Last week, I was lucky enough to interview Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff about all things Agentforce, which has just been made generally available. It’s safe to say that Benioff is fired up about agentic AI, describing it as “what AI was always meant to be”.
Benioff is regarded as a visionary in the tech industry and is renowned for his leadership, philanthropy, and social responsibility. He founded Salesforce in late 1999 as the first popularized cloud-based CRM and ultimately beat out the tech incumbents to not only win but dominate the cloud CRM market. Could Marc Benioff do the same again with artificial intelligence?
How Agentforce Will Compete In the AI Market
Salesforce ultimately won the market through technological innovations, pioneering the SaaS model, and crafting clever marketing campaigns. This left them with over four times the market share of their nearest competitors. Some of these marketing schemes included staging a fake protest outside a rival’s conference and cleverly having Salesforce hire every taxi at Nice Airport to give IT executives a Salesforce-branded 45-minute pitch on their way to the rival’s event.
In the early 2000s, cloud computing was the technology of the future, and over the next 25 years, Salesforce capitalized on the $1T market to grow into the giant it is today.
Although we’ve been through many technological trends such as mobile, social, big data, digital transformations, and collaboration tools (of which Salesforce has mostly capitalized on), there is nothing quite like AI. It’s being implemented in every industry and company, and many professionals are already using tools such as ChatGPT, which now has over 200 million users per week.
Bloomberg has estimated that generative AI will become a $1.3T market by 2032. This may also double the cloud market revenues to $2T by 2030, due to the huge amount of computing power that is needed. Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company again as a case in point.
Benioff addresses this by saying, “This is a big moment for every company who can become more productive, augment their employees, increase their customer fidelity, improve their overall company KPIs and deliver an agentic layer over their whole company and come up with all kinds of amazing new ideas.“
Generating continued widespread buzz and excitement off the back of an IT conference is no easy feat, but that’s exactly what Salesforce has done. Agentforce is relatable, tangible, and exactly what the Salesforce community has been waiting for.
As we enter this new era of technology, there are reminders that take us back to the early cloud-computing battles of the 2000s – namely, Salesforce going after its competitors, and in the age of AI, it’s Microsoft.
Microsoft Copilot vs. Salesforce Agentforce
There’s no question that Microsoft are in direct competition with Salesforce, as both continue to elevate their AI capabilities. They compete against each other in product categories and have a tight relationship with OpenAI, as we covered last week. Benioff has made various comments about Microsoft Copilot. He mentioned that he tried to use it himself, and believes that it can only be described as “scathing”.
“I just think Microsoft has such done such a disservice to the whole industry with how they’ve positioned AI”, Benioff said, “I even bought it, but then I’m using it and it’s not grounded into any of my data, it doesn’t have any levels of accuracy, it was spilling data for me!”
Could this be the start of another epic rivalry ala the Salesforce versus Oracle battle in the early 2000s? (This photo always makes me laugh as the Salesforce fighter jet is shooting down a version of a real Oracle biplane).
If Salesforce’s ambition is to lead the early stages of B2B AI, then they need to use the same cunning as they did for the cloud computing revolution – a mixture of product and platform innovation, with a dash of Salesforce’s marketing prowess.
There is no doubt that Salesforce knows what they are doing when it comes to marketing. How else do you manage to get people to pay for Salesforce merchandise via the in-person store at Dreamforce?
But with Agentforce only going GA late last week, we will have to wait a couple of quarters at least to see if agents will be implemented as quickly as Benioff suggests.
At Dreamforce, he announced a goal to reach one billion customer-created agents by the end of 2025 – “Well, this is our goal. We’re trying to get every employee at Salesforce to work on this and do nothing else.”
How Has the Ecosystem Reacted to Agentforce?
From the conversations that I’ve had within the ecosystem and the general reaction from the markets, Salesforce seems to have created something that is in line with everyone’s expectations.
They have used their foundational Einstein 1 platform from last year to build upon to create Agentforce, with a familiar interface, creating out-of-the-box agents (Sales/Service), as well as the ability to create custom agents on the platform.
Although the market may be optimistic about agents, there are concerns around existing Salesforce implementations; their complexity and technical debt, data integrity, as well as confusion around how Salesforce will be pricing the agents beyond the $2 cost per conversation metric. But what really matters to Salesforce at this stage is that the Agentforce product is slick, easy to implement, and marketable.
The implementation of most Salesforce products is rarely straightforward, which is due to the highly customizable nature of the platform. But with Agentforce, Salesforce is incentivized to get customers set up as quickly as possible.
With the new consumption-based pricing model, fast implementations aren’t just important – they are vital. If customers don’t like their agents, don’t see ROI, and switch them off, Salesforce won’t get paid.
