The Art of the Actual: Harnessing CRM + Data + AI + Trust to Transform Proofs of Concept into Operational Successes

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Unlock the full potential of CRM + Data + AI + Trust: Dive deep into the transformative power of Salesforce’s ready-to-use capabilities that can take your initial proofs of concept and turn them into full-fledged, operational realities. In this session at DevOps Dreamin’, Charlie Isaacs, CTO for Customer Connection at Salesforce, explores the seamless journey of ideation to execution within the Salesforce ecosystem. Leave with actionable insights and strategic frameworks to elevate your customer engagements and operational efficiency.

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Transcript

Did you guys all, take everybody take a picture of my Slack feed right there? I was probably really excited. It said, Charlie, this was due. What are you were you on an airplane all night last night? Why didn't you finish this task?

You are great.

You know, actually, I've got my own clicker somewhere if I brought it. Here. We could have dueling clickers.

So it's nine forty two. I've been told I've got, like, what, thirty minutes?

And I've got fifty five slides. So how many slides per minute is that? Who's the mathematician in the audience? Hi. I'm Charlie, and I'm gonna talk to you about innovation innovation on Salesforce.

And maybe later, if the presentation goes well, you let me know and I'll do, like, a handstand or a crow wheel or something. Okay.

So my official title is CTO for customer connection, and what I do at Salesforce and hopefully, you'll see that by the end of the presentation. If not, I have failed. By the way, that's my family. They keep me going. They're my life.

And I'm sorry, Salesforce, but they're Salesforce, you're secondary to my family, and they're amazing. And my wife is, like, the best partner in the world to have. So first of all, thank you. I'm very grateful to be here.

I forgot who got me involved with this. Let's see. Who got me suckered into the no. Lots of people invited me here, and I really appreciate it.

But thank you to all the partners, all the customers, and for being you. And I just enjoy speaking at these conferences because I get to see so many people. Okay. So my typical goal at a conference or anywhere is not to be the only old white bald guy in the room.

Okay? That's my goal. So in the next few slides by the way, I have to go one slide per minute, so I'm gonna go really fast. So here's a fun fact.

I I'm gonna show you my background. When I see keynotes from Salesforce people, usually they start with their background and what they like and what how they volunteer and how they volunteer and how they give back and also their journey, their journey to get to Salesforce. So I'm gonna give you that in three minutes or less, and I'm gonna dive into the real meat of the matter. But, I was on Good Morning America.

Oh, hey.

Can you do I stand out in that picture?

So I'm, like, the only white guy in the picture. I think I am the only white guy. But that's me in the upper left hand corner, and it was that's Black Girls Code. That's one of my favorite, organizations to to volunteer for.

It's it's a really great organization. It's been through some transitions, but they're really great. So a couple weeks ago, I was with the United Nations, and we were, do I look different in this picture too? I'm the old only old guy.

I'm not a student. These are all students, by the way. They were hacking in the Hack the Earth hackathon. It was called Reboot the Earth.

And all of you would love how how many of you are developers? I think most of you are developers and at least admins or admin elevur how how do you say that? I can't say that. Admin elevurpers.

But Ruth is your fan, right? You're fans of Ruth. She's your I've got my Ruth water bottle here. See, I I decorate my water bottles with Ruth because she's my my hero. She's my heroine.

But you would love going to attend event attending events like that.

There was my best side right there. I'm there with the veterans. I look different here because I really never never was in the military, but you're gonna hear some military stories about what about my journey.

Hi, Joy.

I won't make a note that you're a little bit late, but that's right.

You're sitting on my badge, by the way. No. Oh, okay. You moved. Okay. Okay. So here's my journey.

In nineteen eighty, I started off at an aerospace company. I showed up to the interview wearing, I think I was actually wearing a sport coat, but I was wearing a boat I was wearing boat shoes, like topsiders, because I was an avid sailor at the time before I had a family and gave all that up. And and I was grateful about that too, by the way.

But I was wearing boat shoes with no socks, and the people that were interviewing me thought that was the funniest thing they ever saw, so they hired me.

