As Salesforce Dreamforce Kicks Off, Company Unbottles ‘Genie’

As Salesforce Dreamforce kicks off today, expect the company to talk up “the most significant change” to the CRM platform “in the company’s history.”

Salesforce’s David Schmaier

That’s the word from David Schmaier, president and chief product officer at Salesforce as he introduced Genie, Salesforce’s new data software underlying all of its Customer 360 solutions.

“It’s the future of real-time personalized experiences,” Schmaier told media on Monday.

The drivers behind Genie’s development, and the implications of its capabilities, he added, are huge.

First, consider how work has changed since the onset of COVID-19. Even though the worst of the pandemic appears to have ended, the virus brought about different models of work — remote and hybrid — that remain intact.

“We live in a very different world,” Schmaier said. “We’re never going back to the way things were.”

What that means is more data coming from more sources. Organizations have to figure out what to do with all that information so they can use it to their advantage.

“The amount of data in the world will double in the next few years,” Schmaier said. “Companies simply can’t keep up.”

Salesforce says organizations have, on average, 976 separate applications. But using Genie, they can summon data from, say, billing systems, IoT devices and websites as they type, “so you truly have a single view of the customer,” said Schmaier. Think about what that means for sales, marketing or customer service.

“The cost of not keeping up could be the loss of a customer with a high lifetime value, a meaningful drop in customer satisfaction, or a poor review on social media,” said Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce.

Genie addresses those challenges. And it’s built to work fast.

“Milliseconds matter in the new digital world we…