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 complete 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 is most likely the largest revolution, the largest transition in know-how I’ve ever skilled in my profession,” mentioned Parker Harris, Salesforce’s co-founder and chief know-how officer, throughout a current press briefing. “Sooner or later, 40% of the work within the Fortune 1000 might be going to be completed by AI, and it is 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 12 months 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 current 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 huge. Whereas firms 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 accordance with current MIT analysis that Salesforce executives cited extensively.
“Prospects have invested loads in AI, however they are 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 isn’t due to lack of intent. Individuals need to do that. Everyone understands the ability of the know-how. However why is it so laborious?”
The reply, in accordance with Tallapragada, is that AI instruments stay disconnected from enterprise workflows, knowledge, and governance methods. “You are writing prompts, prompts, you are getting pissed off 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 knowledge 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 important 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 circumstances, and knowledge insights will floor conversationally fairly than via varieties and dashboards.
“Think about that you just perhaps do not log into Salesforce, you do not see Salesforce, however it’s there. It is coming to you in Slack, as a result of that is the place you are 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 very rebuilt Slackbot that acts as a private AI companion. The corporate can also be launching “Channel Professional,” an always-on agent that gives instantaneous solutions from channel conversations.
To allow third-party AI instruments to entry Slack’s conversational knowledge, 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 reside 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 “reaching tens of hundreds of shoppers which have it put in in 120 days or much less.”
Voice and IT service take purpose 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 methods into pure conversations that may replace CRM data, 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 vice chairman for IT and HR Service, positioned the product as a basic reimagining of worker assist.
“Legacy IT service administration could be very portals, varieties, tickets centered, handbook course of,” Sudhakar mentioned. “What we had a number of key tenets: dialog first and agent first, actually centered on having a conversational expertise for the folks requesting the assist and for the folks offering the assist.”
The IT Service platform contains what Salesforce describes as 25+ specialised brokers and 100+ pre-built workflows and connectors that may deal with all the things from password resets to complicated incident administration.
Early clients report dramatic effectivity positive aspects
Buyer outcomes recommend the method is gaining traction. Reddit diminished common assist decision time from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes — an 84% enchancment — whereas deflecting 46% of circumstances totally to AI brokers. “This effectivity has allowed us to supply on-demand assist for complicated duties and enhance 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, diminished 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 through the crucial 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 revealed at assist.salesforce.com exhibiting what number of brokers reply versus escalating to people.
Much more considerably, Salesforce has deployed AI-powered gross sales growth representatives to comply with up on leads that will beforehand have gone uncontacted resulting from value constraints. “Now, Agentforce has an SDR which is doing hundreds of leads following up,” Tallapragada defined. The corporate additionally elevated proactive buyer outreach by 40% by shifting employees from reactive assist.
The belief layer drawback enterprises cannot 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 conduct at scale.
“It is best to consider an agent as a human. Digital labor. It is advisable 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 observe each message, which is nice till 1,000, 3,000,” Tallapragada mentioned. “After getting 1,000,000 chats, there isn’t any human, we can’t do it.”
The platform now contains “Agentforce Grid” for looking throughout hundreds of thousands of conversations to determine and repair problematic patterns. The corporate additionally launched Agent Script, a brand new scripting language that enables builders to outline exact guardrails and deterministic controls for agent conduct.
Knowledge infrastructure will get a significant improve
Underlying the agent capabilities is important infrastructure funding. Salesforce’s Knowledge 360 contains “Clever Context,” which routinely extracts structured data from unstructured content material like PDFs, diagrams, and flowcharts utilizing what the corporate describes as “AI-powered unstructured knowledge pipelines.”
The corporate can also be collaborating with Databricks, dbt Labs, and Snowflake on the “Common Semantic Interchange,” an try and standardize how totally different platforms outline enterprise metrics. The pending $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, anticipated to shut quickly, will develop 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 comparable methods. Microsoft has embedded Copilot throughout its product line, Google provides 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 current releases, Tallapragada emphasised that clients will use a number of AI instruments concurrently. “More often than not I am seeing they’re utilizing OpenAI, they’re utilizing Gemini, they’re utilizing Anthropic, similar to Salesforce, we use all three,” he mentioned.
The actual differentiation, executives argued, lies not within the AI fashions however within the integration with enterprise processes and knowledge. 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 simple as shopping for a ebook on Amazon.com. We’re doing that very same factor. We need to make agentic AI as simple 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 clients and a million Slack clients, the 12,000 Agentforce deployments symbolize roughly 8% penetration — sturdy for a one-year-old product line, however hardly ubiquitous.
The corporate’s inventory, down roughly 28% 12 months thus far with a Relative Energy ranking of simply 15, suggests traders stay skeptical. This week’s Dreamforce demonstrations — and the months of buyer deployments that comply with — will start to supply solutions as to whether 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.
