Salesforce presentation at Dreamforce22. A Genie or a Rabbit… where is the hat?

Salesforce introduced Genie at Dreamforce ’22. Bret Taylor, Co-CEO of Salesforce, calls Genie the most significant shift to the Salesforce platform in 20 years. This development illuminates Salesforce’s aspirations in the modern data ecosystem.

The present conditions are remarkably like the early CRM days when Salesforce got its start.

Before Salesforce, there was a large CRM industry. Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel and just about any consulting company or system integrator would build a CRM solution from their kit of tools and templates. These were custom solutions and very expensive. Most of them failed. Many failed spectacularly after years of effort and millions of dollars invested. It is staggering to think of the waste in the wake of those projects. Not only did they require money and people, they also sucked up time like it was the last water in the desert. Time that competitors used to pillage market share.

So, it was no wonder that conditions were favorable when Salesforce made its entrance. Salesforce’s cloud based CRM was cheap by comparison and ready to use right away. Salesforce had one message: you can have CRM now for a fraction of what you have in your budget. The situation was so bleak that customers didn’t even care if Salesforce worked. Their alternative was not working and cost a fortune and was a huge distraction. Salesforce saved the day.

Fast forward twenty years to the modern data warehouse automation sector. For the past three years, I have been watching and pattern matching. The big, specialized vendors like Informatica, Talend, Tibco along with the generalized vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and the consulting shops like Accenture, Deloitte, Tata, and McKinsey will gladly build you a data warehouse. It will be expensive, take forever, and in the end, probably fail .If it takes a long time to build it will be a failure merely because what was needed last year is not what is needed today.

Just Google “data projects fail” and see what you get. Thousands of articles quantifying the depth and the breadth of the waste. Just like the old days in CRM!

Salesforce is now positioning Genie to: “…bring together ALL your customer data into a single source of truth”. And by ALL Salesforce is talking about ALL data sources in a company. And they say their average customer has 976 data sources. So, Salesforce is going to connect to ALL data sources and then do this:

Presentation about Genie at Dreamforce 22.

This sure looks like the data flow diagram every data platform vendor from Matillion to Microsoft uses to describe their data stack. Put it all together and Salesforce is running their old CRM playbook in the data sector.

Detractors will say that no serious data scientist is going to use Salesforce Genie in their serious data project. What about DevOps? (inside joke). I say, let’s just watch what Salesforce does with Genie. It could be CRM all over again.

Genie and the Salesforce GTM Playbook