Salesforce Inc. joined the steady drum beat of AI news Thursday with a bang.
The company unveiled Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents to help employees answer customer service inquiries, qualify sales leads and optimize marketing campaigns, as part of its heaviest AI push to date. And Salesforce pointedly contrasted its platform approach with copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests that, the company contends, struggle with complex or multi-step tasks.
“All [types of] changes are going on in the industry, and with customers” as the AI revolution unfolds, Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff said remotely during a press conference in San Francisco. “Coming out of Dreamforce (Salesforce’s annual conference next week), we will have transformed our customers… We’re about to enter this third wave of AI with agents.”
“This is what AI is supposed to be,” Benioff added, pointing to “higher, more accurate” AI through a digital platform that includes Salesforce’s data cloud.
Benioff, who has been on the road meeting with customers the past few months, said he has sensed their frustration over huge investments in AI that have not paid off yet.
Early adopters of Salesforce’s new technology, who include OpenTable, Saks Global and Wiley, vouched for immediate marked improvement in customer engagement and operational efficiency.
Salesforce’s play is simple: Citing internal research, it found 41% of employee time is spent on repetitive, low-impact work, and 65% of desk workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic.
“We’re going from content generation and analysis to automating actions,” Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, said in a statement. “In the generative phase, you might ask a copilot to write an email for you to a customer. In the agentic phase, you can ask a harder question: ‘What should I do with all of my customers?’ Maybe it’s email, maybe it’s picking up the phone and calling, maybe it’s sending a text message. That’s really what agents can do: They can take a higher order question, break it down into a series of steps, and then execute each of those steps.”
This is the competitive edge Salesforce hopes to take advantage of in a week bookended by AI news. A scrum of several bold-faced vendors — Apple Inc., Oracle Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. — made their AI plays as they jockey for position in the fast-paced AI race and against the backdrop of a major AI conference in San Francisco. They’re also speaking to investors and developers about where they stand, nearly two years after the debut of ChatGPT.
“We’re reaching a stage of production use and development where AI is reaching customers,” Operant AI CEO Vrajesh Bhavsar said in an interview. The security company recently raised $10 million in funding. “And the market has to address investors and developers with what they are offering.”
The AI product blitz comes as companies refine their AI budgets amid concerns over data security, overall budgets and reliability. Just 63% of companies said they plan to increase AI investments this year, down from 93% in 2023, according to Lucidworks’ 2024 report.
Upping the competitive ante, Benioff texted this message to Techstrong.ai: “[A report] from Gartner highlights significant concerns and risks associated with Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI-driven tool designed to enhance productivity within the Microsoft 365 suite.” He pointed to “substantial threats” that can undermine a company’s data security, governance and operational integrity.
The banter and bluster of AI news underscores the stage at which the technology rests after years of speculation and anticipation, say longtime industry observers. Coveo CEO Louis Tetu refers to the current climate as “show me” among flustered customers.
“We know AI has been the dream for decades, but hasn’t begun to become a reality until the last couple of years,” said Scott Lengel, a longtime Microsoft Corp. executive and former chief technology officer who recently launched AdventureGenie, an AI-powered road trip planner. “A lot of folks have been a little bit on edge, leery. Is it [Peanuts’] Lucy and the football again? A couple of players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google) in the last 12 months have proven it is real, and not so scary after all.”
“This is a tipping point, a major revolution, that is pretty ubiquitous at this point,” Lengel said in an interview. “You can’t live without it. If you’re not in, you’re legacy, and you’re not trying.”
