Salesforce CEO wants to “break the hypnosis coming from vendors” on AI

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wants enterprises to ignore the culture of AI “hypnosis” created by major industry vendors over the last two years.

During a briefing with assembled media at Dreamforce 2024, Benioff hit out at Microsoft in particular, suggesting that it, along with industry competitors, have over-hyped the capabilities of AI assistants, or ‘copilots’.

Following a scathing comparison between Microsoft Copilot and the now defunct Microsoft ‘Clippy’ tool, the Salesforce CEO said recurring claims around the potential promise of generative AI have fallen flat.

“There’s a lot of narratives out there from vendors, and a lot of it is not true,” he told journalists.

“‘I think one question is, you’ve deployed copilots, you’ve trained and retrained your models, two three hundred billion dollars invested in the industry so far in these AI platforms, but how much productivity increases are you getting?”

Benioff suggested that the current trends in AI equate to a ‘DIY’ approach, a comment that echoed previous claims during his opening keynote address on the day.

Meanwhile, Salesforce’s position on the matter is that their new approach will essentially be the gold standard in AI innovation moving forward.

Central to this is the launch of AgentForce, which enables enterprises to create customizable, autonomous AI agents capable of acting independently to support roles spanning a range of business functions.

The launch of this new service dominated the opening keynote session, with Benioff and a host of senior executives providing users with in-depth previews of the capabilities AgentForce will provide.

This includes automated customer service interactions and the ability to essentially allow users to step back and let agents take the reins in a range of circumstances.

“That’s our gambit that we’re running here at the show,” Benioff told journalists.

“It’s this idea that we have a different approach, the salesforce platform, we have all of our customer touchpoints, we have our AI, our AgentForce platform, and now we’re deploying it with customers.”

Notably, early pilot schemes for AgentForce have delivered promising results for customers, with the keynote showcasing practical examples of the service in action with top clients including Saks 5th Avenue.

Salesforce is capitalizing on the next evolutionary step

Crucially, Salesforce appears to be targeting an early lead in what some industry figures believe is the next step on the evolutionary path of generative AI.

Enterprises globally have deployed chatbots en-masse in recent years, and copilot assistants have gained significant traction.

But both these require a great degree of oversight and are designed specifically to support human workers, not replace certain activities outright. Benioff touched on this evolution during a pre-briefing last week ahead of Dreamforce, and it’s clear the company is bullish on this new strategy.

Taking a lead in driving adoption of AI agents is a “high wire act”, Benioff admitted during his keynote, but he appeared confident that the impact will be profound.

The company isn’t alone in this push, either. This week Microsoft announced plans to begin developing and rolling out its own autonomous Copilot agents.

Looking ahead, Benioff said Salesforce has bold plans to drive adoption, noting that by the end of the three-day conference it plans to have the “largest deployment of agents” globally.

“By the time we start our next fiscal year, February 1, our goal is to have thousands of customers live on AgentForce,” he said. “Our goal is by the time we get back to Dreamforce next year, to have a billion consumers interacting with agents globally.”