From the lows of employee layoffs and stock price panics to the dizzying highs of Dreamforce ‘24 and the launch of the flagship AI product, Agentforce, this year has truly been a big one for Salesforce.
Here’s a look back at the key takeaways from 2024 in the Salesforce ecosystem…
January: A Bleak Start
CRM stock value, January 2: $256.13
The year started with a similarly bleak theme to the previous one – sweeping layoffs across much of the tech sector.
In January, it was reported that Salesforce would be laying off 700 workers – around 1% of their 70,000 global workforce. This move echoed the previous January’s announcement that the company would be laying off 10% of employees (approx. 7,000). Unfortunately for Salesforce staff, this would not be the last time they faced hardship this year.
It was also revealed at the start of the year that Einstein Copilot, the generative AI chatbot designed to work across the entire Salesforce product suite, would be arriving in February.
And we learned that Salesforce Co-Founder, Parker Harris, would be taking on the role of Chief Engineering Officer at Slack, following the cloud giant’s acquisition of the company for $27.7B in late 2020.
February: Einstein in Public Beta
CRM stock value, February 1: $283.80
In February, Salesforce moved its Einstein Copilot offering from closed to public beta. We reported at the time how Einstein Copilot was making waves in the ecosystem when generative AI was sending ripples across swathes of major industries across the world.
Salesforce also announced Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, giving a first glimpse of what a marketing app built in alignment with Salesforce’s core platform would look like.
The Trailhead GO app was also updated with a reimagined “Today” page.
And we spoke to Salesforce’s new Chief Trust Officer, Brad Arkin, about all things AI – and his role of closing the “trust gap” with partners and customers.
March: End of Workflow Rules and Process Builder
CRM stock value, March 1: $316.88
In March, Salesforce announced that Workflow Rules and Process Builder would no longer be supported after December 31st, 2025.
The company urged users to migrate their automation processes to Flow Builder before the deadline. The move came as Salesforce aimed to shift its focus towards a more modern, low-code automation solution: Flow Builder. By concentrating resources on Flow Builder, Salesforce seemed to be aiming to provide a more efficient and adaptable automation solution.
Slack also announced a new Developer Program featuring a free developer portal complete with a suite of tools for building apps.
We also reported how customer service platform, Zendesk, acquired Ultimate.ai amid a race for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence.
April: Einstein Available and a Shift in Focus
CRM stock value, April 1: $302.26
In April, we reported that Salesforce had announced the general availability of Einstein Copilot – the conversational AI assistant designed to streamline workflows. It marked a step forward in AI integration with sales, letting Salesforce teams leverage natural language interactions to automate tasks.
The same month, we also reported on a surprising revelation from the Salesforce earnings call, signaling a significant shift in focus from the cloud giant – to metadata.
We delved into previous earnings call transcripts, finding that the term “metadata” had only been mentioned five times since 2018. But in this year’s call, it was mentioned a staggering 26 times.
AI has been mentioned by CEO Marc Benioff in every call over the same period – growing in frequency. The earnings call suggested that Benioff recognizes the critical role metadata plays in training and deploying trusted AI solutions.
Metadata and AI are, after all, somewhat symbiotic, with metadata providing the foundation for AI, ensuring both data quality and transparency. This would herald big things to come later in the year, but challenges would need to be overcome in the more immediate future.
Plus, Salesforce Ben celebrated its 10th birthday!
May: Revenue Falls Short, Stock Drops $50
CRM stock value, May 1: $268.69
May would be a dark time for Salesforce, with the company’s stock (CRM) dropping from $268.69 at the start of the month to a bleak $218.01 on May 30.
The steep drop came as the company fell short on revenue for the first time since 2006, according to LSEG data.
Salesforce shares slumped amid fears that high interest rates and rival AI offerings were hampering demand, Reuters reported at the time.
Morgan Stanley analysts said: “Weak bookings in Q1 further test investor patience as the GenAI (generative AI) innovation cycle has yet to inflect top-line results and now increasingly becomes a point of competitive concern.”
The news was a blow, coming a year after activist investors pressured Salesforce to prioritize profitability after years of growing business through large deals – including the $27.7B acquisition of Slack in 2021.
