Salesforce Connections 2024: Key highlights & takeaways

Neal Hartman

Salesforce Connections 2024: Key highlights & takeaways

Salesforce Connections 2024—touted by Salesforce as “the official Salesforce event for all things digital marketing and commerce”— is in the books. The theme of this year’s gathering for education, networking, and good old-fashioned hype around Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud ecosystems was “The data and AI moment where it all clicks.”

Here’s a look at a few of the new features and functionalities Salesforce unveiled at the event.

Data Cloud functionality

Kelly Eliyahu, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce, stated in the keynote, “Data Cloud is a company data platform. It’s a hyperscale data engine built directly into Salesforce that enhances every cloud.” No matter what cloud you currently work with or whether you’re an admin, analyst, or marketer, it’s time to start taking Data Cloud seriously.

Data Cloud for Commerce now enables retailers to harmonize enterprise data—product details, inventory status, and transactional history—with customer data to create a single view to access and leverage across the entire customer journey. This allows merchants to boost revenue and efficiency with insights from AI-powered analytics and automation to guide key business decisions, like choosing to bundle underperforming products or sending abandoned-cart and back-in-stock notifications.

Salesforce also announced more than 200 new out-of-the-box connectors for Data Cloud, including SAP, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and Snowflake.

AI-driven capabilities

With AI integration increasingly becoming a top priority for businesses and a big challenge for a majority of Salesforce clients, Salesforce announced a series of features related to Einstein Copilot, part of Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform that integrates the user interface, a variety of AI models, and data into a single data-driven platform. Thanks to this integration, Einstein 1 Platform offers the ability to connect any data to build AI-powered apps with low code and deliver entirely new CRM experiences.

Einstein Copilot for Marketing is an AI assistant with pre-built actions that simplify campaign creation by automatically generating marketing briefs, content, and email campaigns. It also helps marketers accelerate time-to-market with auto-generated responses grounded in customer data and aligned to brand voice.

Einstein Copilot for Merchants is an AI assistant that uses natural language prompts to streamline storefront setup and generate personalized promotions to delight customers and drive conversion rates. It also surfaces insights to improve products discoverability and provides AI-powered SEO recommendations to increase revenue.

Einstein Copilot for Shoppers is a generative AI assistant that sits on top of Commerce Cloud Storefront and “talks” to customers like a 24/7 in-store associate.

Einstein Personalization is a new AI-based decision engine that allows brands to leverage real-time customer data from Data Cloud to deliver marketing campaigns that automatically trigger next best offers and personalized content, no matter where a customer engages with a brand or organization.

The bottom line

If you’re looking for a partner to help your organization take advantage of these new features, schedule a call with us to learn more about how Credera can help!