So and that was the story of how I was hired at Salesforce. I was hired to start, on April Fool's Day at Salesforce. So, that was a big joke on who knows Alex Dion? Do you remember Alex Dion? He's the one who originally hired me.

Mark evidently sent a message to Alex saying, hey. We have to because Mark and I met at one of these conferences, and he said, hey. You need to hire this guy. And that was the joke back on Mark was I was hired on April Fool's Day. And it happened on a Tuesday.

No. That that was a Monday the Sunday. So they had to hire me on the Tuesday, which was actually the second. So the joke was back on them.

So, I used to install computer equipment, and anybody know where that is on the left hand side? Have you been there? Cheyenne Mountain. Anybody here from Colorado?

That's Cheyenne Mountain, and that is in the basement of the Pentagon. There are many levels of the used to install PDP eleven equipment. By the way, I was at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, last night celebrating with Vint Cerf. Anybody here heard of Vint Cerf?

He invented the Internet, and people that invented things like Ethernet, were there, all these old inventors, and old meaning my age.

They were all there, and it was amazing to see them. But these are, like, running our government, military secrets back in the eighties on these little microcomputers, right, that, well, we consider we probably have more power in our Apple watches, my Garmin watch even, than there. Okay. So I progressed through that. I worked at that company for fifteen years, but in doing so, at night, I got bored.

So we built this online, search engine, which I it turns out I heard at the Computer History Museum there's something called Archie, Archie Search, back in in the late eighties, eighty eight or something.

And we preceded this, with a anybody remember dBase four database?

Okay. DBase four from Ashton Tate. We online this on twelve hundred baud modems. Actually, we started off with three hundred baud modems. So we were the first ever on online search engine. So this is a talk about innovation.

You take a bunch of old stuff and repurpose it. Right? So that's basically it was running in my closet, and we built this company called DirectNet, and we were doing online e commerce too. We were selling hardware and software online.

So during my tenure and my early military career, which was nonmilitary because I was working for an aerospace company, we used to spy on the Russians. So that's what we did. We we we called it it's called Google Earth now.

And and it used to be called imagery or exploitation.

Okay? So we had we dropped film out of the sky. It was part of the, top secret it was called S I talent keyhole program. I don't I don't think this is classified anymore.

I see it on I can you can Google search you can Google search for it on the web. But we used to do, we used to spy on the Russians, and then innovation is all about repurposing things, and repurposing technology, and I the way I see view innovation is taking one piece of technology, combining with another piece of technology, and building a net new synergistic piece of technology. Right? So what do you think you can do with imagery coming from a satellite, especially if you have something called a GO satellite that's tracking weather data?

Well, you can build weather imagery systems. Right? So we built weather for the government, and we dropped that upper left hand shelter. It's a twenty four twenty by forty shelter into the desert for Desert Storm.

Anybody remember Desert Desert Storm?

And we did the weather forecasting, on dust storms and even real weather, so people didn't die trying to land in the desert. Okay. So that was early in my career. And then we re again, repurposing technology.

We said and this is during the defense downturn. This is in the early nineties, late eighties. And the defense was downturning. Defense industry was downturning.

So we thought, what can we do to reinvigorate our company? And we took the technology and commercialized it. Got permission from the government, and we said, hey. Why not build, weather systems for real airports?

So we started off with the Hong Kong airport. That's an example. Okay. So why am I going the wrong way?

There we go. We need to go forward. How did that happen? Wow. Okay. Let's go down.

Okay. So I work for a company called, when Mark was building Mark Marc Benioff was building Sales Cloud and the Cloud who was here in nineteen ninety nine on Salesforce? Anybody?

Look at that. Amazing. Okay. You preceded me because I was at a company called Broad Daylight, and we were building service cloud in the cloud, but it wasn't called service cloud. We called it Broad Daylight. And we competed with a company called RightNow Technology right after they came out, and they became part of Oracle. And then Oracle bought us eventually.

