Salesforce is set to acquire Fin for $3.6bn, giving the CRM giant an AI agent for customer service.

Fin was founded in 2011 as Intercom, with the chatbot maker rebranding as Fin last month. Over the last few years, the company has focused on developing an AI agent using its own Apex model that's built specifically for customer support.

Salesforce has its own agentic AI known as Agentforce, which was unveiled at the end of 2024. Earlier this year, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce Contact Centre, pulling together its AI agent and the company's CRM. Salesforce said Agentforce has reached an annual run rate of $1.2bn in the latest quarter, up 205% year on year.

"We're thrilled to welcome Fin to Salesforce as we enable every company to become an agentic enterprise," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, in a statement. "Fin brings proven agent technology, a deep commitment to customer success, and an incredible AI team that will complement Agentforce with powerful service agent capabilities."

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory clearance.

Salesforce has pushed AI agents as the future of customer service, with CEO Marc Benioff saying his company has slashed 4,000 customer service roles in favour of AI agents so far. But one survey from earlier this year suggests customers don't agree with the AI chatbots for customer service, with more than two-thirds not confident in the way businesses use generative AI to interact with them, and half saying the transactions don't work.

Find a win-win for customers

Fin's AI agent is multichannel with support for chat, email, WhatsApp, Slack, and even the phone, covering all aspects of a customer journey from sales to service, with the company claiming it can update accounts, troubleshoot tech problems, and process refunds.

On its website, Fin claims to have industry-leading resolution rates of 76% across more than 12,000 customers, with that performance gaining a percentage point every month it's in use.

Fin's system is already in use by companies such as Asana and Monday.com – as well as AI developer Anthropic.

"This is a major win for consumers of the world," said Eoghan McCabe, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Fin. "Our technology has defined this category and set the new standards for what great customer service looks like today. By joining forces with Salesforce, we can deploy it far and wide at a rate far faster than we could have ever achieved on our own."

Salesforce said in a statement that the aim was to give its customers more ways to deploy AI agents in their customer service operations, in particular, offering small businesses options with fast time-to-value that are easily deployable and offer measurable outcomes.

Plus, Salesforce gains Fin's AI team and its customer base of 30,000 companies.

From Intercom to Fin

Intercom was started in 2011 by a quartet of founders – Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett – and developed chatbots for companies to offer customer service, with the Intercom window ubiquitous in the bottom corner of websites.

Several years later, CEO Eoghan McCabe was accused of "unwanted advances" towards female employees, and though he apologised at the time, he stepped down the next year. COO Karen Peacock took over as CEO, but only briefly, as McCabe returned in 2022 at the request of the board – keeping the controversy continuing with public support for US President Trump.

Last month, Intercom rebranded as Fin, the name of the company's AI agent platform, though the Intercom brand was continuing as customer service software. "Fin is clearly our future, and the future of this new customer agent category," McCabe said at the time.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff still believes AI is nowhere near capable of replacing software engineers, and the proof is in the fact that many major industry players are still hiring for roles in this domain.

Speaking during a recent podcast appearance, Benioff said that AI is undoubtedly having a positive impact on software engineering, enabling teams to ramp up production and unlock significant productivity gains.

The technology isn’t a silver bullet and an excuse to reduce headcount, however.

Human workers remain critical and many big tech companies leading the charge in AI are still hiring in areas like software engineering – a trend he said acts as the “canary in the coal mine” for AI’s current capabilities.

“The models still cannot operate autonomously,” he said. “We’re not at that level yet of AI.”

“Our engineering organisation is probably more than 30% productive, but I wouldn’t call it 100% more productive, and that’s why even in the top AI companies, if you go to their job boards, you’ll see they are still hiring a lot of engineers,” Benioff added.

“Even though these top AI companies … have these unbelievable models, they need a lot of humans. That’s probably the canary in the coal mine that we know that the models are not at that level yet.”

Statistics from TrueUp, a platform that tracks open positions in the tech sector, shows engineering job openings have been trending upward slightly over the last two years.

Yet despite continued demand - albeit mild compared to pre-2023 levels - concerns about the impact of AI on entry-level roles have been rising.

Analysis from IDC in November 2025 warned entry-level roles will be among the hardest hit by AI adoption, and developers have been firmly in the crosshairs with this trend.

The changing face of software engineering

The influx of AI tools in software engineering has precipitated significant change in the profession over the last two years. In late 2024, for example, Gartner warned anywhere up to 80% of engineers will be forced to upskill to accommodate for changing skills requirements.

In January last year, Benioff himself proclaimed that the company “might not hire any software engineers” due to the advances in generative and agentic AI tools.

Despite that bold claim, Benioff said the CRM giant still has over 15,000 engineers globally, which has given the company a vital insight into how the technology is changing daily workflows.

When asked about whether AI would mean engineers need to become “generalists”, Benioff noted that many are now acting in a supervisory capacity managing agents working away in the background.

“The key thing about these 15,000 engineers, they’re all out there all over the world, all of them can now be hugely augmented with these coding tools,” he said.

“It could be Anthropic 4.6, it could be OpenAI Codex, it could be Cursor,” Benioff added. “But they start to use these models, they’re now working not only with the AI, but agents to help them code and they can even become somewhat supervisory over these agents.”

The use of AI still requires humans in the loop to ensure security and safety standards are maintained, however. This has become a recurring talking point with the rise of AI coding over the last 18 months. Indeed, a slew of studies highlighting AI-generated code flaws and the need for more hands-on supervision by developers.

Research from CodeRabbit in December, for example, found that although AI is helping improve developer productivity, the efficiency gains are being offset by flawed code and security issues, with many facing increased levels of manual remediation.

The situation with agents is no different. Workers across a range of professions are now managing these autonomous bots and encountering higher workloads.

Six in 10 knowledge workers who manage agents told Asana their roles are made more difficult due to “confidently wrong outputs”, highlighting the need for robust safeguards and supervision.

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Salesforce has announced the launch of a new AI Foundry service aimed at accelerating agentic AI research.

Through the service, the company hopes to ramp up internal AI development and testing, moving from “foundational research to product innovation faster than ever before”.

This, Salesforce noted, will have a downstream benefit for customers, enabling it to roll out more intuitive and powerful AI solutions.

The AI Foundry will see researchers collaborate closely with “strategic customers” and academic partners to develop and test new AI tools and capabilities.

“Many of the old rulebooks simply don’t apply anymore,” said Itai Asseo, VP of Salesforce AI Research.

“AI Foundry connects foundational research to real business problems by collaborating closely with our strategic customers in rapid iteration cycles.”

