After a rollercoaster couple of years for Salesforce, Agentforce is bringing back renewed optimism to the Salesforce ecosystem.
Although it can seem like every Salesforce release is the “biggest innovation ever”, the Agentforce buzz continues to grow and is snowballing into a movement that could see Salesforce majorly capitalize on the huge upcoming market for agentic AI.
Agentforce’s Global Momentum: From Dreamforce Launch to Worldwide Tours
We are exactly eight weeks removed from the flagship Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where Agentforce was officially released to the world, and Salesforce’s marketing push shows no signs of slowing down. There are 21 scheduled “Agentforce” tours between the 8th and 19th of December hosted in cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo.
One stark difference between Agentforce and other major Salesforce releases is that Salesforce community members have had the chance to get hands-on with the product from day one. Unlike Data Cloud, which is a much more complex product, or Einstein GPT, which wasn’t made generally available for months, Agentforce was available at Dreamforce the same day as the announcement.
In a recent interview I had with Marc Benioff, CEO and Co-Founder of Salesforce, he mentioned that this resulted in over 10,000 Agents being created at Dreamforce, and thousands more at the many global World Tours.
Although we were lucky enough to secure an interview with Benioff, we weren’t the only ones. He has pushed significantly to get the word out about Agentforce to as many people as possible, ensuring that people also know his negative sentiment towards Microsoft’s version of similar AI products.
One of the reasons for this may be Salesforce’s freemium model. Anyone with Enterprise licenses and above (Which includes 90%+ of the Fortune 100), and roughly 150,000+ other customers around the globe, can start using Salesforce’s Agentforce product today via Foundations.
If Salesforce has a game-changing product, gets it well adopted, and then scales revenue with their new consumption-based pricing, they may be on to a market-leading winner – Wall Street seems to think so anyway.
Salesforce’s Comeback: Rising Stock, New Growth, and Major Hiring Push
After a pretty rough couple of years for $CRM – with reduced growth, falling margin due to overspending, and falling behind their rivals – Salesforce are back on the up and up and have grown nearly 50% this year alone. This is even after their disastrous Q1 earnings in May where they missed their revenue target for the first time since 2006, which was followed by a 16% plunge in their share price.
Tech and AI stocks have been on a good run for a while now, possibly due to the prospects of monster revenue growth, or pricing in a Donald Trump win, which obviously happened last week and sent tech stock prices even higher. With Trump soon coming to power, the prospect of fewer corporation taxes, and less AI regulation is continuing the markets bull run.
But it’s not just the perception of Salesforce’s growth prospects that are interesting, Salesforce is hiring 1,000 employees across the globe to focus on their new Agentforce initiatives.
For the first time since widespread layoffs began impacting the tech industry a couple of years ago – and continues to affect some companies significantly – Salesforce has started hiring on a large scale again.
Final Thoughts
Back in the 2000s, both Microsoft and Oracle experienced stagnant revenue growth, similar to Salesforce in the past few quarters. Traditional software licensing such as Windows, and other on-premise services was usurped by more modern technologies. Both Microsoft and Oracle saw a massive resurgence in growth as they moved to the Cloud – Microsoft with Azure, and Oracle with Oracle Cloud.
Today, Salesforce faces a similar challenge with sluggish growth, but AI has the potential to play the same transformative role that cloud computing did for Microsoft and Oracle. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!