Microsoft, the world’s largest cloud provider, has taken a commanding lead in the “Agent Wars”, recently announcing that over 160,000 customers have claimed to have built around 400,000 agents.
This development represents a significant advancement towards a future where agents play a pivotal role, highlighting the value that customers recognize in agent technologies and services. Although this news may initially appear to undermine the confidence in other enterprise agent offerings, such as Salesforce and Agentforce, it actually presents numerous positive implications for these companies.
Breaking Down the Numbers
At first glance, 400,000 agents being created is a huge achievement, but it’s important to understand the reality behind the numbers. As of right now, we can’t categorize how functional these agents may be, and many of them might not be ready for deployment yet.
But this proves to be less of a limitation and more of a reflection of an entire ecosystem ready to experiment. Not to mention, even a small success rate out of the 400,000 agents would provide hugely to many businesses.
Even if there was a mere 1% success rate, you are still looking at 4,000 potential agents. Likewise, with something more optimistic like 10%, that’s 40,000.
And this is just the beginning – as agentic AI technology continues to advance and mature, we can expect the success rate of AI agents to climb even higher.
This means a future where AI is seamlessly integrated into every aspect of business, from customer service and marketing to finance and operations. The potential benefits are limitless, and the organizations that embrace AI early on are likely to gain a significant competitive advantage.
How This Impacts Salesforce and Agentforce
The premise of an “Agent War” may suggest to many that this news is negative for Salesforce, who consider Microsoft’s agents as competition to Agentforce. However, this should be seen as a sign of a growing trend and something Salesforce should view as a positive.
It’s no secret that Salesforce are relying heavily on Agentforce and needs their ecosystem to get on board with the product. Acceleration so far has been slow, despite Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claiming that this is the year of Agentforce.
So far, Salesforce claims to currently have 3,000 paying customers and 5,000 customers in total, 2,000 of those, presumably, getting Agentforce on a freemium license through foundations.
Assuming a conservative estimate of one agent per customer, that would put the number of live agents at approximately 3,000.
Microsoft are trumping these numbers by a large margin, but Salesforce must see this as a long-term positive and a potential sign to come for their own ecosystem.
While Microsoft’s advancements intensify competition, they also affirm the market’s potential, offering Salesforce opportunities to innovate and differentiate Agentforce in the evolving AI landscape.
Benioff himself recently made headlines by criticizing the quality of Microsoft’s products, suggesting they aren’t as strong as their market share might imply. While Microsoft may be leading in numbers right now, Benioff’s comments show he believes Salesforce can win on product quality and trust in the long run.
Final Thoughts
The agentic AI landscape is growing rapidly, and it reflects the sentiment that Benioff has been voicing for these past few months. While acceleration and success rate may take some time, we aren’t far off agents being the norm on enterprise platforms.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
