small teams do more with fewer resources. This means small teams can spend more time building strong data foundations—data that will be critical for successful generative AI—and leverage enterprise AI capabilities for the first time. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition removes some of the technological barriers to entry that smaller businesses face in implementing AI, helping them get up to speed with fewer headaches.

What if I’m already a Marketing Cloud user?

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition might be the cool, new kid on the block, but there’s no need to move from an existing Marketing Cloud to this one. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition indeed brings new functionality to the table, but we look forward to seeing further innovations in Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement that will bring each platform in parity with one another. This means all Marketing Cloud customers can expect more good news on the horizon.

Whether you’re an existing Marketing Cloud user or will just be getting started with Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, we’re happy to help you make the most of platform features. Having a seat on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Partner Advisory Board and being part of the the product’s pilot program, I'm thrilled to see the platform become more accessible to even more businesses, granting them access to robust, enterprise-level data tools for the first time—especially at a time when that is so crucial to entering the new AI economy.

For those using Marketing Cloud in any of its forms, we offer guidance on how to connect your data strategy and implement features as they go live. For Data Cloud users, we can help you realize the role of data beyond the context of customer relationship management, like how to join it together with generative AI functions.

Unlock the power of AI with Salesforce.

Both of Salesforce’s recent announcements will be welcome news to marketers who are itching to ramp up their AI transformation journeys. While Marketing Cloud Growth Edition and no-cost access to Data Cloud are especially beneficial to smaller businesses, a strong data strategy is important for organizations of any size—and no matter your Marketing Cloud of choice, we can help you make the most of your customer data on the platform.

Got any questions about Marketing Cloud Growth Edition? Check out Salesforce’s announcement for more.