So I like to joke that all of my old technology is locked in a closet at Oracle, and so that was that was that. I keep going the wrong way. Okay. So then I worked for a company called Kana, and we did contact centers. So all all along, it's trying to expand my horizons.

So I wanna tell you some hard lessons learned about innovation and your career and technology.

So that company DirectNet I was talking about, where we were the first search online search engine, we didn't register any of our proprietary technology. Right? We didn't take, commerce, the the idea about commerce, selling things online via a three hundred baud modem, which at the time, the the Internet was non commercialized.

The Internet didn't get fully commercialized, I think, till nineteen ninety three. Right? Nineteen ninety four, you're able to buy stuff or or commercialize it or sell ads online. That was Google.

So the, are you getting a lot of feedback? Is this too high? Okay. Good. It's me.

Commerce and search should have been registered if I were smart back then, because I'd probably be making lots of money. Not that I'm complaining. I'm not complaining. Okay. Auto answer was another technology. Here's another, hard lesson example.

One of those companies I flashed up there, Broad Daylight, we used to do have this technology where you'd send an email in, and it would automatically respond with a knowledge article.

And we first did that in, like, nineteen, ninety six, nineteen ninety seven.

And when I was at Cona, a who here has heard of patent trolls?

Yeah. Okay. Patent trolls are people that they buy bankrupt companies that have technology, and then they take those patents, and they sue other companies for money. And they litigate this in Texas, and, they always win because they the the judges in Texas are paid handily. Oh, I didn't say that out loud, did I? Okay.

So auto answer, I got when I was at Cona, that patent troll came and sued my company, I was CTO for Khana at the time, for my own concept, Auto Answer. And we had to we had to settle with them for two and a half million dollars. So we paid them five hundred thousand dollars, a quarter to, to make them go away because the our attorneys at the time claimed that it would cost four or five million dollars to litigate the case, so we were better off just paying the money. So if you have an idea, send yourself an email.

Register the you don't have to necessarily patent it. Just keep that idea and or like I do, I work for a company that I love and I adore, So everything every idea I come up with, I give it to Salesforce. I work with our patent office, and I I pat my ideas. And sometimes you think, oh, people have done this before, but they'll do if you work with a company that has a patent office or, a group that is a patent attorney or has a patent attorney, they will do the search for you, and you'll be surprised at how many especially when you take one technology, combine it with another technology, and a third technology, and then find a unique way to do it and build it uniquely on your platform that it it's patentable, and you should protect yourself.

And we don't at Salesforce, we don't sue other companies.

We use it for defensive purposes. So if a competitor comes to us and says, hey.

You're using our technology here on this cloud. Then we say, well, good. Well, you're using our technology in these five other clouds, and here are the patents, so they go away. Okay? So it's purely for defensive purposes.

So another hard lesson I learned in my career, and I gotta get to the the meat of my thing before I run out of time, is that I I was fired from Conna for doing the right thing. They wanted me to falsify information.

And at the time, I had two kids going into college. I couldn't afford it, and I could have done very easily falsified the they wanted me to falsify customer sat data for a, financial investor, and I chose not to do that. And they fired me for that, and I had a really rough life for about three to six months.

And guess what? I ended up at Salesforce.

So just when you think you're doing the wrong thing, or the right you could do the wrong thing, You're tempted to do the wrong thing. Do the right thing because it's always the right thing to do. And I'm running out of time, so, like Genesys, I worked I wasn't a cultural fit. You know, be your own authentic self.

Right? Try to work for a company. I know it's hard to do early in your career because you have to grin and bear it, but try to strive to to work for a company where, like, I could do really goofy stuff, and people at Salesforce will laugh. They might I might get called to what we call employee success.

We don't call it human resources. I might get a strange note from employee success saying, Charlie, you know, you really should really rethink the way you said that, and that's great. You know, that's good feedback. But, like, another company, like, I won't mention any names, would not appreciate that as much.

My humor. Okay. So, and the most important this is what I tell kids when I go to colleges, when I go to high schools, when I go to Black Girls Code, don't let anybody tell you you can't do something, right, unless it's illegal. No.

