Five Dreamforce ’25 sessions recommended entirely by a human
Hello, friend! It’s that beautiful time of year where you get to dream a little Dreamforce with me, leaving all your worries behind as we accelerate in hyperdrive to a bright, agentic future!
For those wondering (or perhaps wishing for the day to come), I have still abstained from using even a teensy-weensy bit of AI when writing these articles. I’m still trying to prove to my kids that working out the creative side of your brain to complete fun assignments is an essential skill and worth the extra time. Hopefully, they will continue to use words like “teensy-weensy.” Not so ironically, the ever-evolving Salesforce Agenda Builder page provides an advanced set of AI-generated session recommendations and filter criteria for Dreamforce beginners. I would love it if someone could reach out to me after the show and tell me which one provided them with more value. Happy lies are considered a form of spreading joy in my book, so feel free to send a few my way.
Another improvement within my evolving conference editorial career is that I am NOT going to include the main keynote as one of my five recommended sessions moving forward. At this point it should be a mandatory requirement to jump-start your Dreamforce experience by learning what Uncle Marc has in store for the world, and all the while inhaling that hit of dopamine and positive energy emoting from the keynote presentation. Consider that the unofficial sixth recommendation, as I share with you the following gems:
Five Sessions We Recommend
#1 Justify the Value of Your Salesforce Investment
Why we recommend it:
A nice way to start your conference experience on a Tuesday morning could be to join a workshop that addresses some of the questions asked in every office by every budget-approving C-level in every organization since the history of technological advancements. Can you imagine being in a conference room in the 1400s when someone had to convince a boss of the cost savings and rapid increase in page production per workday by investing in a movable-type printing press? I mean, Ingrid’s shaky calligraphy gets the job done, but she’s retirement age (40?) and we’re talking about an increase of 3,600 pages a day, ya know?
Huge digital transformations come with larger licensing and implementation costs, and not everyone is equipped to have the dialogue to make huge digital decisions, because they typically aren’t aligned on the metrics that solve business problems and measure success. Now, granted, this workshop is specific to Financial Cloud and Agentforce, but hearing how the presenters help you build the business case for calculating ROI and securing buy-in will most likely translate across all Salesforce solutions.
Why we recommend it:
Our team has jumped into the deepest deep end of the swimming pool to fully embrace and understand all the possibilities within this new agentic era. We’ve conducted several hackathons with our best and brightest, and we’ve built (and continue to build) agents for Marketing Cloud Engagement users. Now that you know that we’re really smart and bleeding-edge, there are still questions lingering around the full customer life cycle of an agentic beneficiary.
Agents are making both the marketer’s and customer’s lives easier, but how do you translate those positive vibes into long-term brand loyalty and sales-qualified leads? I experienced an amazingly painless customer support agent through a sport betting app (don’t judge me!) where they looked at my parlay bet in advance and predicted the question I was about to ask them. It was like a car repair employee having a new tire ready for me because they watched me pull into the parking lot with a doughnut wheel and recognized the make and model of my vehicle. Ten out of ten times, I will descend from the tippy top of a sales funnel to the very bottom like a water park slide when smooth experiences like this happen to me. I’m hoping to see if this session gets into marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads and how to route this new channel of lead activity into a beautifully unified customer portrait.
#3 Visualize and Act on Data with Tableau Next
Why we recommend it:
After attending the Salesforce Connections conference in June to witness the unveiling of Marketing Cloud Next, along with carrying the historical knowledge of several conferences past, my colleagues and I play a game of “name change or technology change?” to determine the true potency of certain announcements. Enough of us witnessed the name transitions that HBO put us through (HBO into HBO Max to Max and then HBO Max again) without a lick of enhancement, but fortunately, with Salesforce, there do tend to be several new features that accommodate their name changes.
What excites me about Tableau Next is that they are taking the tried-and-true Tableau core platform and making it AI-native with Agentforce. Many marketers have long faced the questions that a board of executives asks when they want to know how a campaign performs. Now you can convert that trauma into a series of trained and tested AI prompts to do the heavy data lifting and deliver something that’s ready for a PowerPoint slide or two.
Why this session is a must:
1. It’s a hands-on training to build a visualization and dashboard in the platform itself, so you’re not just conceptualizing what’s possible;
2. They are offering TWO different session times for this training, and
3. This is one of two different hands-on training topics addressing “Next” products (the other is related to Cross-Channel Flows in Marketing Cloud Next, which I also recommend. A seventh session recommendation!).
Let’s peek under the hood of Salesforce’s latest to truly explore what’s new.
#4 Smart Marketing Decisions: Marketing Cloud and Agentforce
Why we recommend it:
A nice way to wrap up your conference experience on a Thursday afternoon could be to sit down with some experts and validate everything you heard about Agentforce and Marketing Cloud Next, and how to apply practical frameworks to your organization. I’ve written in the past how I value speakers who bring extra value to their sessions, and then if I happen to see their names tied to sessions the following year, I smash that heart icon and registration button in the session catalog. My favorite session type will always be hands-on training, but my second favorite session type is a round table format when I have real use cases and questions that I want answered before I jump on a plane for home.
Pato Sapir is a Salesforce champion and MVP whom I have followed, and I have attended his sessions at Dreamforce, Connections and Dreamin’ events throughout each and every year. Now, do I work with the guy? Yes. Do I collect hair samples and create a Pato Sapir voodoo doll? There’s no lost and found for hair, so finders keepers, right? Joined by Jacob Hayes and Ali Saeed, you will get the opportunity to share your real-life Agentforce and Marketing Cloud experiences, and receive valuable and tangible steps to run within your org. I highly recommend talking to these experts!
#5 A Conversation with Sundar Pichai and Marc Benioff
Why we recommend it:
Call me old-fashioned, but I like it when department stores and mom-and-pop shops that founded and scaled a business proudly used their last name as the company name itself. So excuse me if I pretend that Google was founded by a Mr. and Mrs. Google, preferably with the first names McDougal and Ivana, respectively. With a son named Jeeves, for my older search engine folks.
Alas, we have the opportunity to be in the same room with the real-life CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as they both discuss AI and redefining what’s possible in business. There are multiple sessions at Dreamforce that share this similar topic and future forecast promise, but these two have the actual power, intellectual property ownership and elite development org charts to truly redefine our human roles within a digital landscape.
Imagine witnessing a conversation between two of your favorite Greek mythology gods, sitting up in a cloud above Mount Olympus, deciding if they want to bestow a bountiful harvest or unleash the titans upon the earthbound mortals. I will be waiting in line for this, and I may bring an offering of ambrosia and nectar.
ATTENDING DREAMFORCE?
Build your session agenda today and meet up with Matt and the Devs United team!
P.S.: Got a marketing challenge keeping you up at night? There’s an agent for that! We can build one for you and integrate it directly into your Marketing Cloud Engagement platform. Now you can power up your MCE with new agentic capabilities to make it even more efficient. Let’s talk.
