For me this was happily, a nice “mob handed” conference, harking back very much to the old pre pandemic style, where I knew multiple people and met with several groups during the day and the first one in a while where multiple members of LDC Via have attended. It was three times bigger than last year and packed with content.
This was another Excel centre conference in the same area as the AWS, Snowflake and Pokémon world championships, of all the recent conferences presented in this same space, this was by far the best laid out, very definitely a marketing conference, the whole Trailhead theme they’ve been running for a number of years, really makes the layout and the walking of the main showroom, a far more pleasant adventure than is normal.
One thing that was of note was that there were far less product venders than I would have expected. In fact, between every four to six of the stalls was a pure consultancy which I can tell you from personal experience are quite difficult to man as you don’t have much visually to show.
You could feel the “Sales” in Salesforce in this conference as there was a certain hard push to arrange a sales meeting as soon as possible, So it felt a tiny bit pushy compared to what would be a normal technical product conference. A feeling that was backed up by a number of my larger client contacts stating “Don’t make eye contact with the Vendors”
The technical content was less than I’d normally expect. But as I’ve just come from London’s calling a couple of weeks ago, that is a good pairing to do and they match each other well, however that’s not to say that wasn’t enough to see and do. As one of my colleagues pointed out there was actually too much for a one day conference, you couldn’t visit everything, this was really now a two day conference.
On a personal side I met up with a lot of people and we chewed the fat on projects and deliveries and reviewed the content of the main presentations.
The actual main presentation we’d all gone to see was exceptionally AI driven, far more than any of the other conferences recently, and spun slightly more towards the marketing side than the technical IT side, a number of the slides contained technical terms but with no explanation given so it was obvious who the target audience was.
The Legal “Forward looking Statements” document that was flashed up nearly gave me the giggles.
On the presentation side. they are assuming all your data is in salesforce, and if its not then Mulesoft can fix it, which made one of my eyebrows crawl up my forehead, also they were claiming to have been first with AI with Einstein, which I’m fairly sure IBM might argue with.
On the configuration of the AI, they are moving to the same sort of framework as many of the other vendors such as Microsoft and AWS, so they have caught up on the use of multiple engines, in addition they are using AI for easy template generation that can be linked to actions ,and most pleasantly a whole lay of extra security to stop your data from escaping, which is a massive selling point to me as understanding of AI data is not common knowledge yet.
A particular thank you goes out to Bluewave who had the best after dinner drinks, in which we fixed the world and all things Salesforce while drinking what felt like gallons of Beer 1. So exactly what you’d hope for at the end of a conference.
Conclusion
All in all, A long hard serious conference in the traditional form. A good 12 hours of solid networking, not quite the technical level that I prefer, but that’s because I’m a geek. But from a genuine conference “meet your clients”, “see what’s going on”, “find out what the business needs, and work out what you need to deliver on”, an excellent day.