Dreamforce Agentforce 2024
Odds say you've heard of Dreamforce, the annual three-day convention with over 45,000 attendees to celebrate innovation, to improve customer relationships and to learn about Salesforce's next big thing.
In 2024, that next big thing became so big that Dreamforce became something else: Agentforce.
So let's rewind and try this again.
Agentforce. A three-day convention focused around the biggest shift ever in technology: How humans with AI Agents can work together to drive customer success.
And we had to change our entire event in two weeks.
What? Why? The capabilites of Agentforce sped up in a way that nobody could predict. And two weeks out, what was an ambitious future-looking product announcement inside a bigger story became a very real right now thing and the only thing that mattered. That’s AI for you.
So we had to turn our biggest event upside down in fourteen days to sell a product that was going to revolutionize not just our business, but business in general.
My team and I had to rewrote some of our signage - at least, the ones we could with the time we had remaining - and made Agentforce make sense throughout the entire attendee journey. We had to edit out the buzzwords and lingo out from our partners’ work to make this complicated concept seem understandable. We changed the digital activations so they were focused purely on Agentforce. We had to tweak demo headers and the product narratives they told. We had to quickly tell new origin stories for our new characters. We had to quickly change our demand gen strategy and prep our attendees for Agentforce with new emails, paid media and more. I’m sure there was more we did, but those two weeks felt like a blur.
And, most importantly, we had to make the entire event feel intentional, which honestly was the biggest job we had to tackle. Guess what? Nobody knew the difference.
Our campground transformed into an Agentforce classroom, with product demos, customer success experiences, and helping everyone become an AI Expert.
Our lodges turned into acceleration centers, fast-tracking our sales, service,
marketing, commerce and other industry leaders into Agentforce-driven success stories.
Our launch zones turned into, well, literal launch zones, helping over 10,000 attendees build and deploy their own agents on the spot.
Howard Street was still the fun heartbeat of the entire event, except this year, we had Brandi Carlisle, Vance Joy, the Lumineers and others perform, and athletes like Simone Biles there to inspire. It had nothing to do with Agentforce, but that’s okay. Sometimes, you need an escape.
Agentforce felt even more special with the introduction of our new fleet of characters that we concepted, developed style guides for, expanded and introduced in one month.
If you were an AI newbie, and was shy about asking questions, we made very simple, easy-to-win AI trivia games intended to get everyone up to speed while building up their confidence.
And if you couldn't be there in person, we broadcasted it live.
The press was blown away. Attendees were ecstatic. P!nk flew over a ballpark. Our customers flourished. Robots did robot things.
And to top it all off, we had a five-minute drone show that captivated everyone.
Did we overdo it? Of course we did. That’s what we do. But this is our flagship event, and we’re promoting our newest generational-changing product. How could we not go above and beyond?
Dreamforce, errr, Agentforce was just the beginning. Weeks later, we launched the Agentforce World Tour, bringing the greatness of this three-day event to different cities around the globe, and helping tens of thousands of more customers build and deploy their own Agents in real time.
It was exhasuting. But we loved every minute of it.