Targeted AI innovation

The new AI Foundry will focus primarily on areas where the company sees the “greatest opportunity for enterprise impact”.

This includes simulated environments for testing agents based on real-world best practices and learnings. Indeed, researchers have already developed eVerse, a simulation environment that “exposes agents to thousands of edge cases, handoffs, and judgment calls”.

The aim here is to assess agent performance and consistency, and the tool has been used to stress-test Agentforce Voice using thousands of simulated conversations.

“Ambient intelligence” is another key focus area for the new foundry project, according to Salesforce, helping test agents that “disappear into the environment”.

These are essentially agents that are always on that enterprises can trust to work quietly behind the scenes without the need for repeated commands.

“Ambient intelligence is context-aware, proactive, and timely. It understands the full situation, anticipates needs before they emerge, and surfaces just-in-time insights,” the company explained in a blog post.

The AI Foundry is currently experimenting with ambient intelligence capabilities, with the eventual goal of embedding this within enterprise workflows to help aid workers on the go.

Agent ecosystem building

Another key area of focus for the new AI Foundry lies in agent-to-agent interactions, according to Salesforce, including those that act “across organizational boundaries”.

Researchers are developing rules and protocols aimed at governing cross-boundary agentic ecosystems, for example. This includes agent cards, which are essentially a “business card” for each individual agent, the company noted in a 2025 blog post.

These help enterprises establish whether a third-party agent interacting with their own internal tools is legitimate, and what it's designed for.

“Working with Salesforce’s legal council, as well as with the Office of Ethical Use of Technology, our research team is defining the legal frameworks required for autonomous agent negotiation,” Salesforce said.

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Salesforce has hailed the official launch of Agentforce Contact Center, its new comprehensive platform for automating, streamlining, and tracking customer interactions.

Agentforce Contact Center combines the company’s CRM and AI agent offerings with telephony in one seamless platform made accessible to representatives via a native platform.

Through the offering, operators can track live customer interactions with AI agents, with a view of customer transcripts and conversational context to reduce the amount of information the customer has to repeat if they’re handed from an AI agent to a human representative.

Administrators can provision numbers and manage routing directly within the platform, as well as oversee human and AI agent interactions and workflows based on the same business logic as their CRM.

Finally, Agentforce Contact Center provides supervisors with comprehensive, omni-channel analytics in real time. This includes customer experience and operational metrics, as well as AI agent performance, escalation numbers, and sentiment analysis.

In a demo, Gautam Vasudev, SVP, Contact Center at Salesforce, showed how he could speak to an Agentforce voice agent via the phone to rebook a flight.

The agent was able to recognize that Vasudev was frustrated with the idea of the additional charge associated with the change, and transferred him to a human service representative.

Switching over to the representative point of view, Vasudev showed how Agentforce Contact Center automatically provided him with the call information to show where the agent left off, in addition to the relevant reservation details.

Within the platform, he could also use the AI Rep Assistant to provide suggested responses for helping the customer further.

The new offering is a part of Agentforce Service, which Salesforce is positioning as the newest iteration of Salesforce Service Cloud.

Agentforce Contact Center has already driven returns for customers. In a briefing, media heard from Beth LeClerc, VP, Business Systems Architecture & Web Services at smart home firm Savant Systems and George Reuter, MD, Impact & Innovation at the nonprofit Compass Working Capital, which works to help families out of asset poverty.

Reuter explained how Agentforce is already automating structured note entries for its coaches, covering topics such as employment status, school attendance, barriers to their goals, which all feed into the ongoing relationship between their coaches and clients.

Overall, Compass Working Capital estimates that Agentforce Contact Center is saving coaches up to 6,000 hours across the agency each year.

For Savant Systems, LeClerc said Agentforce Contact Center is helping to prioritize which calls should be escalated and for her team to focus on support, maintenance, and integration.

“I think the technology is going to empower any employee to be, you know, one who can drive revenue,” LeClerc added, explaining that integrations with Savant Systems’ organizational data will help representatives to give customers recommendations personalized to their purchase history.

Real-time voice interactions are key

As with its wider Agentforce offerings, Salesforce has stated that the key to Agentforce Contact Center’s effectiveness is its ability to ground agentic interactions in organizational data.

“The way we are looking at Agentforce Contact Center, is we really have built this from ground up to be agentic first, it's built on a deeply unified platform, built using our Data 360, our CRM, that enterprise data that comes to bear,” said Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM, Agentforce Service at Salesforce.

Agents within Agentforce Contact Center are grounded in a company’s organizational data, including its Salesforce and third-party apps. AI agents will also act as assistants to human representatives within the platform,

Within the platform, administrators can set up integrated automation through Salesforce Flow and Mulesoft. For example, an administrator may choose for all incoming calls to create a record, associate a number with a customer contact, or automatically route certain calls to Agentforce agents.

Another major element within Agentforce Contact Center is the inclusion of Agentforce Voice, Salesforce’s multimodal AI agent that brings native voice input capabilities to handle customer phone calls.

It’s combined this with traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems, which help users to route their calls with voice commands, in an aim to help customers have the most seamless AI-agent phone conversations possible.

Salesforce says that customers are increasingly satisfied with results from speaking to AI agents alone. Vasudev explained that Agentforce voice and the wider Agentforce ecosystem is helping to elevate customer experience beyond the simple text or voice chatbot.

“Now, what we are finding is that customers need more than a chatbot, and the formula for more than a chatbot really is having all of the channel data, having all of the customer data together, and also having your enterprise data come together to give your AI agents the latest context.”

For phone conversations, he added, latency is key as customers will expect a truly real-time conversation.

Salesforce is confident that it’s solved these challenges via Agentforce Contact Center. In response to an ITPro question, Vasudev stated that some customers are seeing over half of conversations with voice agents resolved without human interaction.

“So we've got certain customers, especially in travel and hospitality, where we are seeing now 40 to 60% containment, which means that the voice agent itself was able to handle the customer request, with high quality, without a subsequent escalation,” he said.

“That is great news, because it shows those high repeat scenarios can actually be automated away.”

At present, Chetan said, customer experience is not standardized across the industry which leads to “broken experiences” where they have to repeat themselves from channel to channel.

It’s part of a broader convergence of the contact center as a service (CCaaS) and customer relationship management (CRM) markets, Chetan added, driven by customer demand for highly personalized service available 24/7.

For now, Agentforce Contact Center phone numbers are only available in the US and Canada. Salesforce intends to expand this internationally throughout 2026. Ahead of this, Salesforce is targeting support for WhatsApp voice in international markets.