In May 2024, Salesforce had forecast second-quarter profit and revenue below Wall Street estimates amid weak client spending on its cloud and enterprise business products.
Despite some doom and gloom surrounding the tech giant, this blow would be far from decisive, and big things were still in the pipeline.
June: Recovery and Sustainability
CRM stock value, June 3: $236.62
In June, the stock price was recovering from the drop, and we reported how Salesforce was lobbying for regulations to make companies disclose their emissions data and AI standards.
It was revealed they would be implementing their own six-point plan to support sustainable AI with their Einstein 1 Studio.
Salesforce also announced the world’s first-ever CRM AI benchmark, letting businesses evaluate LLMs and decide which ones work best for their own CRM needs.
The LLM benchmark would act as a recommendation tool to help businesses decide which LLM will be most effective for individual use cases.
Elsewhere in the tech sector, OpenAI acquired real-time analytics company Rockset.
July: Shake-Up for Salesforce Employees
CRM stock value, July 1: $256.21
The company saw two significant changes in July – both of them directly affecting employees.
Salesforce had been letting people work from home, but in July, the cloud giant issued an internal memo instructing most staff to return to their offices by October 1st. In another sign of a crucial shake-up at the company, Salesforce Ben also reported that the total of employees laid off by the company in 2024 had hit 1,000.
The company said at the time: “Like any healthy business, we continuously assess whether we have the right structure in place to best serve our customers and fuel growth areas. In some cases, that leads to roles being eliminated.”
That same month, Salesforce and fellow cloud giant Workday announced a strategic partnership.
We at Salesforce Ben also launched our very own podcast: SF Ben Insider!
August: Salesforce ‘Mojo’ in Question
CRM stock value, August 1: $253.06
A slow-ish month for the company in August prompted us to ask whether Salesforce was “losing their mojo”, echoing some feelings in the ecosystem.
Ultimately, we concluded that it was important to stay abreast of the news, the changes, and the trends, but ecosystem members should not get too bogged down in negative headlines, with Salesforce Ben Founder, Ben McCarthy, writing: “Salesforce and its ecosystem are still alive and kicking!”
Ben’s thoughts were perhaps somewhat prophetic, as the next month would be anything but uneventful for the tech giant.
Perhaps in another instance of foreshadowing, Salesforce announced a new AI Specialist certification.
In late August, Salesforce’s Q2 earnings came out, with the company beating Wall Street estimates and the company’s mysterious new AI platform, Agentforce, being mentioned 39 times in the earnings call…
As we know now, big things were coming!
September: Dreamforce, Agentforce, and the Future
CRM stock value, September 3: $248.06
September was a significant month for Salesforce, with headlines largely focused on Dreamforce ‘24 and the launch of the company’s flagship AI product.
The big announcement was Agentforce – the company’s flagship AI product and new primary focus, which delivers autonomous agents to Salesforce that are able to operate independently without external control or continuous intervention.
But this wasn’t the only news – Copilot Builder was rebranded to Agent Builder. Then two new Agents – SDR Agent and Sales Coach Agent – were brought in for sales.
SDR Agent interacts with leads, addresses inquiries, handles objections and organizes meetings by leveraging both CRM and external data.
Sales Coach Agent offers customized role-play sessions for sales teams using Salesforce data and generative AI to help sellers practice their pitches and address objections.
Einstein for Developers was rebranded and expanded into Agentforce for Developers, upgrading its functionality for users.
A change that lets Slack channel human members converse with agent members in natural language was revealed, with responses based on both structured CRM data and unstructured conversational data.
Agentforce came with other announcements:
- Atlas Reasoning Engine: The ‘brain’ behind Agentforce, an agentic system that takes into account what needs to be done, generates (and refines) its plan, and then takes action (see the next announcement for more details).
- Agent Builder: Create and customize agents and enable them with automation, APIs, and code on the Salesforce platform. Agent Builder joins Prompt Builder and Model Builder to form the Agentforce Studio.
- Agentforce Partner Network: Salesforce has forged partnerships with leading software vendors that extend agent-building capabilities, such as adhering to the same ethical guardrails, data sharing, and actions.