I'm just you know, if if they say that there's a task that can't be done, then you could probably do it. You could find a way to do it eventually.

So, innovation is repurposing.

These are lessons learned from my journey that I just showed you.

Double down and do it anyway, and so we're gonna talk about the art of the actual. So who here has heard that term before, art of the actual?

Because I according to according to ChatGPT, I made that term up.

I like that. Okay. So it was, like, it first arrived in one of my presentations.

So how do we innovate at Salesforce? Well, okay. Here's the guy I was with yesterday, Vint Cerf, inventor of the Internet. But you know what?

My favorite quote from Vint is, engineers turn science fiction into reality. Okay? Isn't that cool? And that's true.

That's what you do. I mean, you're develop I I consider even if you don't consider yourself to be an engineer, if you're a developer, you're an engineer. Okay? You're engineering software.

So, who invented the Apple Watch?

Anybody know? Dick Tracy. Dick Tracy. Right? Okay. Hannah Barbera. Hannah Barbera, created FaceTime.

Flying cars. Again, this is Hannah Barbera. Right?

What's in the lower right hand corner? They're launching, here's an article I just grabbed off the Internet today. Top five coolest flying cars taking off in twenty twenty four. Can you believe that? We're we have flying cars.

And who who invented that?

Some wild stuff that you see in science fiction. Whenever I watch a sci fi movie, I go, you know, I I might be able to build that. Right? You think about that. I wonder to myself, is that or is that idea already taken? It's in a movie, but has anybody really built that?

So we have this guy named Peter Schwartz at our company. Anybody heard of Peter Schwartz? He he helped he consulted on the minority report.

And so user interfaces, remember those user interfaces you saw? And, I think that was the first time those came out. And then, clienteling, which is I call it clienteling. You know, you walk up and they know who you are, like, in the store, and the the, the video banners say, hey, Charlie.

You need to buy more women's underwear, because it saw I was looking I really wasn't. My wife was looking at it on my computer. That's what happened. Okay.

So So this is why I get in trouble with employee success.

So so what if you could be all of you in the room could be the world's best inventor for free.

K. Free beer. You can't read the fine print. It says free Wi Fi, beer from around the world. That's what it says in the small but free beer.

Here you go.

Who here knows how to spin up a dev org? Anybody spun up a dev org? What do you get in a dev org for free? This is how I roll. This is how I do stuff at work. Some customer will come to me and say, Charlie, I've got this wild vision for the future.

And or they'll say, Charlie, tell me my vision. Which should be my which should be my vision for the future? And what I'll do is I'll go cruise around their website. I'll look at their annual report, which they're probably stretching the truth on where they're gonna be in the future.

Right? So I take all those ideas, and I look at their current functionality, I look at what they're running on Salesforce, and then I figure, okay, I've got this world of free stuff. Let me show you the next slide. Here's more more free beer.

I don't know. Did everybody read that slide? What do you have? What do you have in a dev org?

You have sales cloud, service cloud, marketing cloud. And I'm listing, like, some of the key features, right, that you could get for free on a developer developer org. More free beers. You get experience cloud, analytics cloud, Einstein analytics.

You got App Cloud with Lightning Flow. Lightning Flow is my hammer. Everything looks like a nail. So you can take your customer's vision.

You could take your own vision, when you're not working at and if there are any CEOs in the in the room, ignore that I'm saying this. If you're a worker for a company and you're you're going to sleep at night, you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, you could build it. Right? You could build it really quickly, and it doesn't have to be a demo.

It's not a demo because it starts off as a demo, but it's an art of the actual. Because you could take stuff you build on our platform and you can scale it, right, Because you're not building, Figma. Who here uses Figma?

Okay. I I don't like to say I tried Figma. I could build sales on Salesforce faster than I could build Figma.

Right? So I I bring together, I can write a lightning web component, and by the way, I've got a slide on that.

Okay, so I forgot about MuleSoft. How much time do I have? Because we I started late. How much do I have, like, five minutes?

Yeah. Yeah. Ten minutes? Do I have ten minutes?

Five minutes. Okay.