Agentforce continues to expand

Agentforce has become the product that underpins all Salesforce announcements, as CEO Marc Benioff chases gains in the enterprise AI market.

At Dreamforce 2025, the company launched Agentforce 360, an end-to-end platform for building and deploying AI agents, while also rebranding Slack as the ‘agentic OS’ for Agentforce going forward.

In February, the firm launched Agentforce for Communications, aimed at automating tasks for telecommunications operators.

For Agentforce Contact Center, Vasudev explained that AI plays a role at every point in the workflow, for both customers and representatives.

“[W]hen we say that this is the first truly agentic contact center, we really mean it, because agents are operating both in the voice channel, in the digital channel, as well as supporting reps as they are engaging with customers during an escalation.”

Going forward, he added, Salesforce’s CCaaS partners will also benefit from the platform’s capabilities.

Salesforce has issued a warning over an ongoing campaign targeting customers using misconfigured Experience Cloud platforms.

In an advisory last week, the CRM giant said a “known threat actor group” has been observed using a modified malicious version of the AuraInspector tool, which as part of the Salesforce Aura framework to identify security misconfigurations in Experience Cloud sites.

Originally developed by Mandiant, threat actors are using the open source tool to “perform mass scanning of public-facing Experience Cloud sites” and extract data.

“While the original Aura Inspector is limited to identifying vulnerable objects by probing API endpoints that these sites expose (specifically the /s/sfsites/aura endpoint), the actor has developed a custom version of the tool capable of going beyond identification to actually extract data — exploiting overly permissive guest user settings,” the company said.

Salesforce emphasized that the incident was not caused by a “vulnerability inherent to our platform”, but instead due to a customer-configured guest user setting.

This is because an exposed Salesforce Experience site accepts guest user profiles to provide access to publicly available data.

However, the company noted that misconfigured profiles with excessive permissions could allow a threat actor to “directly query Salesforce CRM objects” without logging in.

Charles Carmakal, CTO at Mandiant, said the company is aware of the AuraInspector misuse and is working with Salesforce to mitigate risks.

“We are aware of a threat actor attempting to identify misconfigurations within the Salesforce Experience Cloud instances,” he told ITPro.

“We are working closely with Salesforce and our customers to provide the necessary telemetry and detection rules to mitigate potential risk."

ShinyHunters claims responsibility

The “known threat actor group” cited by Salesforce appears to be ShinyHunters, with the group claiming responsibility for the attacks.

According to reports from The Register, the threat group claims to have stolen data from upwards of 400 websites and around 100 “essential high profile companies”.

Companies cited by the group included Snowflake, LastPass, Okta, AMD, and Salesforce. The group told the publication that the campaign has been ongoing “for several months now”.

What can Salesforce customers do?

In its advisory, Salesforce detailed a number of steps customers can take to mitigate potential risks, including:

• Enforcing a “least privilege” access model
• Conduct an audit of guest user permissions
• Set Org Wide Defaults to “Private”
• Switch off portal user visibility and site user visibility

Salesforce also advised customers to disable self-registration unless explicitly required. This is because guest data can be used to create portal accounts, thereby enabling “broader data access”.

“In addition to checking for unusual query volumes, review your Aura Event Monitoring logs for anomalous access patterns — such as queries targeting objects not intended to be public, unexpected spikes from unfamiliar IP addresses, or access outside normal business hours,” Salesforce said.

“If you suspect your environment may have been affected, contact Salesforce Support and complete the guest user audit steps outlined above rather than relying on log volume alone.”

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Salesforce has announced a range of new AI agents designed specifically for telecommunications operators.

The Agentforce for Communications service offers sector-specific AI agents, including pre-built options aimed at helping automate tasks and reduce manual labor for staff.

These include a dedicated Service Level Objective (SLO) Insights Agent, which assists teams troubleshooting customer service queries on fiber uptime and repairs, for example.

The agent can compare real-time network usage, according to Salesforce, providing staff with a “breakdown of compliance trends and root causes of failures”.

Salesforce said this will enable teams to shift from a reactive service model to a proactive one of “data-driven assurance”.

Other agents touted by Salesforce include:

• A billing resolution agent for customer service staff
• A quoting agent for sales representatives
• A site grouping agent for assistance on large-scale deals
• A guided selling agent for field representatives

Organizations such as One NZ and Lumen have already used the new agentic AI tools, so far recording notable benefits, including time savings for staff.

"Our AI assistant uses real-time data to handle everything from balance inquiries to plan switches, resulting in a 4x increase in engagement over traditional digital and physical channels," said Summer Collins, chief AI and data director at One NZ.

Ryan Asdourian, EVP and CMO, Lumen Technologies, said AI agents have helped the company save “more than 300 hours of productivity for our teams every week”.

Tackling telecoms challenges

Salesforce said the launch of the new sector-specific agents come amidst a period of intense modernization for the telecoms industry, which is facing a “revenue paradox”.

“Telcos have spent years investing in massive 5G infrastructure and digital experience projects only to discover that they barely preserved the revenue they already had,” the CRM giant said in an announcement.

Industry growth is expected to slow to 2.9% by 2029, raising concerns about long-term revenue stagnation.

Salesforce thinks the answer to that question lies in automation by equipping teams with AI solutions aimed at reducing manual toil for staff and streamlining customer service operations.

Notably, the custom agents launched as part of the service have “deep context into the customer” as they’ve been trained on internal data held by telecoms operators. This includes data on service and billing history, for example.

“Agentforce for Communications’ industry-specific agents are customized specifically for the telecom industry, built on almost three decades of industry expertise,” the company said.

David Fan, senior vice president and general manager for communication at Salesforce, said the aim is to help telecom operators “work smarter by connecting every part of their business” within Agentforce.

“Whether it’s resolving billing disputes, managing subscriptions, or accelerating complex B2B quotes, we’re enabling telecom companies to compete in the AI era by improving efficiency, driving growth and freeing teams to focus on what matters most,” he said.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has revealed hiring for software engineering has dipped as a result of AI, but the CRM giant is ramping up recruitment in other key areas to push its agentic agenda.

Speaking on TBPN this week, Benioff attributed the “mostly flat” headcount in software engineering to marked productivity benefits delivered by its own internal agentic AI tools.

“I've held my engineering headcount mostly flat this year because I've gotten so much productivity increase,” he said. “I probably have about 15,000 engineers and they're more productive than ever.”

“I'm so proud of them. Look at what we just delivered for you guys [referring to the recently launched Slackbot].”

