As 50,000 attendees descend on Salesforce's Dreamforce convention this week, the enterprise software program big is making its most aggressive wager but on synthetic intelligence brokers, positioning itself because the antidote to what it calls an industry-wide "pilot purgatory" the place 95% of enterprise AI tasks by no means attain manufacturing.
The corporate on Monday launched Agentforce 360, a sweeping reimagination of its total product portfolio designed to rework companies into what it calls "agentic enterprises" — organizations the place AI brokers work alongside people to deal with as much as 40% of labor throughout gross sales, service, advertising and marketing, and operations.
"We’re actually within the agentic AI period, and I believe it's in all probability the most important revolution, the most important transition in expertise I've ever skilled in my profession," mentioned Parker Harris, Salesforce's co-founder and chief expertise officer, throughout a latest press briefing. "Sooner or later, 40% of the work within the Fortune 1000 might be going to be completed by AI, and it's going to be people and AI really working collectively."
The announcement comes at a pivotal second for Salesforce, which has deployed greater than 12,000 AI agent implementations over the previous yr whereas constructing what Harris known as a "$7 billion enterprise" round its AI platform. But the launch additionally arrives amid uncommon turbulence, as CEO Marc Benioff faces fierce backlash for latest feedback supporting President Trump and suggesting Nationwide Guard troops ought to patrol San Francisco streets.
Why 95% of enterprise AI tasks by no means launch
The stakes are monumental. Whereas corporations have rushed to experiment with AI following ChatGPT's emergence two years in the past, most enterprise deployments have stalled earlier than reaching manufacturing, in line with latest MIT analysis that Salesforce executives cited extensively.
"Prospects have invested lots in AI, however they're not getting the worth," mentioned Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce's president and chief engineering and buyer success officer. "95% of enterprise AI pilots fail earlier than manufacturing. It's not due to lack of intent. Individuals wish to do that. Everyone understands the ability of the expertise. However why is it so onerous?"
The reply, in line with Tallapragada, is that AI instruments stay disconnected from enterprise workflows, information, and governance techniques. "You're writing prompts, prompts, you're getting annoyed as a result of the context will not be there," he mentioned, describing what he known as a "immediate doom loop."
Salesforce's resolution is a deeply built-in platform connecting what it calls 4 elements: the Agentforce 360 agent platform, Knowledge 360 for unified information entry, Buyer 360 apps containing enterprise logic, and Slack because the "conversational interface" the place people and brokers collaborate.
Slack turns into the entrance door to Salesforce
Maybe essentially the most vital strategic shift is the elevation of Slack — acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for $27.7 billion — as the first interface for Salesforce itself. The corporate is successfully reimagining its conventional Lightning interface round Slack channels, the place gross sales offers, service instances, and information insights will floor conversationally fairly than via varieties and dashboards.
"Think about that you just possibly don't log into Salesforce, you don't see Salesforce, however it's there. It's coming to you in Slack, as a result of that's the place you're getting your work completed," Harris defined.
The technique contains embedding Salesforce's Agentforce brokers for gross sales, IT service, HR service, and analytics straight into Slack, alongside a totally rebuilt Slackbot that acts as a private AI companion. The corporate can be launching "Channel Professional," an always-on agent that gives immediate solutions from channel conversations.
To allow third-party AI instruments to entry Slack's conversational information, Salesforce is releasing a Actual-Time Search API and Mannequin Context Protocol server. Companions together with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Author, Dropbox, Notion, and Cursor are constructing brokers that may stay natively in Slack.
"The easiest way to see the ability of the platform is thru the AI apps and brokers already being constructed," Rob Seaman, a Salesforce government, mentioned throughout a technical briefing, citing examples of startups "attaining tens of 1000’s of shoppers which have it put in in 120 days or much less."
Voice and IT service take intention at new markets
Past Slack integration, Salesforce introduced main expansions into voice-based interactions and worker service. Agentforce Voice, now typically obtainable, transforms conventional IVR techniques into pure conversations that may replace CRM information, set off workflows, and seamlessly hand off to human brokers.
The IT Service providing represents Salesforce's most direct problem to ServiceNow, the market chief. Mudhu Sudhakar, who joined Salesforce two months in the past as senior vp for IT and HR Service, positioned the product as a elementary reimagining of worker help.
"Legacy IT service administration may be very portals, varieties, tickets targeted, handbook course of," Sudhakar mentioned. "What we had just a few key tenets: dialog first and agent first, actually targeted on having a conversational expertise for the folks requesting the help and for the folks offering the help."
