Salesforce hails 'next wave' in gen AI with custom agents

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has long touted the company’s advantage when it comes to enterprise AI, pointing to the sheer amount of data it has access to.

Its new platform Agentforce looks to capitalize on that by deploying generative AI-driven digital agents grounded in companies’ customized data. Agentforce is at the center of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce Conference, which attracts tens of thousands of its customers and partners to San Francisco every year.

As the world’s largest provider of customer relationship management software, Salesforce (CRM) is betting on Agentforce to drive the next wave of growth, as it looks to keep pace with rivals, including Microsoft (MSFT). Sales and service agents on the platform operate autonomously 24 hours a day, handling basic inquiries that can then be handed off to human agents. Utilizing every piece of information stored in Salesforce’s Data Cloud, generative AI enables the development of custom agents that can respond to conversational language, allowing robots to learn and reason in real-time, unlike chatbots that respond to pre-determined questions.

Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, said the new agents eliminate the frustration stemming from old bots.

“It would ask us the same questions over and over again,” she said. “These service agents from AgentForce, they really understand a wide range of human language and vernacular and can map that to what are the trusted data sources.”

The latest product launch comes as Salesforce looks to gain momentum following slowing sales growth stemming from a pullback in customer investments. A handful of companies including Disney (DIS), OpenTable, Kaiser Permanente, and ADP (ADP) have piloted Agentforce so far, but Salesforce is targeting wide adoption, after showcasing the technology at Dreamforce. Benioff said he’s aiming to have one thousand agents deployed by the end of the event.