Benioff's comments on software engineering come roughly a year after the chief exec suggested the company would freeze hiring for roles in this domain as a result of AI – a prediction that appears to have come to fruition.

“In engineering this year at Salesforce, we’re seriously debating - maybe we aren’t going to hire anyone this year,” he told The Logan Bartlett Show podcast.

While headcount in this area has remained flat, the company is driving ahead with recruitment in other key areas – particularly sales and customer engagement – as it continues to push its agentic AI service, Agentforce.

“I’ve changed the employee mix,” he said. “This year we hired 20% more account executives.”

The recruitment drive in this business segment is crucial for Salesforce, Benioff noted, allowing it to boost engagement with customers still on the fence about agentic AI and showcase its potential.

“There still needs to be people like me and you who go meet with our customers to really explain all the intricacies and nuances of the technology,” Benioff explained.

“There’s a lot of false narratives and people playing the market and saying things about AI that are not true, especially in regards to the enterprise,” he added. “We have to go and explain it, and talk to it, and build the relationships, and show them, and prototype and deploy.”

Indeed, Benioff noted that staff in these areas are “more valuable than ever” and will play a vital role in ramping up adoption of agentic AI tools.

Despite a bullish recruitment campaign on some fronts, workers in other areas of the business have bore the brunt of Salesforce’s AI and automation efforts over the last year.

In a follow-up appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff revealed the company had cut its customer support workforce by roughly 50%.

Marc Benioff is all-in on Agentforce

Salesforce unveiled Agentforce at its annual Dreamforce conference in 2024, with Benioff hailing the advent of agentic AI as a step change in the evolutionary path of the technology.

With agents, enterprises are able to draw upon an array of autonomous bots to carry out tasks on behalf of human workers, as opposed to the previous iteration of assistants which supplemented worker activities.

The launch of Agentforce marked a huge pivot for the CRM giant, and it’s now very much all-in on the technology. Benioff even hinted that the company might even change its name to Agentforce as a result.

Looking ahead, Salesforce shows no signs of slowing down on this front. Benioff told TBPN that “every company is going to have a customer agent”, touting the fact that customer adoption rates are surging.

“Since we’ve spoken there’s like 10, 20, 30,000 companies … deploying Agentforce for their customers,” he said.

“We’ve seen these amazing agents emerge,” he added. “We’re going to see one emerge next week at the World Economic Forum.”

Agentforce has seen significant growth since launch. However, the numbers flagged by Benioff don’t quite match up. Official figures from Salesforce show that over 12,000 companies in 39 countries currently use Agentforce in some capacity.

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Slack has announced the general availability of its updated Slackbot, which is now capable of advanced AI reasoning, personalized responses, and agentic tool use.

The updated chatbot can draw on enterprise and user context to summarize Slack channels, and answer user questions, without any need for training or setup.

In a demo, Amy Bauer, principal product experience designer at Slack and product lead for Slackbot, showed how Slackbot can summarize user feedback for an upcoming feature, drawing on the relevant channel.

Bauer was able to expand on this data by providing Slackbot with an image of a usage metrics dashboard, asking the assistant to correlate the feedback with the user data.

Slackbot was able to complete this task and provide recommendations for addressing the issues and expanding access to the pilot. Bauer could then turn this information into a canvas, which can be shared with teammates and eventually shared with leadership.

Rob Seaman, chief product officer at Slack, said that this is an example of an “internal tool call” which would set the tone for future Slackbot updates.

“We're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls,” he said.

“So it can not only create canvases in Slack, but it can actually be creating documents in other systems, creating tickets in other systems, etc.”

Personalized AI interactions

Slack has become increasingly crucial to Salesforce’s entire product offering in the past year. At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce announced Slack is now an ‘agentic OS’ for customer data, acting as both a communications platform and natural language point of entry for interacting with its AI agent platform Agentforce.

One of the key selling points of the updated Slackbot is its ability to provide answers and make actions based on wider user and enterprise context.

For example, Bauer asked Slackbot to identify 30 minutes on a Tuesday to discuss the findings from the canvas with key stakeholders. The assistant could autonomously identify the canvas to which Bauer referred, as well as channel information to identify who the ‘key stakeholders’ for the project are and cross reference the Google calendars of all involved parties.

While Slackbot cannot schedule meeting events at launch, Slack has committed to rolling out this feature as soon as possible.

“It can know everything that you can know in Slack – in fact, it can know a heck of a lot more, because I don't remember the conversation from two months ago, let alone a year ago, but Slackbot does,” said Ryan Gavin, chief marketing officer at Slack.

“And while I have access to literally hundreds of public channels in Slack, let's be honest, I'm not reading those channels most days, but Slackbot is. Because Slackbot has all that important work context, it becomes unbelievably insightful.

When users interact with Slackbot, the assistant is capable of delivering answers specific to them, drawing on the data they have access to, including in Salesforce or third-party storage such as Google Drive.

“There's not a lot of personal agents out there that can know a ten year past of things that you've worked on, or what your company's worked on,” Gavin said.

In recent weeks, Salesforce employees have been using Slackbot to help them write self-assessments.

“If you’re in the corporate world you've written these before, they're kind of a pain remembering what you did 12 months ago, let alone a week ago, sometimes it's challenging,” Gavin added.

“You want to have a nice document that reflects your work. It turns out Slackbot knows your work. It knows all the things that you did 12 months ago, eight months ago, six months ago.”

The result is hours saved for employees, he explained, with some workers having saved up to 20 hours per week.

Salesforce operates under a ‘customer zero’ principle, in which its own employees test and adopt its new products ahead of any public launch.

Within the firm, employees have adopted Slackbot faster than any other product in its history, Gavin said, adding the firm has also measured high user retention rates.

In another example, Seaman explained that he’s used Slackbot to learn the pronunciation of new hires’ names, with the assistant able to automatically draw the data from inside a Google Slides presentation within his Google Drive.

Slackbot is available in all the languages Slack supports. These are:

• Chinese (Simplified or Traditional)
• English (US or UK)
• French (France)
• German (Germany)
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Spanish (Latin America or Spain)

At launch, Slackbot will not be able to generate images, presentations, or videos though Slack is looking at enabling these features in the near future.

From this point on, Slack is making Slackbot a model context protocol (MCP) client, which in the future will allow the assistant to connect to other apps and AI agents.

Select customer organizations have had access to the updated Slackbot for several months and representatives from these firms noted the increased productivity possible through the tool.

“Slackbot is my second brain, it is the memory I wish I had myself,” said Peter Stoltz, VP, head of CIO Office at reMarkable.

