I was one of four Desyniteers that made the trek from Bristol to Zaragoza for the dreamOlé 2025 Salesforce Community Conference; our Spanish colleague Julio Fernandez was also in situ as one of the event organisers and handling his role as master of ceremonies with aplomb.
After a welcome from the organizers, the day began with an opening keynote from Ananya Jha, Senior Project Manager for the Agentforce for Developers product. The theme of the keynote was “Building on Salesforce with AI”, and consisted of a whistle-stop tour of new features for developers that tie in with Agentforce, Salesforce’s heavily promoted AI platform.
Some of the features covered included:
Salesforce is investing heavily in the area of AI-bolstered development, and it feels like they are genuinely trying to innovate and reimagine the developer experience in the age of AI. Unfortunately, the demos were light on detail and glossed over the fact that many of the features are not yet available.
My experiences with Agentforce for Developers suggest that it has some way to go to catch up with products like GitHub CoPilot. Salesforce will need to find a convincing story to get developers to switch from services they are already familiar with at this point, so watch this space.
This year, for the first time, dreamOlé were running an Agentforce Certification Bootcamp and Agentforce Hands-on workshop alongside the usual presentation program.
I gave these a miss, as there was a wide variety of talks to attend, and I love the unexpected insights that come from community presentations, but they seemed very popular and I’m sure we’ll see more of this at conferences in the future.
My colleague Angus Brown had a full room for his talk “Awful user experiences (and how to avoid them)”. It’s always good to be reminded that not everybody loves the Salesforce platform, and Angus had crowd-sourced a number of compelling use cases from the Bristol Salesforce Admin Group and the wider community which suggested that we all need to be more cognizant of this.
Fabien Taillon is a familiar face on the Salesforce conference circuit, and he led an audience of devs through his talk “Bring data to your LWC without Apex using the GraphQL Wire Adapter” with conviction.
GraphQL has not been a major part of Salesforce development until very recently, and Fabien made a convincing argument that it could remove the need for a lot of boilerplate Apex code and speed up the development process.
It does require a bit of a change in mindset, and some reasonably complicated syntax, so we’ll all need to level up a bit to use it though.
My final talk of the day was “Integrate Agentforce with third party systems” from Salesforce Developer Advocate Philippe Ozil. This talk covered some pretty deep technical content in a short period, but definitely was good for whetting the appetite for upcoming features like Apex REST Actions and External Service Agent Actions.
You could think of these features as click-based shortcuts to building integrations: they start with importing Open API specifications (a sort of technical description of the behaviour and expectations of an external service), which generates Web Service Actions to rapidly implement communication between Agentforce and systems beyond Salesforce.
(If you’ve ever had to import enterprise WSDL specifications to access SOAP APIs from Apex these concepts will be pretty familiar).
Philippe gave the example of an organisation using both Salesforce and an external billing platform to demonstrate the benefits of this – showing that a customer can keep interacting with a Service Agent even when their support issue requires details and functionality that are only available in the billing system.
It’s difficult to judge unreleased functionality; the devil is always in the details, and there weren’t enough of those to convince me I would be able to use these features to replace the code that I would normally write myself. We’ll have to wait and see!
And speaking of whetting the appetite, I can’t finish without a mention of the fantastic variety of food and drinks that were on offer during the lunch break and after party, and the warm, welcoming atmosphere throughout the day.
Communal eating, conviviality, and friendliness are a huge part of Spanish culture, and it was great to see that reflected at dreamOlé. If you haven’t been to this conference before, it is well worth a visit.
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