Marc Benioff’s agentic AI gambit is paying dividends

When Marc Benioff cut the ribbon on Salesforce’s agentic AI strategy at the company’s Dreamforce conference last year, the announcement marked what he described as the next step in the evolution of the technology.

Clunky AI assistants, glorified chatbots, and repackaged solutions with a sprinkling of AI were last year’s news – the future for enterprise efficiency was an army of automated, self-sufficient bots picking up the slack for human workers.

So far, it seems his gambit paid off. In the months following the announcement a host of industry competitors and tech sector heavyweights jumped on the bandwagon, and at this point you can’t go a week without a new agentic AI product announcement.

Salesforce struck an early lead with its Agentforce service, and since then agentic AI has dominated the CRM giant’s messaging – from customer service and sales to frontline trade workers, its agents are everywhere.

The approach here isn’t a slapdash bombardment of agents akin to the early days of the generative AI boom where assistants were flying out the traps. The company is investing heavily in the underlying infrastructure which supports this.

In recent weeks the company announced the acquisition of Informatica, its largest since Slack in 2021. Informatica will, as Salesforce points out, bring a broad data catalog, new integration capabilities, and governance, quality, and privacy controls aimed at underpinning the Agentforce service.

Combined with MuleSoft, another data integration specialist in the portfolio, and Tableau, its data analytics and visualization platform, the firm’s solutions ecosystem is all centered around facilitating Agentforce.

Even agentic integration with Slack is ramping up, with CPO Rob Seaman noting that it’s now the “cockpit” for orchestrating AI agents across its solutions estate.

Simply put, Salesforce is putting in the legwork to frame itself as a one-stop shop for agentic AI services, and it’s working.

Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UK, told assembled media at the Agentforce World Tour event in London this week that enterprise interest in AI is soaring.

“I’ve got a very, very strong C-suite agenda,” she said. “Honestly, the strongest I’ver ever seen in my career. But at the same time a strong board pull, I’ve never seen that. I’ve never had to host a board alongside a C-suite or exec team in the same briefing session.

“We’ve been doing that systematically on AI at least for about 18 months now. That tells us something.”

In response to a later question, Bahrololoumi noted that Salesforce is also putting its money where its mouth is on AI, unlocking marked benefits from its own agents.

“I wasn’t kidding about the benefits we’re seeing at Salesforce. We knew we had to be customer zero, we applied it to our own business.”

The Salesforce UK chief exec said the company explored how agents could be deployed in areas such as sales, service, commerce and marketing. All told, the move paid dividends.

“I remember putting a metric and I thought of being a bit bold, but I estimated between 30 and 65% average call time reduction,” she said. “What I didn’t count on was 85% resolution without human intervention. Only 2% of our conversations that came through Agentforce required human intervention.”

Her keynote address earlier in the day specifically highlighted the fact the company is saving $50 million internally through the use of AI agents, showing it’s not just lip service and marketing jargon.

Agentic use cases are Salesforce’s bread and butter

Internal value is all fine and well, but what about customers actually using the Agentforce service? Again, the picture painted by the CRM giant seems rosy.

At the conference, examples of the service being used in frontline operations were abundant. Capita, for example, has been using Agentforce to streamline recruitment activities and CEO Adolfo Hernandez joined Bahrololoumi on stage to wax lyrical about the benefits of the technology.

These use cases are critical for the company moving forward, as it allows it to show tangible, real-world examples of Agentforce actually being used to unlock value from the technology. This was severely lacking across the industry during the early days when concerns over return on investment (ROI) were commonplace.

Speaking to ITPro, Matt Mullen, analyst at Deep Research, said early examples of Agentforce in action will be vital in broadening the appeal to a wider enterprise audience.

“We are eight months into Agentforce and at the last earnings call, they’ve got 8,000 Agentforce customers signed up, 4,000 of which are paying and 800 are in production,” he explained.

“So there’s a funnel of getting customers actually using the software, and because of the way it’s been paid for, that keeps the cash register ringing.”

Mullen noted that Salesforce has been candid about the short-term impact of the service, with public comments noting that it doesn’t expect to be making any large financial gains this year.

But that’s part of the process for Salesforce. It’s building up a catalog of use cases that will inevitably snowball and deliver long-term value.

“This year for them is about building that flow of customers to the on-ramp and using the platform,” he said. “Key for that is getting the customers to bring use cases that they’re familiar with, or Salesforce enabling them to develop use cases for agents”

This initial customer interest is typically from those with a mature foundation within the Salesforce ecosystem, Mullen added, with examples from firms like Capita, Saks Fifth Avenue, Formula One, and Shark/Ninja making perfect sense.

“I think in the first instance, this first wave is customers who are mature with the rest of the Salesforce stack, using Agentforce to augment those processes with things you can do with AI that you couldn’t do with the previous technology,” he explained.

“But what needs to come behind that are the next wave of people who are building net new processes, who are developing net new sets of tasks to follow behind, to use the praxis demonstrated by the mature customers who come on stage, the customers that come to these [events], they’re the lighthouses,” Mullen added.

“They’re the lighthouses which the next generation, the bulk, the mass of customers will want to follow later on.”