Dreamforce 2024 announcements: Financial services edition

Dreamforce 2024 Announcement #1: Agentforce for Financial Services

The major highlight of Dreamforce 2024 was the introduction of Agentforce, Salesforce’s autonomous AI platform. Agentforce is how Salesforce is uniting humans and AI-powered agents to drive real customer success. This innovation will transform customer service and operations within financial services, shifting service from a cost center to a profit center.

Agentforce empowers financial institutions to deliver exceptional experiences effortlessly. It seamlessly integrates AI with human agents, handing off context when needed—perfect for regulated industries. This allows human agents to focus on high-value tasks while AI handles routine work, driving cost savings and scalability. Agentforce is going to utilize what your organization has already built within your own Salesforce org to launch with speed and control. 

Financial institutions have traditionally scaled their services by adding more people, driving up costs to deliver customer experiences. Here's how AgentForce can replace human involvement with AI agents in a transaction dispute scenario:

• Step 1: Define the agent’s role as a banking representative responsible for dispute resolution.
• Step 2: Ensure secure access to the necessary customer data.
• Step 3: Set clear guidelines on what actions the agent can and cannot perform, such as issuing a new card.
• Step 4: Deploy AI agents across all service channels, including Financial Services Cloud, for seamless support.

This is just one example of how AI agents will help financial institutions reduce service costs. The release of Advisor and Claims Agents is scheduled for Winter 2025, with Banking Agents launching in Summer 2025.

Salesforce also announced key partnerships with IBM and Google to enhance Agentforce. IBM's tailored autonomous agents will streamline complex financial services tasks, such as loan approvals and tax compliance.Agentforce is set to revolutionize the financial services industry—whether you're a credit union, bank, wealth management firm, or insurer. Get started with Financial Services AI Use Case Library. All the prompts, code, and use cases are here. Simply open these use cases in a sandbox environment, install the code and start working. 

Dreamforce 2024 Announcement #2: Data Cloud Enhancements

At Dreamforce, three major announcements were made to enhance the performance and scalability of Data Cloud. As the foundational platform across Salesforce orgs, Data Cloud now serves as the essential engine driving seamless data flow. These enhancements are: 

1. Expanded Unstructured Data Processing: Financial services firms can now natively process unstructured data such as video and audio (e.g., customer service calls, sales demos), uncovering valuable insights that were previously out of reach in traditional reporting.
2. New Connectors: With 50 new pre-built connectors, raising the total to over 200, financial institutions can integrate a wider variety of data sources more efficiently, enhancing data accessibility and operational speed. 
3. Sub-second Real-time Performance: Data Cloud now delivers sub-second speeds for data ingestion and activation, empowering financial services organizations to make faster, more informed decisions.

“Data Cloud will make data management smarter, faster, and cleaner. Add in AI-assisted activation and cross-platform orchestration, and we’re looking at a platform that will let businesses act on their data in ways that weren’t possible before. It’s a leap forward in turning data into action, making this moment so exciting.”

- JD Fuller, Senior Data Engineer, Zennify

In addition to the Data Cloud Enhancements, Salesforce also announced Atlas, the AI engine behind Agentforce. It’s going to be a transformative force for financial services. Leveraging high-quality data from the Data Cloud, it autonomously generates and refines strategies that optimize critical operations such as risk management, portfolio assessment, and compliance.

With advanced reasoning, data retrieval, and decision-making capabilities, Atlas enables financial institutions to handle complex processes more efficiently, reducing operational risks and enhancing decision accuracy. The potential to reshape both customer and employee interactions is immense, driving unprecedented levels of productivity and engagement across the industry.

Dreamforce 2024 Announcement #3: Exciting B2B Updates for Financial Services Cloud 

Salesforce has aimed to drive more innovation in the B2B space, addressing the persistent challenge of understanding complex customer businesses, especially for bankers. Traditionally reliant on core systems and manual processes, bankers often managed data in Excel or from memory. Salesforce's latest enhancement promises to change that, unlocking and making business data dynamically accessible to all.

This innovation of Financial Services Cloud for Commercial Banking will provide bankers with rich, accessible information about the businesses they serve, bringing together the front and middle office. With compliance at the forefront, this feature is designed to make bankers more efficient, allowing them to focus on what truly matters: building relationships and driving growth.

Salesforce also announced enhancements to Financial Services Cloud for Insurance Brokerages, an offering that unifies producers and account managers on a client-centric platform. This innovation simplifies engagement across clients, partners, and carriers, while streamlining workflows across the front, middle, and back office. This powerful solution is set to transform how insurance brokerages operate, creating a more connected, efficient, and client-focused experience.

These advancements mark a significant step forward in the financial services industry, enabling financial institutions to streamline operations, improve compliance, and elevate customer engagement in entirely new ways.

Dreamforce 2024 Announcement #4: Transforming Marketing Cloud with AI, Data-Driven Automation, and Advanced Tools

Marketing Cloud Advanced was arguably one of the most significant announcements made during the Marketing & Commerce Keynote. Marketing Cloud Advanced is deemed the ‘big sister’ to Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. This new offering brings several exciting features, such as Path Experiment for testing content across multiple channels, Unified Conversations with SMS for two-way interactions, and advanced tools like Einstein Engagement Frequency and Scoring. It also includes Rules-Based Dynamic Content and Opportunity Influence, a more sophisticated take on Campaign Influence, set to launch with the Winter ‘25 release.

Earlier this year, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition caught attention as the first version of Marketing Cloud built directly on the Salesforce platform. Both Growth and Advanced Editions are built on Data Cloud, which mentioned above is the essential engine to driving data flow between Salesforce Orgs. 

We’re also going to see Agentforce make waves within Marketing Cloud—just like the rest of Salesforce’s suite of solutions. Referred to as 'Agentforce in every app,' there’s potential to build Campaign Agents. These agents can develop a campaign brief, create a campaign record and related records, utilize data from your Data Cloud instance, and follow your brand guidelines. Agentforce is going to completely revolutionize the way work is done by enhancing efficiency. 

Dreamforce 2024 Announcement #5: Salesforce Ventures $1 Billion AI Investment

Salesforce Ventures has expanded its AI investments to $1 billion, reinforcing its dedication to driving AI innovation across industries, especially within financial services. This significant fund aims to accelerate the development of AI tools designed to enhance decision-making, optimize processes, and elevate customer experiences.

Salesforce has long been a leader in building an ecosystem of consulting and ISV partners that create complementary solutions to extend Salesforce products and accelerate time to value—particularly in financial services. This is especially true for AI innovations. With AgentForce, Salesforce partners are now uniquely positioned to generate AI-driven value for their customers.

In the financial services sector, the call to action is around ideating business use cases and designing solutions with Salesforce Einstein, Agentforce, Data Cloud, and industry-specific solutions. The new AI investment fund will provide additional momentum to an already successful strategy, fostering a faster co-development of solutions. As a strategic Salesforce Financial Services partner, our customers can expect a more programmatic approach to incubating and accelerating time-to-market for use case-driven solutions with broad industry applications.