I was gonna give a demo of one of my innovation demos, but okay, so I'm gonna go fast. So what about MuleSoft? Okay, anybody here use MuleSoft at all? Okay, What I'm getting to here is, what about integration of data cloud? You take a component and you drag it on your onto your flow, and you're connected to data cloud.

Anybody here experimenting with data cloud?

Okay. It's near real time now, right? And we're getting faulted for that. Guess what? We have a release now that I just built a demo on that I was gonna give you a demo if I had more time.

It's called, real time data graph. Real time data graph is on near core on Hyperforce and allows you to run-in in true real time. You know, the near real time before was, like, one one minute to three minutes of latency on data cloud. Now we get instantaneous.

You query the data graph, and you can put, events into a time line, vehicle time line, which I'm gonna show you. But so you wanna integrate to something?

MuleSoft, right? This is like one page out of the, what, ten pages on the Anypoint Exchange?

Analyze this for free. This is a evaluation copy of Tableau. Anybody hear use Tableau? Okay, yeah, Tableau's pretty cool.

You can train for free. You can learn for free, right?

So all this free stuff, we give away everything. We're giving it away, Winnebago, whatever. Okay, so how to quick how to code quickly? The all the developers in the room, you're gonna hate me, but I cheat.

I take my code that doesn't work, and, by the way, I'm not gonna have time to show this, but the demo I have is, I'm for three d models, I use Unity, and Unity has c sharp. And I've been programmed in c and, you know, since Kernighan and Richie days. Anybody know what Kernighan and Richie are? You know, the the the bible on c.

So I have bugs all over my code. I take it. I post it to, Einstein code what are we calling it now? Code, Copilot?

I have no idea what we call our Einstein code thing.

I paste it in there and it says, oh, you have an error on line twelve. This is how you fix it. It gives me my code back. Okay?

And don't do that to chat GPT because they'll steal your code. Okay? But if you use Einstein code, code builder, it'll do that. Okay.

So, how do I build an I you you can't read this in the back, but I've been I'm the IoT guy. I run IoT at Salesforce, Internet of Things. And I said in the left hand panel, I say, I have four sensors. I have a weather sensor, a humidity sensor, shock, and, I don't know, whatever, location.

Give me a JSON payload for that. It gives me the JSON payload. I don't have to type in quote temperature quote unquote colon blah blah blah. So I already saved I I don't type very well.

I've already saved, like, fifteen, twenty minutes. Okay. Then I send it back in there, and I say, okay. Given this JSON payload, give me a data we've transformed from MuleSoft that will transform this data and, send it into Salesforce.

Okay. So give me a data we've transformed. That's the middle one. And then I forgot what I did in the last one.

Oh, I said, give me the custom oh, give me a custom object. Right? And send it up through so I use Visual Studio source. Right?

Anybody use that Microsoft tool? Okay. C t I the the CLI? Okay. So submit that, object up in Salesforce.

I've already created my my custom object. So now I've built my IoT, capability in a matter of minutes. I put a flow on top of that, which I can now build.

I can generate flows on Salesforce using Einstein two, but I do it manually usually because it's not ready for prime time. But I didn't say that out loud. Okay. So how do I build a concept? Let's say Marc Benioff comes to you and says, Charlie, I just talked to Cristiano Aman from Qualcomm.

They make the Snapdragon chipset. Anybody heard of Qualcomm? They they make chips?

They used to be in your Apple, iPhone, and then they got into a flight or something. I don't know.

So Qualcomm built this thing called car to cloud, and they connected their concept car up to this car to car to cloud. And Cristiano and Mark were at some party, like, in Thanksgiving, right before Thanksgiving, And Christiana was was boasting to Mark, hey, you're not so cool. I have my own cloud. It's called the Carta Cloud. We call it the Snapdragon Cloud. And Mark says, well, what do you what are you doing about the customer experience?

And Christiana says, I don't know. So then I get this mail from Alex Dion and Mark saying, Charlie, we need to work with Qualcomm.

Their deadline is December thirtieth, final integration at a factory in San Diego, and they wanna be at the CES show live with Salesforce.