But the adoption and implementation of agents are already high thanks to workstations at Dreamforce, and the many Agentforce World Tours happening around the world.
Over 10,000 agents were created at Dreamforce, and as Benioff says, “Thousands more at the UK World Tours, the Tokyo World Tour, the Australian World Tour. There’s a New York World Tour coming in November”.
Benioff goes on to say, “Our job is to give you the agents you need easily, quickly, and at a low cost. It just helps us make it easier, faster, and more affordable. We want to keep you as Trailblazers at the tippy top of the technology industry.”
Agentforce as a Freemium
One of the secondary announcements that got slightly swept under the rug was the announcement that agents will become available on a freemium plan via Salesforce Foundations. Previously, Prompt Builder was only available via paid license upgrades, meaning that your average Salesforce professional won’t have any experience with Salesforce’s AI product suite.
This decision ensures professionals can upskill, start experimenting with agents and AI in their org, and therefore evaluate the platform before rolling it out. It will also presumably trigger a wave of user-generated agent content throughout the Salesforce ecosystem.
Marc Benioff credits this decision not to any of his employees, but to Vernon Keenan, a Salesforce analyst who wrote the article on his blog entitled “Why Salesforce Trailblazers Don’t Care About AI”, who was right on the money with the way most of the ecosystem was feeling about this technology.
In my discussions with Salesforce executives at Dreamforce, I learned that the decision to incorporate Agentforce into Foundations was made at the last minute, leading to some stressful late nights to ensure it was ready for the Tuesday keynote. Nonetheless, it’s fantastic that this decision was made.
Benioff emphasized the importance of general feedback throughout our interview: “They should always reach out to me by email – ceo@salesforce.com, to tell me exactly what’s going on. Or directly on X.”
But the most important bit of feedback Salesforce are after is with Agentforce, as it’s a big factor in opening up the platform to the wider community for free. As any business owner, entrepreneur, or product manager will know, feedback is the key for progressing a product.
“Yeah, we want direct feedback and as much as possible”, Benioff told me.
In my opinion, there has been a bit of an outstanding question in regards to AI in the ecosystem and who will be implementing these products. Do we need to hire LLM Experts? Or hire in expensive consultancies with neural network experience?
But in Benioff’s opinion, it will be the Salesforce ecosystem and it’s Trailblazers who will be at the heart of this revolution.
Salesforce had a clever mantra at Dreamforce ‘24 which echoed back to their days of pioneering the Cloud industry, labeled “Don’t DIY your AI”. Essentially, this means you don’t need to hire specialized AI agents, or implement multiple products to amalgamate your data – you can simply buy Salesforce.
This is exactly the same pitch Salesforce and Benioff would have used back in 1999 to IT executives. Don’t worry about server infrastructure, complex installations, or uptime. Just let us do it.
Redefining Salesforce With Agentforce
Benioff told me about a deal he is working on – a $23M deal with a large telecoms company, and $9M of that is Agentforce. “I’m excited about this because I want to make the world’s first agent first telecoms company. I really want to sit with that CEO and transform them as a business and do something incredible for them.”
“I think this will be the role of every member of the ecosystem. Up to this point, we’ve mostly helped to connect businesses to customers in a whole new way – that’s been the mission of the trailblazers. They’ve done it as an incredible community that helps each other along the way.”
He then took a moment to really emphasize the importance of not DIY’ing your AI, taking a slight dig at a certain competitor. “You’re not going to load up a hyperscaler, which is going to plug into some nuclear power plant and hook up some co-pilot that doesn’t work. We’re going to actually do this. Here’s the demo and let’s go.”
I finished the interview by asking if external AI specialists were needed for these implementations. Benioff replied, “This is a Trailblazer first product”.
Salesforce has been through a tough few years after two successful decades of being a darling of Wall Street, pioneering cloud computing, and becoming one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies of all time. However, the wider macroeconomic environment, among other factors, has hampered their growth, dropping from a steady 20-25% quarterly growth to around 10%. This has even spurred activist investors to join their ranks for the first time.
But we are entering the next technology revolution, which many peg as the most significant since the dawn of the internet; Salesforce and Benioff have a chance to completely reinvent themselves.
Whilst there has been a more pessimistic outlook within the Salesforce community in recent times due to layoffs and less demand for professionals, Agentforce is providing renewed optimism, and so far, Salesforce seems to be doing everything right.
Final Thoughts
The battle for AI supremacy will be fierce, and we as the community have a chance to rally behind Salesforce and support the company. Testing Agentforce, creating content, and providing as much feedback as possible.
We are still in the first innings of the AI revolution, and there is a long road to go until we see a winner in the B2B CRM space. But would I place a bet against the man and company who defined the SaaS and Cloud era, created one of the most successful modern software companies, and beat out the incumbents to 23% CRM market share? Probably not.