The new Salesforce office in Dubai – its first in the region – was inaugurated in the heart of Dubai Internet City recently. The opening of this dedicated office building is a continued indication of the global AI CRM giant’s focus on the UAE as a key hub of rapid growth.
“It is a foundation that will help us to accelerate the growth [in the region],” said Thierry Nicault, Area Vice President and General Manager, Salesforce Middle East. “First, we'll be able to accelerate the internal collaboration, because our team is growing. Second, it will help us to be closer to our customers, which means more workshops, more innovation, ideation, and discussions. It will help us to accelerate almost every customer engagement that we have.”
The inauguration was attended by Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for AI, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, Malek Al Malek, Chairman of TECOM Group, and Abdulla Belhoul, CEO of TECOM Group, and the bright and airy office was packed to the brim with company executives, partners and customers.
Agentforce
The big opening comes just two weeks after Dreamforce, the company’s annual flagship event, at which its latest innovation, Agentforce was unveiled. Agentforce is a groundbreaking new tool that allows corporations to build and customise their own autonomous AI agents that can then provide 24/7 support and engagement for customers, all without writing their own code.
At the Dreamforce conference alone, 10,000 agents were created by attending companies, with an agent created by major retailer Saks Fifth Avenue being deployed for customers in just two weeks, according to Nicault.
“It was for customer support services, and they have never seen that before. This type of technology usually takes years to develop, and months to test at the minimum,” he said. “It shows the speed at which we can help customers jump into a new technology and roll it out as simply and as quickly as possible, while at the same time keeping it very secure, without the problems that we can see today with AI, such as toxicity, hallucination or bias.”
Journey in the UAE
Salesforce has a strong history of delivering on this promise in the UAE. Although the company has physically opened offices here only now, its relationships with major organisations such as the TECOM group and DIFC stretch back over the past decades and have been integral part of its growth journey.
“We were an early adopter, back in 2009, fast forward to today, and I can tell you we use it in a very complex way,” said Ammar Al Malik, Executive Vice President of Commercial at TECOM Group, and Managing Director of Dubai Internet City. “Now, if you go to our platform, we extend 200 services on behalf of many government-related entities, and all these complexities couldn't be done without Salesforce.”
And the company’s growth continues unabated. Less than a year ago, Hyperforce, Salesforce’s secure cloud platform built in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched in the UAE, and it has now achieved the Dubai Electronic Security Centre’s (DESC) Cloud Service Provider (CSP) security standard, which will allow the company to take on more regulated workloads in the country.
Agentforce, which becomes available in the UAE this month, is already generating considerable excitement among corporations in the region. “Each and every customer has told us – I want to use the competitive advantage of AI as soon as possible in a realistic and pragmatic way,” Nicault said. “But they also want it adapted to their business, their own use cases. So, the discussion that we’re currently having with many customers here is on the main use cases that they'd like to explore, and how we can help them.”
The way forward
This is where the physical presence of Salesforce in Dubai will make all the difference – it will mean that this third-wave AI technology will be put to use in a way that makes most sense for the needs of UAE-based organisations, particularly in customer service and engagement, and sales and marketing. The Salesforce team has already been in talks with corporations, building pilot prototypes rapidly in order to evaluate their value. The problem, if anything, said Nicault, is bandwidth: “Everyone wants to be first!”
But that’s a problem they’re well equipped to deal with. “I'm expecting, with this new office and team here, to be faster to deliver these new technologies to our customers,” he said. “We have helped democratise technology like the cloud, mobile, social, predictive AI and now generative AI, and all these technologies are evolving at the speed of light today,” said Nicault. “Our aim is to be more present, quicker to answer the demand from the market, and go deeper in terms of understanding what business value is needed.”
