With 50,000 participants accessing Salesforce Dreamforce Conference This week, the enterprise software giant is making its most aggressive bet yet on artificial intelligence agents, positioning itself as an antidote to so-called “threats” across the industry. "pilot purgatory" where 95% of enterprise AI projects never reach production.
The company was launched on Monday agent force 360a major rethink of the entire product portfolio designed to transform the business into a so-called "agency company" — Organizations where AI agents work alongside humans to handle up to 40% of work across sales, service, marketing, and operations.
"We’re really entering the age of agent AI, and I think this is probably the biggest revolution, the biggest technology shift that I’ve seen in my career." Salesforce co-founder and chief technology officer Parker Harris said at a recent press conference. "In the future, 40% of the work in Fortune 1000 companies will likely be done by AI, and humans and AI will actually collaborate."
The announcement comes at a pivotal time for Salesforce. Salesforce is, as Harris puts it, “ "7 billion dollar business" Focusing on AI platforms. But the announcement also comes amid extraordinary turmoil facing CEO Marc Benioff. fierce backlash About recent comments support president trump He suggested that the National Guard should patrol the streets of San Francisco.
Why 95% of enterprise AI projects never launch
The stakes are huge. Since ChatGPT was introduced two years ago, enterprises have rushed to experiment with AI, but most enterprise deployments stall before reaching production. Recent MIT research Widely quoted by Salesforce executives.
"Customers are investing heavily in AI, but not realizing its full value." said Srini Thalapragada, President, Chief Engineering and Customer Success Officer, Salesforce. "95% of enterprise AI pilots fail before going live. It’s not for a lack of intent. People want to do this. Everyone understands the power of technology. But why is it so difficult?"
The answer, according to Tallapragada, is that AI tools remain separate from a company’s workflow, data, and governance systems. "I keep writing prompts and it gets frustrating because there’s no context." He said this and explained what he meant. "Prompt doom loop."
Salesforce’s solution is a deeply integrated platform that connects four elements: the Agentforce 360 agent platform, Data 360 for unified data access, Customer 360 apps with business logic, and Slack. "conversational interface" A place where humans and agents collaborate.
Slack is your gateway to Salesforce
Perhaps the most important strategic change is slack — Acquired by Salesforce in 2019. $27.7 billion — as the primary interface for Salesforce itself. The company has effectively rebuilt its traditional Lightning interface around Slack channels, where sales deals, service cases, and data insights surface in conversations rather than forms and dashboards.
"Imagine you may not be logged in to Salesforce or you may not see Salesforce, but Salesforce is still there. I can work in Slack," Harris explained.
This strategy includes embedding Salesforce’s Agentforce agents for sales, IT services, HR services, and analytics directly into Slack, as well as a completely reimagined Slackbot to serve as your personal AI companion. The company has also launched "channel expert," An always-on agent that provides instant answers from channel conversations.
To enable third-party AI tools to access Slack conversation data, Salesforce will Real-time search API and model context protocol server. Partners like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Writer, Dropbox, Notion, and Cursor are building agents that live natively in Slack.
"The best way to see the platform’s capabilities is through the AI apps and agents that are already built." Salesforce executive Rob Seaman said this at a technology briefing, using the example of a startup company. "Delivered deployments to tens of thousands of customers within 120 days."
Voice and IT services target new markets
Beyond the Slack integration, Salesforce announced significant expansions into voice-based interactions and employee services. Agentforce audiois now generally available and can transform traditional IVR systems into natural conversations, update CRM records, trigger workflows, and seamlessly handoff to human agents.
IT service delivery represents Salesforce’s most immediate challenge. ServiceNowmarket leader. Mudhu Sudhakar, who joined Salesforce as senior vice president of IT and HR services two months ago, positioned the product as a fundamental rethinking of employee support.
"Traditional IT service management is very much a manual process centered around portals, forms, and tickets." Sudhakar said. "We had a few key principles: Conversation First and Agent First, and we focused on providing a conversational experience for those requesting support and those providing support."