“Whenever I have a question about the work we do, I always ask Slackbot. Whether it’s translation help or finding information, both about people and operating the company, Slackbot provides the information and the context to explain it.”

Salesforce has opened up its Agentforce 360 platform to allow partners to build and sell AI agents and applications.

The move marks a significant expansion for the platform and positions Agentforce 360 as a foundational tool for commercializing AI-powered solutions.

According to the CRM giant, the revamp aims to help businesses improve how they build, customize, and monetize enterprise AI applications through flexible pricing models, automated marketplace selling, and real-time insights.

In an announcement, Salesforce said it is bringing together enhanced capabilities across its core product portfolio to help partners, ISVs, and systems integrators position themselves as IP-focused AI product companies.

"We are entering a phase where expertise is more valuable than code,” commented Brian Landsman, CEO of AppExchange and EVP of Global Partnerships at Salesforce.

“When expertise becomes a product, whether it is managing livestock, resolving patents, or optimizing shipbuilding, it shows how much potential exists once you give people the right foundation."

Salesforce targets easy agent creation

With Agentforce 360, Salesforce said it is enabling partners to build, package, and sell AI-powered agents and applications using more than 500 pre-built features within its platform.

Partners can construct AI agents natively, without the need to manage large language model (LLM) infrastructure, model hosting, or usage optimization – meaning reduced operational complexity and fewer pre-launch barriers.

The firm’s data architecture has also received a revamp, with Data 360 and the new Zero Copy Partner Network offering the ability to access data across systems in real-time without the need to build ETL pipelines.

According to Salesforce, partners can create “harmonized” customer profiles with governed access to ensure every team and agent works from the same trusted context.

“Agentforce 360 eliminates the need for fragile, do-it-yourself infrastructure so innovators can move faster, scale globally, and focus on customer outcomes,” the company said. “It delivers enterprise-grade performance, reliability, and security out of the box.”

Enhanced automation

Businesses will also benefit from deeper integration with AppExchange for automation of provisioning, license management, and billing, alongside flexible pricing models for seat-based, usage-based, or consumption-based options through its new Flex Credits structure.

In support of these changes, Salesforce is also introducing the new Salesforce Partner Marketplace App in Q1 2026, offering partners a convenient way to automate order creation and license provisioning, as well as to streamline order-to-cash workflows with centralized billing and payments.

Elsewhere, Agentforce 360 offers real-time transparency through automated usage statements, as well as real-time consumption data via App Analytics.

“Agentforce 360 ensures innovators can evolve with the market, integrate the latest innovations, and deliver continuous value to customers,” Salesforce added.

Availability

Agentforce 360 is available now, while the Marketing Cloud Growth & Advanced tool is slated for a mid-December release.

Other new ecosystem components, such as Data 360, Financial Services Cloud, Automotive Cloud, and Shield, are also available immediately.

The Salesforce Partner Marketplace App is expected in early 2026, alongside the pending addition of Tableau Next.

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Salesforce is moving to meet enterprise AI demand by remaining as flexible as possible on pricing and moving to more helpfully capture business data.

At Agentforce World Tour London 2025, the firm looked to double down on its messaging around agentic AI and stress what makes Salesforce so capable at meeting enterprise AI needs.

Zahra Bahrololoumi, UKI CEO at Salesforce, explained in her opening keynote address that failed AI pilots are still widespread among businesses due to poor data and fragmented implementation.

“We are seeing a widening agentic divide between customer expectations and enterprise capability – and it’s really not for want of trying,” said Bahrololoumi.

The core issue, Bahrololoumi said, is a lack of cohesion and sophistication at the data and infrastructure layer.

“Every week, I speak to customers that are trying to DIY their AI and they are spending fortunes on infrastructure, on engineering capabilities, on model testing.

“And I can tell you now many of these projects will not get into production. That is because the data quality in these companies are typically very poor and the technology is bolted on, it’s not built in.”

Salesforce’s solution is what it calls the ‘agentic enterprise’, built on the foundations of Agentforce 360, the newly-upgraded Slack which acts as an ‘agentic OS’, and Data 360 (formerly known as Data Cloud).

The importance of Informatica

Data 360 is a key offering for agentic AI adoption within Salesforce, as it unifies both structured and unstructured customer data into a single source of truth.

Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Informatica for approximately $8 billion, which closed on 18 November, will expand these capabilities further.

Bill Patterson, EVP Corporate Strategy at Salesforce, told ITPro that Informatica’s operations synergize with existing products like Data 360 and Mulesoft.

“The best way I would articulate it is, Data Cloud is an incredible platform for customer data to be activated, whereas Informatica is an incredible platform for enterprise data to be activated,” Patterson said.

“So, it sort of gives us a bigger universe of data to taxonomize and make accessible to things like Agentforce, if you will.”

Patterson added that clients had already been asking for compatibility between the two products prior to the acquisition being announced.

In Salesforce’s recent Q3 2026 earnings call Marc Benioff, CEO and founder at Salesforce, hailed the acquisition as a key move for Salesforce’s Data Foundation which is projected to do around $10 billion in business next year.

“When you look at a $10 billion business, that's the first layer, that's data,” Benioff said.

“So Informatica with Data 360, MuleSoft, that is taking everything to this new level. And you get into the world of harmonization, integration, federation, and then you're trying to deliver to the AI, the intelligence, the accuracy, the reliability to wipe out the hallucinations delivering the AI context.”

Addressing AI worries with new pricing

Many public AI models are only available to businesses via pay-per-token pricing, which can rack up costs depending on the desired use case. But this doesn’t always fit the need for AI experimentation, nor shifting business interests, Patterson explained.

“Most companies, if you were to ask them ‘how many tokens would I need to qualify a lead?’, that would be a very complicated calculation,” Patterson said.

“The metaphor I use is companies come to Salesforce to buy a house, they don’t want to buy all the nails, parts, labor, glue, all that to get there.”

In response, Salesforce has invented an economic model that considers agents as labor, Patterson told ITPro, with a focus on conversational AI first. Quite quickly, Salesforce realized this wasn’t the best approach for customer needs.

“We just learned that one size did not fit all for conversations, so that sometimes a long conversation that was two dollars, was the same as a one and done conversation which was two dollars – it just wasn’t equitable for companies.

“We still have the conversation model for companies that maybe want that as an experience, but we also invented something called our action model, which is really paying for work that is done by the platform.”

All of this shows how Salesforce focuses on how to meter access to AI via Agentforce, without focusing on tokenization which Patterson added “wouldn’t be appropriate” for Salesforce.

