Salesforce Inc. and NVIDIA Corp. on Tuesday announced a strategic partnership to develop AI features for large customers, giving them autonomous agent and interactive avatar experiences.
The companies, whose stocks have been heading in different directions the past six months over their AI prospects, said they are developing products to optimize predictive and generative AI workflows through the combination of NVIDIA’s AI platform with the Salesforce Platform and Agentforce, a suite of AI-powered autonomous agents.
Salesforce anticipates advances in user experiences around crisis management in the event of a product recall or service outage; real-time weather impact for travel and logistics for the delivery of goods; and real-time customer support resolution. The companies expect no less than to redefine the enterprise software market, where Salesforce is a distant second to Microsoft.
“Together with NVIDIA, we’re leading the third wave of the AI revolution — moving beyond copilots to humans and intelligent agents working seamlessly to drive customer success,” Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff said in a statement at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. “By combining NVIDIA’s AI platform with Agentforce, we’re supercharging AI performance and creating dynamic digital avatars, delivering more engaging, intelligent and immersive customer experiences than ever before.”
Benioff, who introduced Agentforce last week in what he called a “hard pivot” and joked that Salesforce should be renamed Agentforce, believes agentic AI will provide new insights and improved productivity across sales, service, marketing and IT teams using Salesforce CRM for customer data.
“In the future, every company, every job will be enhanced by a wide range of AI agents — assistants that will transform how we work,” NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “NVIDIA and Salesforce are bringing together our technologies to accelerate the development of AI agents for companies to supercharge their productivity.”
In addition to advanced AI capabilities, the companies said the partnership will enhance AI capabilities by accelerating processing in Salesforce Data Cloud.
The question remains if Salesforce can leapfrog AI rivals with its autonomous and NVIDIA accord. The company’s stock has been bruised the past few months under the perception that Salesforce, which started as an anti-software company, has lagged behind Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Adobe Inc., ServiceNow Inc. and others on the AI landscape. Consequently, Salesforce shares and sales projections have temporarily dropped, raising anxieties around the company’s AI long-term strategy.
NVIDIA, conversely, has for the most part been a Wall Street darling with its dominant AI chip business.
During a sit-down chat late Tuesday, Huang said the opportunity for AI agents is “gigantic,” to which Benioff quipped, “I’m hoping so, too.”
“If you create agents, I will power them,” Huang added.
Salesforce expects its belated AI gambit to pay off, as billions of its Agentforce agents are deployed in the coming years, creating new customer and employee experiences on the Salesforce platform. At the same time, the company has steadfastly worked on building and establishing trust with customers over verified data as well as establishing guardrails, according to Rachel Gillum, vice president of ethical and humane use of technology at Salesforce.
“It’s going to be a lot more about welcoming a new team member [when adding an agent],” Huang said. “It’s like onboarding employees… Work is going to be done before we even get to work.”
“Nobody should miss the next decade of tech,” he added. “Whether in how we run companies, the scientific breakthroughs, education.”