The IT Service platform contains what Salesforce describes as 25+ specialised brokers and 100+ pre-built workflows and connectors that may deal with every little thing from password resets to advanced incident administration.
Early prospects report dramatic effectivity features
Buyer outcomes counsel the method is gaining traction. Reddit lowered common help decision time from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes — an 84% enchancment — whereas deflecting 46% of instances solely to AI brokers. "This effectivity has allowed us to offer on-demand assist for advanced duties and increase advertiser satisfaction scores by 20%," mentioned John Thompson, Reddit's VP of gross sales technique and operations, in a press release.
Engine, a journey administration firm, lowered common deal with time by 15%, saving over $2 million yearly. OpenTable resolved 70% of restaurant and diner inquiries autonomously. And 1-800Accountant achieved a 90% case deflection price in the course of the essential tax week interval.
Salesforce's personal inside deployments could also be most telling. Tallapragada's buyer success group now handles 1.8 million AI-powered conversations weekly, with metrics printed at assist.salesforce.com exhibiting what number of brokers reply versus escalating to people.
Much more considerably, Salesforce has deployed AI-powered gross sales improvement representatives to observe up on leads that will beforehand have gone uncontacted on account of price constraints. "Now, Agentforce has an SDR which is doing 1000’s of leads following up," Tallapragada defined. The corporate additionally elevated proactive buyer outreach by 40% by shifting employees from reactive help.
The belief layer downside enterprises can't ignore
Given enterprise issues about AI reliability, Salesforce has invested closely in what it calls the "belief layer" — audit trails, compliance checks, and observability instruments that allow organizations monitor agent habits at scale.
"It is best to consider an agent as a human. Digital labor. You have to handle efficiency similar to a human. And also you want these audit trails," Tallapragada defined.
The corporate encountered this problem firsthand when its personal agent deployment scaled. "After we began at Agentforce at Salesforce, we’d monitor each message, which is nice till 1,000, 3,000," Tallapragada mentioned. "Upon getting one million chats, there's no human, we can’t do it."
The platform now contains "Agentforce Grid" for looking throughout tens of millions of conversations to determine and repair problematic patterns. The corporate additionally launched Agent Script, a brand new scripting language that permits builders to outline exact guardrails and deterministic controls for agent habits.
Knowledge infrastructure will get a serious improve
Underlying the agent capabilities is critical infrastructure funding. Salesforce's Knowledge 360 contains "Clever Context," which robotically extracts structured data from unstructured content material like PDFs, diagrams, and flowcharts utilizing what the corporate describes as "AI-powered unstructured information pipelines."
The corporate can be collaborating with Databricks, dbt Labs, and Snowflake on the "Common Semantic Interchange," an try to standardize how completely different platforms outline enterprise metrics. The pending $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, anticipated to shut quickly, will broaden metadata administration capabilities throughout the enterprise.
The aggressive panorama retains intensifying
Salesforce's aggressive AI agent push comes as nearly each main enterprise software program vendor pursues related methods. Microsoft has embedded Copilot throughout its product line, Google affords agent capabilities via Vertex AI and Gemini, and ServiceNow has launched its personal agentic choices.
When requested how Salesforce's announcement in comparison with OpenAI's latest releases, Tallapragada emphasised that prospects will use a number of AI instruments concurrently. "More often than not I'm seeing they're utilizing OpenAI, they're utilizing Gemini, they're utilizing Anthropic, similar to Salesforce, we use all three," he mentioned.
The true differentiation, executives argued, lies not within the AI fashions however within the integration with enterprise processes and information. Harris framed the competitors in phrases acquainted from Salesforce's founding: "26 years in the past, we simply mentioned, let's make Salesforce automation as straightforward as shopping for a ebook on Amazon.com. We're doing that very same factor. We wish to make agentic AI as straightforward as shopping for a ebook on Amazon."
The corporate's buyer success tales are spectacular however stay a small fraction of its buyer base. With 150,000 Salesforce prospects and a million Slack prospects, the 12,000 Agentforce deployments signify roughly 8% penetration — sturdy for a one-year-old product line, however hardly ubiquitous.
The corporate's inventory, down roughly 28% yr to this point with a Relative Energy score of simply 15, suggests traders stay skeptical. This week's Dreamforce demonstrations — and the months of buyer deployments that observe — will start to offer solutions as to if Salesforce can lastly transfer enterprise AI from pilots to manufacturing at scale, or whether or not the "$7 billion enterprise" stays extra aspiration than actuality.
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