And there are other competitors competing with you, So if you're not there by December thirtieth, you're out of luck. Okay.

So there are all the requirements. And so how how do you build this in five weeks? Right?

Well, start date is November twenty eighth. Drive around CS show. Okay. If this were a Trailhead question, what would you say? Okay.

Tell Mark Benioff no. That is not an option. Believe me. That is not an option. You don't tell Mark no. Use Figma to mock stuff up.

No. I don't do that. I built art of the actual. Right? Use the force. Right?

That's what we did. So we we used for the API, which was a shifting SANs API. Don't tweet that. Although, they'll admit it now.

Qualcomm's API was was shifting and rotating about every other day.

How do we do how do we create trouble tickets from a vehicle? How do you have a car that has a error code one twenty three and you wanna notify the contact center and you want the contact center to call the driver and tell him to pull over, otherwise, their car is gonna blow up, how do you tell them that? Well, you use service cloud and you fuel service to identify the right part and the right skill and the right tool to fix that break issue or whatever.

Commerce Cloud, we wanna be able to upsell. We wanna sell them a parking assist package. Right? So we use Commerce Cloud. That was on the platform too. Commerce Cloud is on core.

Data Cloud, personalization. We wanna be able to feed in their mobile phone app and their website clicks and everything else and figure out who it is. And as soon as they log in with their email, we know who it is. We attach it to the vehicle. We have personalization nailed down.

Marketing cloud for the customer journey, every driver's on a customer journey, right? From buying the car to driving the car.

Lightning flow the whole thing was built on lightning flow I'm pushing events in from the vehicle into MuleSoft into Lightning Flow through and we were using at the end there, we're using platform events. We had a Kafka feed going from, from their cloud into MuleSoft. We're pushing in a Kafka feed for the actual actual DTC code, the error messages.

And we were able to do this in a matter of, I say, hours, but it it took days because you have to do for some reason, you have to do testing. I'm not sure why they do that. Okay. For a CES show, why do you need to test you were there.

You saw it in action. That was two years ago, and then we did an upgrade, this year. And then we also used UnityEngine. I was talking about UnityEngine.

We used that for a three d simulator. I keep going the wrong way. The down arrow means up. Okay.

So what I wanna leave you with, because I'm out of time, is would you hop into an airplane knowing that the airplane was being flown by a pilot that had no flight simulator training?

Probably not. Right? They have, what, hundreds of hours of flight simulator training.

So all of us right now are running our businesses without doing what if scenarios, without doing, scenario planning and, simulation of our business. So here's an example of a connected elevator that's a digital twin of an elevator, and you can simulate what if scenarios. What happens if it gets trapped between floors? What happens if there's an error code one twenty three? What how many cases can we handle simultaneously from different airports being I mean, airplane airport airplane. I I just got off the airplane. Can you tell?

Elevators being stuck.

And I was gonna show you a demo, of Acme Motors. There's a, another simulation of a a power station that I did for a customer, and the capacitor fails or the transformer fails, what's gonna happen when the transformer fails? Right? So, my view of the future someone was asking me at the, Computer History Show yesterday, the fifty year anniversary of the Internet.

They asked me, how do I envision the future? I think more of this is gonna happen. I think, every important process and function is going to be simulated.

And some companies and some functions right now are already simulated because you you see these factories they're simulating. I built a Brompton bike factory simulator for our customer, Salesforce customer. So more and more factories are doing that.

Every physical object, aircraft engines are already doing this, equipment, even humans. This is gonna be a digital twin of every organ in your body. Right? They already have a digital twin of a heart that they're experimenting with. And they're three d printing organs that doctors can practice on, right, as digital twins. There is NVIDIA is working on a digital twin of the Earth, so we can figure out how to help help solve, global warming and other issues associate with the environment.

So enterprises in the future are gonna break things repeatedly, while building their future. So I ran out of time, and I don't know. Do I have to get off? Jack?

You wanna see a demo? No. I better get off. I'm running into the next session. So thank you very much.