“I think others can do that. What we want to do is really be the world's best business agent platform and I think that the utility-based pricing that we've created makes that fair and economical.”

Patterson told ITPro that the mismatch between outcome and spending is another reason for high rates of AI failure.

“The inventor of the ship also invented the shipwreck,” Patterson said, arguing that DIY AI failure is more to do with companies being dissatisfied with the outcomes they’re getting relative to spending.

Hyperscalers, on the other hand, are not seeing failure whatsoever, Patterson explained.

“The hyperscalers in this space don’t really see that as failure because you’re paying because of all that usage that was there. And so actually their meters are running, if you’re in production, or testing, or development or whatever.

“That’s not our business model, our business model is we want you to be successful with these technologies.”

Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise Licensing Agreement (AELA) is the firm’s answer to this issue, which offers customers access to unlimited use of Agentforce and Data Cloud.

In the opening keynote of Dreamforce 2025, Benioff acknowledged that Salesforce has upended its pricing model to meet the varied needs of its customers.

“We realized there’s going to be a lot of different ways to deploy this technology, we might have to write you highly custom agreements,” he said.

“So we’ve introduced this brand new Agentic Enterprise Licensing Agreement, giving you unlimited Agentforce into your company, unlimited Data Cloud into your company. Or, you might want to have an action-based model, you might want to have a flex credit model.

“It’s clear, one pricing model is not right for every company in the era of the agentic enterprise, so we’ve had to radically shift our pricing, and we want to thank you for the advice you’ve given us.”

In the opening keynote of the London event, Bahrololoumi hailed how the AELA can help companies scale with Agentforce and remove uncertainty around the technology.

“We’ve worked really hard on pricing,” Bahrololoumi said. “We want to remove the anxiety, we want to give you the confidence to be able to scale with certainty and with trust.”

Salesforce has launched an investigation into a spate of customer data theft incidents following a breach at a third-party application provider.

In a statement on Thursday 20 November, the CRM giant revealed it had revoked access and refresh tokens for Gainsight-published applications as part of its response to the breach.

Gainsight is a software as a service (SaaS) provider specializing in customer success and product experience, available to Salesforce customers via the company’s App Exchange platform.

“Salesforce has identified unusual activity involving Gainsight-published applications connected to Salesforce, which are installed and managed directly by customers,” the company said in an advisory.

Salesforce noted that a preliminary investigation suggests the breach could have enabled “unauthorized access to certain customers’ Salesforce data” through Gainsight connections.

“Upon detecting the activity, Salesforce revoked all active access and refresh tokens associated with Gainsight-published applications connected to Salesforce and temporarily removed those applications from the AppExchange while our investigation continues,” the advisory added.

Exact details on the scope of the incident and those affected are yet to be revealed. However, Salesforce confirmed that affected customers have been notified.

Gainsight the latest third-party incident for Salesforce

The Gainsight incident marks the latest third-party application breach for Salesforce in recent months.

Earlier this year, the Salesloft Drift attack impacted hundreds of companies including Google, Zscaler, Cloudflare, and Palo Alto Networks.

Hackers gained access to sensitive customer data through compromised OAuth tokens associated with the third-party application.

Brian Soby, CTO and co-founder at AppOmni, said the scale of Gainsight integrations means this latest incident could have equally wide-reaching implications for an array of businesses.

“Gainsight is widely deployed and tightly connected to Salesforce, Slack, Google, Microsoft, and numerous other SaaS environments,” he said. “Because of that footprint, customers now have to quickly identify every location where Gainsight was integrated.”

Soby added that the Gainsight incident once again highlights “persistent weaknesses” in SaaS supply chain security practices.

“The attack closely mirrors the earlier Drift breach, which also targeted Salesforce, Google Workspace, and other widely used SaaS platforms,” he told ITPro.

“The scale of the Gainsight compromise underscores that many organizations did not apply the lessons they should have learned from Drift, leaving large portions of their SaaS supply chain exposed.”

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With concerns rising about the impact of agentic AI on the labor market, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy thinks agents are nowhere near ready to begin stealing jobs.

In a recent appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast, Karpathy described the output of AI agents as “slop” and suggested the latest iteration of the technology isn’t quite living up to the hype.

“They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working,” he told host Dwarkesh Patel. “It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues.”

Karpathy added that, in their current form, AI agents “just don’t work” and aren’t quite the silver bullet for productivity and efficiency that major industry providers have framed them as.

“I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it’s not. It’s slop”.

Big tech goes all-in on AI agents

While Karpathy’s comments appear to pour cold water on the potential of AI agents, leading industry stakeholders have been banging the drum for the technology repeatedly over the last year.

Microsoft, for example, said it expects 1.3 billion AI agents to be operational by 2028, while Salesforce has essentially pinned future success on the potential of its own agentic AI service, Agentforce.

Launched last year, CEO Marc Benioff hailed the arrival of agents as the next big step in the evolutionary path of generative AI.

A key factor behind the appeal here is that agents can carry out tasks on behalf of human workers. They’re autonomous bots that can pick up the slack anywhere, and any time.

By contrast, AI assistants, which represented the first iteration of the tech during the early days of the generative AI ‘boom’, act as a supplementary tool for individual employees.

With this in mind, leaders across the industry have touted the potential for agents to streamline efficiency across a range of business functions, from customer support to software engineering and even in manual trades.

At the company’s annual Dreamforce conference earlier this month, Salesforce once again doubled down on agentic AI in a rallying call for customers to jump on the bandwagon.

But even while hailing the technology, adoption rates at the CRM giant show it’s struggling to achieve significant uptake.

Too much hype is causing serious issues

Karpathy isn’t the first in the industry to question the hype surrounding AI agents.

Indeed, Capgemini research shows IT leaders are still largely skeptical about the technology and are keeping their cards close to their chest on any investment in this domain.

Earlier this year, analysis from Gartner suggested that a concerning number of so-called agentic AI products were just repackaged software or RPA tools or basic chatbots.

“Agent washing,” as the consultancy described the trend, has become a serious issue as vendors look to capitalize on enterprise interest in the technology.

Longer term, the outlook isn’t exactly positive, according to Gartner, with 40% of agentic AI projects expected to be cancelled within the next two years.

This is largely due to poor returns on investment and the fact that most current use-cases are immature, which aligns closely with Karpathy’s comments regarding immediate benefits.

Previous research from Gartner on specific use-cases for agentic AI also show the technology has fallen flat, particularly in customer service and support roles.