The IT services platform includes what Salesforce describes as more than 25 professional agents and more than 100 pre-built workflows and connectors that can handle everything from password resets to complex incident management.
Early customers report dramatically increased efficiency
Customer results suggest this approach is gaining traction. reddit Average support resolution time decreased from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes, an 84% improvement. Additionally, 46% of cases were completely routed to AI agents. "This efficiency has allowed us to provide on-demand support for complex tasks and improve our advertisers’ satisfaction scores by 20%." John Thompson, Reddit’s vice president of sales strategy and operations, said in a statement.
engineTravel management company reduced average processing time by 15%, saving more than $2 million annually. open table We independently resolved 70% of inquiries from restaurants and diners. And 1-800Accountant achieved a 90% case deviation rate during the critical tax week period.
Salesforce’s own internal developments may be most telling. Tallapragada’s customer success organization currently processes 1.8 million AI-powered conversations each week, and metrics are publicly available at: help.salesforce.com Indicates the number of agents that respond and the number of agents that escalate to a human.
More importantly, Salesforce deployed AI-powered sales development reps to follow up with leads that were previously unreachable due to cost constraints. "Today, Agentforce has an SDR and is following up on thousands of leads." Tarapragada explained. The company also increased proactive customer interactions by 40% by shifting staff away from reactive support.
Trust layer issues that companies cannot ignore
Given companies’ concerns about the reliability of AI, Salesforce has invested heavily in so-called “AI.” "trust layer" — Audit trails, compliance checks, and observability tools that allow organizations to monitor agent behavior at scale.
"You need to think of agents as humans. Digital labor. You need to manage your performance just like you would a human. And you need an audit trail of these." Tarapragada explained.
The company encountered this challenge firsthand as it expanded its agent deployment. "When we started using Agentforce at Salesforce, we were tracking every message. This is 1,000, 3,000," Tarapragada said. "After a million chats, there are no humans. we can’t do that."
The platform currently includes: "Agentforce grid" Search millions of conversations to identify and fix problematic patterns. The company also introduced Agent Script, a new scripting language that allows developers to define precise guardrails and deterministic control over agent behavior.
Significant data infrastructure upgrade
Fundamental to the agent’s functionality is a significant infrastructure investment. sales force data 360 Contains "intelligent context," Automatically extract structured information from unstructured content such as PDFs, diagrams, flowcharts, etc. using what the company describes as: "AI-powered unstructured data pipelines."
The company is also cooperating data brick, dbt instituteand snowflake in "universal semantic interchange," It is an attempt to standardize the way different platforms define business metrics. The pending $8 billion acquisition of Informatica is expected to close soon and will expand metadata management capabilities across the enterprise.
The competitive environment continues to intensify
Salesforce’s aggressive AI agent push comes as virtually every major enterprise software vendor pursues a similar strategy. Microsoft has embedded Copilot across its product line, Google offers agent capabilities through Vertex AI and Gemini, and ServiceNow has launched its own agent capabilities.
When asked how it compared to Salesforce’s announcement, Recent releases of OpenAITallapragada emphasized that customers will be using multiple AI tools at the same time. "Most of the time, I see them using OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic. Like Salesforce, we use all three." he said.
The real differentiation lies not in the AI model, but in its integration with business processes and data, executives argued. Harris framed the contest in terms familiar from Salesforce’s early days. "Twenty-six years ago, we said, let’s make Salesforce automation as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com. We are doing the same thing. We want agent AI to be as easy as buying a book on Amazon."
The company’s customer success story is impressive, but it only represents a small portion of its customer base. With 150,000 Salesforce customers and 1 million Slack customers, 12,000 Agentforce deployments equates to approximately 8% adoption. This is strong for a year-old product line, but it’s not ubiquitous.
The company’s stock has fallen Approximately 28% year-to-date and Relative strength rating is only 15suggesting investors remain skeptical. Whether this week’s Dreamforce demonstration and subsequent months of customer adoption will allow Salesforce to finally move enterprise AI from pilot to production at scale; "7 billion dollar business" There remains more hope than reality.
