It is that time of the year, when Salesforce thought leaders, industry pioneers, and thousands of our peers converge at one place, for week to share, network and have loads of fun.

My Blog is an attempt to record my experience, of all 4 days when I was @ Dreamforce 2016

Where to Sleep:

While it is exciting to be at Dreamforce, finding a place to sleep is not cheap.

You have to book hotels well over 6 months to find a place to stay close to the event.

We booked a place near the airport, which was like 10 miles from the event. It had free breakfast, a fairly large bath, free parking. But then the place is like an industrial town, with train tracks passing in between the hotel buildings and only Denny's as a place to eat.

It was just about OK. For the money definitely not worth it.

Day 1:

It was another great start to an amazing collection of speakers, companies and experts. Day 1 was productive and filled with many amazing moments!

Session - Free ideas from within:

We Started off with a wonderful session from Scott Catherall, Director, CRM Systems, ITS, City of Hope on how to build an effective intranet for employees.

The session was focused on how companies were using the Salesforce platform to harness the power of social and mobile to enable employees to be engaged and productive, and untap the knowledge and expertise trapped in technology silos.

Dreamtalk: The Age of the Consumer and More Intelligent AI:

I had a lot of expectation from this session, but it turned out to be very boring. It did have some informative pieces like:

Structure
Culture
Metrics - you cant manage when u cant measure.
Processes

But overall, it was not something I was looking forward too.

Dreampitch:

A Shark Tank" style pitching event involving billionaire investors Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca to this year's Dreamforce, it was a huge blockbuster.

There were three lucky startups a chance to pitch in front of Cuban, Will I am and Sacca. Whoever won, would have got an actual investment from Salesforce Ventures, that can go up to $150,000 in total.

The contestants Claire, CRM Market and Appinium, were grilled by the judges in front of thousands of people at a conference.

Claire was a clear winner, with very clear concise pitch, to the point answers, and a wonderful chatbot based product testing software.

Trailhead:

Trailhead was back, and bigger than ever. Salesforce offered admins, users and developers the opportunity to learn and grow in a fun and interactive way through their Salesforce Trailhead learning community. The Trailhead Zone had a camping theme and we were amongst one of the lucky few with a coveted Trailblazer hoodie, tshirt, socks and soft toy :).

It was hard work, to go around the trails, and carefully listen to each of the booths. But knowledge was in abundance, and if you had a good sleep, you can absorb a lot of useful information.

Day 2:

Session - Smart Cities:

Quite an interesting day, and to kick off, we attended a session on smart cities. SFO was moving into the digital age, and it was great to see the municipal government and the private sector take part in this transformation.

Interesting to hear about Generation changers - such as Salesforce/Uber, who do changes that are temporary and will be disrupted by someone else or by the company itself.

While the Civilization changes is a permanent change, and that is like a infrastructure change, like building a bridge.

*Interesting Metrics: 15% of Adults in US do not have internet.

Session - Health Cloud:

Salesforce Health Cloud is the product for the moment. For me it was really inspiring to see the product mature to what it is today. The product demo presented a connected patient experience, while still having its core functionalities, as:

Patient Profiles
Timeline Views
Tasks
Notification/Alerts

Keynote: Be a Customer Trailblazer" with Marc Benioff & Special Guests

Marc Benioff’s keynote address focused on the future of CRM and, more specifically, AI. With the introduction of Einstein, Salesforce plans to mainstream AI to give companies their “very own data scientist.” When AI is incorporated into the Salesforce platform, sales teams from companies of all sizes can gain real-time insights into prospect data and behavior.

Day 3:

Keynote: Salesforce Einstein Keynote: AI for Everyone

Every Dreamforce conference inevitably introduces a new technology. Introduction is too soft a word – the full power of Salesforce’s marketing engine comes into play. This year’s featured technology is Salesforce Einstein – artificial intelligence andmachine learning. It’s a combination of existing technologies and a number of companies that Salesforce has purchased during the last year or two. I saw the keynotes and asked a lot of questions. I’m not sure exactly what they have, when they’ll have it and how much it will cost (except that at first most of it will be expensive). But their vision – to let ordinary people use machine learning and AI without being or hiring a data scientist, is pretty incredible, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Session: Healthwise

I stumbled upon this session, it was Healthwise for Care Coordination .

Healthwise, is a workflow that allows care teams to share relevant videos and topics, follow-up on unopened materials, and empowers the patient to be more involved.

Day 4:

I could only attend the morning sessions, most of them on lightning.

Lightning Readiness
Lightning Design System
Lightning Components
Lightning Experience

Key Takeaways :

ITS OVERWHELMING !!!

Get struck by Lightning. Transitioning over to Lightning might be something to really start considering. While the newest version of Salesforce’s platform is still being updated.

Einstein. The presentation of what Einstein can accomplish was amazing. Even though it seems a little too good to be true, its exciting to see how “everyone can get their own data scientist” with pre-written emails, competitor guessing, predictive lead scoring, and more.