Analysis from the consultancy in June noted that while workers in these positions were among the first on the AI chopping block, many are now backtracking on the trend.

Around half of companies that expected to “significantly reduce” customer service workforces due to AI agents are now projected to abandon plans by 2027.

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San Francisco has played host this week to one of the biggest tech conferences of the year, Salesforce Dreamforce.

The stalwart event has seamlessly transformed from being all about cloud for the best part of 20 years to being heavily AI focused in the past two years.

What can we learn from the pronouncements – and contradictions – being delivered on stage this year?

In this episode Jane speaks to Rory, who has been on the ground this week reporting from Salesforce Dreamforce 2025.

Highlights

"This year is part two of the hard turn into AI agents. Ross wrote a great piece last year on how Agentforce is kind of intended to be Salesforce's Chat GPT moment. So this is Salesforce's dedicated AI agents platform – platform kind of undersells how extensive it is. It's not just like a marketplace for agents, for example. It's kind of a marketplace/fabric/agent builder."

"Slack is more and more becoming the front end for interacting with your Salesforce data. So CRM data from Salesforce will now be directly accessible in Slack. You can pull data through from Tableau, from HR, IT from sales, by just invoking it through agents"

"Slackbot is being updated so it can now summarize documents, summarize threads, draft project updates, everything you would expect from from an LLM. But also, over time, the idea is it will become more personalized to you as a worker and to your organization. So it will be able to offer you more personalized assistance."

Footnotes

• Dreamforce 2025 live: All the latest updates from San Francisco
• ‘I don't think anyone is farther in the enterprise’: Marc Benioff is bullish on Salesforce’s agentic AI lead – and Agentforce 360 will help it stay top of the perch
• Salesforce just launched a new catch-all platform to build enterprise AI agents
• Slack is now the key to Salesforce’s agentic AI plans
• "Do not sacrifice your entry-level jobs": Salesforce might be all in on AI, but it isn't giving up on junior workers yet – despite Marc Benioff's job replacement claims
• Why Dreamforce 2025 will be all about agents, agents, agents

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It’s been a very busy week defined by Marc Benioff, Salesforce mascots, and Metallica – but Dreamforce 2025 has come to an end.

The annual conference, which has more than rebounded post-pandemic into a 50,000-strong festival of cloud and AI, showed no sign of slowing down in its 22nd year.

As I predicted ahead of the conference – though you didn’t need superintelligence to come to this heavily-trailed conclusion – Salesforce’s agentic AI platform Agentforce was the star of the show.

When Salesforce launched Agentforce a year ago, it signaled a hard turn into AI adoption that couldn’t have come too soon. Some commentators had proposed Salesforce could be at serious risk of conceding market share to AI-powered upstarts, forcing the CRM giant to respond with gusto to keep shareholders and customers onside.

Eleven months on, Salesforce’s future is looking more certain. Though there’s more to do – just 12,000 of the company’s 150,000 customers have adopted Agentforce so far – there’s a far clearer path to Salesforce becoming a dominant force in enterprise AI.

Slack is the Salesforce golden child

One of the standout announcements at the conference, in addition to the slew of new Agentforce features, was the increased use of Slack as an ‘agentic OS’ for Agentforce and other Salesforce data.

This means more agents, CRM tools, and customer data will be accessible via natural language in Slack alongside more personalized automation in the form of a spruced-up Slackbot. Slack has quickly moved from a simple jewel in the Salesforce crown to its most important customer-facing product.

The positioning of the platform as an ‘agentic OS’ is crucial, as both a pillar of the firm’s AI strategy going forward and a concerted effort to make using AI far easier and more natural for businesses.

“I can understand the skepticism around the term but the reason I believe in it is if you think about an operating system, what it typically does is it will hide the complexity of the hardware or the back end from the end user,” explained Rob Seaman, chief product officer at Slack.

“And that's effectively what we're attempting to do with Slack which is like, let's obscure the complexity of all these different agents and apps from users with a simple interface.”

This is a canny move by Salesforce, which is moving to meet surging customer demand without exposing them to a bad experience that could erode their view of the platform. And make no mistake, the demand is there: Denise Dresser, CEO at Slack, told attendees that since the advent of LLMs and AI agents, Slack users have added almost 100,000 agents to the platform.

In 2025 alone, Slack has seen an 800% increase in the number of agents deployed, Seaman said.

If Salesforce can continue to meet this demand, it’s in an excellent position to unlock actual ROI for businesses – something of a holy grail, even three years into AI adoption.

With Slack available as a free tier, it’s an excellent hook for potential Salesforce customers. Take the example of GM, which has seen its 16,000 Slack users explode to 96,000 users over just the past nine months. The same pattern applied to a company that uses Slack but not Salesforce could see firms driven by FOMO into the arms of the CRM giant – to lucrative rewards.

Seaman acknowledged that rivals may be able to replicate Slack’s UI but said they couldn’t achieve the same responsiveness and overall intelligent features that the company had built up over time. It’s in this same pedigree that Salesforce is now putting so much stock.

Emin Gerba, chief architect at Salesforce, who was part of building the platform in the mid-2000s, told ITPro the extent to which different architectural layers are integrated within Salesforce has always been a strong selling point for the firm, with each layer – whether it’s data or AI – enhancing the other.

“I’d argue that we have a uniquely integrated platform and I think that’s a big advantage,” he said.

“Because all of the layers we talked about, we’ve integrated them – so you can think about data activation, which is seamlessly integrated with the semantic layer, which is seamlessly integrated with how you manage AI, which is integrated with how you manage agents.

“Which then are integrated into sales, service, marketing – where you people are doing work.”

Salesforce is casting a wide net

A key part of Salesforce’s AI strategy is its ability to provide customers with many different AI models – and it’s committed to an open approach with models from many of the major providers.

One of the more straightforward ways the firm telegraphed this throughout Dreamforce 2025 was bringing those AI partners up onstage: Benioff hosted fireside chats with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Sundar Pichai, CEO at Alphabet.

The only conspicuous absence was to be found in OpenAI’s executive Sam Altman – though Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI, made a brief appearance during the opening keynote.

But just because Salesforce is being as open as possible at one end doesn’t mean that customers should expect the user experience to become watered down or needlessly complicated.

Seaman explained his team is working hard on ensuring that agents can be adopted in Slack en masse without causing unnecessary “noise” for end users. Indeed, the platform individually reviews each agent that’s added to its marketplace to ensure it doesn’t misuse user data or negatively impact the user experience.

In addition, each AI model that’s deployed within Slack is deployed within Slack’s AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), ensuring that customer data is kept secure regardless of the model used.

