On the surface, Agentforce’s numbers keep getting bigger and better. With over 29,000 paid deals, over $1B in AI revenue, and plastered over nearly every promotional bit of material Salesforce has owned in the last two years, Salesforce has worked hard to prove the product’s value.
It does appear to be getting into curious hands too. According to a survey conducted by investment bank and financial services company Oppenheimer, nearly 90% have either tested or deployed Agentforce, but nearly half are still testing or running pilots. Full adoption is still not on the cards, and the question now is: when will it be?
Agentforce Has Much More Left to Prove
Oppenheimer, which has conducted interviews with Salesforce customers at Dreamforce since 2012, took the conference again this year to determine business conditions, demand, and trends affecting the company’s fundamentals over the next 12 to 18 months.
This time around, 85% of surveyed customers said they have either tested or deployed Agentforce. However, half are still in pilot mode – a world away from the potential of multiplayer agents or agentic teams that we have been hearing about from the CRM giant.
Not only that, but according to respondents, around 40% of the data that goes through Agentforce is handled by a third-party provider rather than Data 360. Salesforce has made it clear that the products work best when they work together, but factors like cost, cohesion, technical debt, or messy data could actively be preventing many customers from choosing this route.
“In our view, Agentforce has the potential to drive meaningful installed-base upside and growth acceleration for Salesforce, but production scale and adoption are lagging,” said Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz in a note to clients. “Nearly half [of respondents] remain in the pilot or testing stage, leaving the pace of production adoption and monetization uncertain.”
Where Does Agentforce Now Sit in Salesforce’s AI Portfolio?
Although Agentforce was released just short of two years ago, it has grown from the latest and greatest product in Salesforce’s AI product portfolio to one that appears to be quietly overshadowed by the company’s newfound favorite toys.
Even six months ago, you couldn’t attend Salesforce events or see any Salesforce marketing without seeing mention of Agentforce. Now, the company’s significant partnership with Anthropic has meant that tools like Claudeforce have been all the rage, as well as the new agentic layer SIforce, which used to be AIforce and Headless 360.
Salesforce is now facing a unique situation involving customers who are on board with AI but not quite yet on board with its products and an AI portfolio that is beginning to feel increasingly more disconnected and messy. The renaming and rebranding add another layer of confusion, and although a company as large as Salesforce has to constantly release the latest and greatest piece of AI technology, there’s no denying the large subset of customers left in the dust.
Final Thoughts
Agentforce clearly isn’t short on interest – the real test now is whether Salesforce can turn a crowd of people who are just curious into production deployments before its attention drifts to the next new product.
Until the company gives customers a clearer, more cohesive AI story, the gap between Agentforce’s headline numbers and its real-world adoption is unlikely to close anytime soon.
