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 really within the agentic AI period, and I believe it's most likely the largest revolution, the largest transition in know-how I've ever skilled in my profession," stated Parker Harris, Salesforce's co-founder and chief know-how officer, throughout a latest press briefing. "Sooner or later, 40% of the work within the Fortune 1000 might be going to be performed 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 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 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 huge. 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, based on latest MIT analysis that Salesforce executives cited extensively.
"Prospects have invested rather a lot in AI, however they're not getting the worth," stated 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 need to do that. Everyone understands the ability of the know-how. However why is it so arduous?"
The reply, based on Tallapragada, is that AI instruments stay disconnected from enterprise workflows, information, and governance programs. "You're writing prompts, prompts, you're getting pissed off as a result of the context will not be there," he stated, describing what he known as a "immediate doom loop."
Salesforce's answer 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 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 instances, and information insights will floor conversationally relatively than by types and dashboards.
"Think about that you simply possibly don't log into Salesforce, you don't see Salesforce, but it surely's there. It's coming to you in Slack, as a result of that's the place you're getting your work performed," 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 also be launching "Channel Skilled," an always-on agent that gives on the spot 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 can reside natively in Slack.
"One of the simplest ways to see the ability of the platform is thru the AI apps and brokers already being constructed," Rob Seaman, a Salesforce government, stated 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 usually accessible, transforms conventional IVR programs 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 elementary reimagining of worker assist.
"Legacy IT service administration could be very portals, types, tickets centered, handbook course of," Sudhakar stated. "What we had just a few key tenets: dialog first and agent first, actually centered on having a conversational expertise for the individuals requesting the assist and for the individuals 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 every little thing from password resets to complicated incident administration.
Early prospects report dramatic effectivity features
Buyer outcomes recommend the method is gaining traction. Reddit lowered common assist decision time from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes — an 84% enchancment — whereas deflecting 46% of instances fully to AI brokers. "This effectivity has allowed us to offer on-demand assist for complicated duties and increase advertiser satisfaction scores by 20%," stated John Thompson, Reddit's VP of gross sales technique and operations, in an announcement.
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 fee in the course of the important 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 attributable to 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 workers from reactive assist.
The belief layer drawback 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.
"You must consider an agent as a human. Digital labor. It is advisable handle efficiency identical to a human. And also you want these audit trails," Tallapragada defined.
The corporate encountered this problem firsthand when its personal agent deployment scaled. "Once we began at Agentforce at Salesforce, we might monitor each message, which is nice till 1,000, 3,000," Tallapragada stated. "After you have 1,000,000 chats, there's no human, we can not do it."
The platform now contains "Agentforce Grid" for looking out throughout thousands and thousands 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 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 information pipelines."
The corporate can also be collaborating with Databricks, dbt Labs, and Snowflake on the "Common Semantic Interchange," an try to 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 presents agent capabilities by 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, identical to Salesforce, we use all three," he stated.
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 stated, let's make Salesforce automation as simple as shopping for a e-book on Amazon.com. We're doing that very same factor. We need to make agentic AI as simple as shopping for a e-book 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 characterize roughly 8% penetration — sturdy for a one-year-old product line, however hardly ubiquitous.
The corporate's inventory, down roughly 28% 12 months so far with a Relative Power ranking 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.