It came as Salesforce’s strong year of acquisitions carried on, with the cloud giant announcing in September that they had acquired Israeli-based data management provider Zoomin for $450M. It was Salesforce’s second major acquisition in Israel that month, following the purchase of Own for approximately $1.9B around three weeks prior. Salesforce also acquired AI Agent Startup Tenyx.
Klarna also revealed that they would be terminating two of their largest SaaS partnerships, Salesforce and Workday, as part of a complete generative AI overhaul.
October: Mud-Slinging and Freemiums
CRM stock value, October 1: $270.87
As the battle for AI supremacy heated up, Microsoft launched their own version of Agentforce in a very similar fashion.
Copilot Studio lets users build custom agents. It included ten autonomous agents designed for pre-built tasks like sales qualification, supplier communications, customer intent analysis, and customer knowledge management.
Marc Benioff was front and center of mudslinging, summarizing his skepticism by comparing Microsoft’s Copilot to Clippy 2.0: “I don’t think Copilot will be around. I don’t think customers will use it, and I think that we will see the transformation of enterprises with agents, and Agentforce will be the number one supplier.”
In late October, we reported that Salesforce Foundations, containing several new and upgraded features appearing in the Starter and Pro Suite product set, was becoming freely available to all Enterprise customers and above.
At Dreamforce ‘24, it was revealed that Agentforce would become part of Foundations, meaning the entire Salesforce AI suite would soon be ready for orgs. Agentforce became generally available in late October.
November: Testing Center and CEO Departure
CRM stock value, November 1: $294.72
In November, Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih stepped down after less than two years in the role to join social media giant Meta as the head of a new Business AI group. Just two months prior to the move, Shih was discussing Agentforce – which she herself spearheaded – at Dreamforce 2024.
In other news, Salesforce introduced a “first-of-its-kind” Agentforce Testing Center to help trial autonomous AI agents at scale. The CRM giant announced the agentic lifecycle management tools to automate Agentforce testing, try out agents in secure sandbox environments, and transparently manage usage. Salesforce said in November that the Agentforce Testing Center was in a closed pilot but was set to be generally available for use in sandboxes in early December.
Sabio Group also sold its UK Salesforce practice – formerly Makepositive – to Nextview Consulting just three years after acquiring it.
We also interviewed the winner of the Agentforce NYC Hackathon, Dominick DeFazio, about his experience at the event.
December: Q3 Earnings, Agentforce 2.0
CRM stock value, December 4: $367.87
Salesforce stock shot up after the company enjoyed a strong display in its long-awaited Q3 earnings report in early December – its first since the launch of Agentforce.
The cloud giant’s stock (CRM) stood at $367 at 9.30 am on December 4th – an impressive 10% increase from its close-of-market cost of $331.43.
Salesforce’s revenue grew 8% year over year during the third quarter and fiscal fourth quarter sales were expected to be between $9.9B and $10.10B, within analysts’ projections of $10.05B. The company’s net income was $1.5B – a 25% increase from last year’s $1.2B. The figures come after the company’s apparent hard pivot towards the world of artificial intelligence (AI).
During the earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff teased another new item – Agentforce 2.0. He told those on the call that those who tuned in for the product’s big reveal on December 17th would “not believe” what they’d see.
On December 17th, Agentforce 2.0 was revealed, introducing a new library of pre-built agent skills spanning CRM, Slack, Tableau, and partner-developed skills on the AppExchange.
The Atlas Reasoning Engine – the ‘brain’ behind Agentforce – was also enhanced, powered by new capabilities in Data Cloud.
Salesforce also promoted our SF Ben Insider podcast with Marc Benioff on social media.
Final Thoughts
It can’t always be good news for Salesforce, and the company has certainly seen its fair share of bumps along the rocky road of 2024.
But they do appear to be just that – bumps – and the overall picture is generally a positive one. This is borne out in the Q3 figures, which no doubt provided a very welcome sense of security to those who have nailed their colors to the mothership’s mast.
There always seems to be another ‘next big thing’ when talking about Salesforce, and perhaps this has played a part in how the company has not only survived but dominated the market since its inception 25 years ago.
Agentforce is certainly the current big thing, but whether that remains so in 2025 – with the agentic AI going on to change the workplace as some claim – or if it becomes just another step in the Silicon Valley AI race to bigger and better things, remains to be seen.