The key is in the layer that Salesforce adds on top, both via Slack, its CRM offerings, and Agentforce itself. It’s the chief USP for Salesforce, which is playing its cards remarkably well.

Measuring success will be very simple for Salesforce at next year’s conference: it will be looking for that figure of 12,000 adoptees to have significantly increased. We’ll be checking back in for Dreamforce 2026 – and so will the firm’s stakeholders.

Salesforce is still committed to hiring junior team members even as AI automates roles, according to UK&I chief executive Zahra Bahrololoumi.

Speaking to assembled press at Dreamforce 2025, Bahrololoumi addressed what she described as a universal fear and “orthodoxy” that AI will replace entry-level jobs.

Bahrololoumi stressed that this is not a Salesforce strategy in the UK or elsewhere and urged companies looking to eliminate junior roles with the technology to reconsider.

“Our message here is: do not sacrifice your entry-level jobs because you do need people that can work through that function, that process that can work alongside the AI to be able to manage and lead that composition of digital and human capital.”

Paul O’Sullivan, UKI CTO at Salesforce, said the firm is working closely with UK academic institutions such as Brunel University to plug skills gaps, noting that Salesforce is part of a UK government industry partnership that aims to train 7.5 million workers in AI skills by 2030.

“If companies eliminate entry-level hiring, they will not have the right skill profile to be able to orchestrate and manage the duality, or maybe the multimodality, that will be our future,” Bahrololoumi added.

Despite its efforts to expand AI skills and targeted hiring in the UK, Salesforce is elsewhere engaged in widespread job cuts driven by AI tools.

CEO Marc Benioff has repeatedly emphasized that Agentforce and greater AI adoption would enable the firm to cut staff spending and reduce hiring across a range of areas, including customer support and even software engineering.

In September, he revealed that Salesforce has already reduced customer support roles by around 50% as a result of its own internal success with agentic AI tools.

Smaller firms use Agentforce to scale without staff

While Bahrololoumi and O’Sullivan emphasized that AI will empower rather than hinder the job prospects of graduates and junior workers, the duo also pointed to the potential benefits of the technology for smaller firms that can’t easily scale their workforce.

Bahrololoumi said Salesforce has seen a surge of interest, both globally but particularly in the UK, in its ‘commercial business’ category.

This is defined by Salesforce as enterprise customers that have $2 million or below in revenue. Growth across this category reached approximately 35% in Q1 2025, she explained, with double digit growth in Q2 and an expected 31% in Q3.

“I think it's interesting why we've seen this surge, because a commercial business or a mid-market business will not have the resources readily available to scale humans,” Bahrololoumi said.

“And yet they are growing because they're taking advantage of the technology that can enable them to grow and decouple that growth from headcount.”

As a result of this shift in interest, AI has actually increased hiring plans for Salesforce in its UK&I region, Bahrololoumi noted, as it now needs more sellers within the commercial business to meet demand.

AI isn’t affecting Salesforce hiring targets

Outside of this, Bahrololoumi revealed AI hasn’t reduced hiring targets but is changing the qualities sought in candidates. For example, certified engineers with experience and applied practice in generative AI are favored.

The same is true for many of its customers, she added, giving the example of a customer in private equity that won’t hire engineers for its portfolio company unless they have hands-on skills in the field.

In a separate panel at the event, Nathalie Scardino, president & chief people officer at Salesforce, explained that fresh graduates increasingly possess native digital and AI skills that lend themselves to career progression.

“We’re hiring a lot of AI natives,” said Scardino, explaining that Salesforce practices ‘reverse mentorship’ in which new graduates are paired with people throughout the organization such as forward-deployed engineers to share AI skills.

Salesforce onboarded around a thousand interns over the summer, Scardino added.

In addition to new hires, Salesforce is looking to equip its existing engineers with AI skills. O’Sullivan told attendees that this has been marked by a shift in focus over the past year.

“If we think about the existing community of engineers we’ve got, we're now being really prescriptive on carving out time to stay current, stay relevant,” he said.

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Salesforce has never moved as fast on a project as it has with Agentforce, according to CEO Marc Benioff, who said the company is capitalizing on its unique B2B strengths.

When asked whether Salesforce is looking to increase Agentforce adoption, which currently stand at 12,000 enterprise users versus a total customer base of 150,000, Benioff appeared bullish.

“It's the fastest growing product in our history,” Benioff said, adding that adoption is already higher than it expected just 11 months after launching Agentforce.

Slack has a million customers and Benioff confidently predicted Salesforce will see even greater adoption of its AI agents via new Agentforce integrations and native features within the platform like Slackbot.

He added that the slew of enterprise customers featured in the conference’s opening keynote were testament to the appeal of Agentforce for large scale deployments:

“William-Sonoma, Pepsi, Accenture, even Smartsheet, even Pandora, they don’t just make changes in their enterprise architecture like this – it takes time,” he said.

“That said, I've never seen anything go faster. Because of that, we've had to go faster.”

Benioff described Agentforce as “deep enterprise technology” and contrasted it with other products that run high-level productivity improvements or rely directly on pulling through apps like ChatGPT.

“11 months in, I don’t think anyone’s farther in the enterprise. I don’t know, you can go down to the Oracle conference today, the SAP conference,” he suggested,

At the company’s annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce unveiled a sweeping expansion of Agentforce, with new integrations for Slack intended to make it an ‘agentic OS’.

The announcements feed directly into Salesforce’s intense focus on the usability of enterprise data, with new products and unified platforms aimed at making data easier to find with AI agents and solutions quicker to deploy across IT, sales, the supply chain, and more.

Customer testimonials core to Agentforce success

Practical use-cases have been central to the company’s current focus on agents. At Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour event earlier this year, the company highlighted a number of real-world examples where the service is being used to deliver marked improvements for enterprises.

Dreamforce has been no different, with Julie Sweet, CEO at Accenture showcasing how the consultancy has been capitalizing on agentic AI to unlock cost and efficiency savings.

“Keep in mind that what customers are not excited about, if you run a big enterprise, is having lots and lots of different versions and doing things when there's best in class,” she told attendees at Dreamforce.

“Many of the customers you've heard have been working with Salesforce for years, they didn't make a bet on Salesforce for the capabilities of the day. They said they're the best in the day, but we're making a bet that Salesforce is going to drive and invest in innovation for decades.”

Sweet added that Accenture has made over $80 billion in sales last year underpinned by Salesforce, which feeds directly into its confidence in its AI solutions as well.

Laura Alber, CEO at Williams-Sonoma, said that Salesforce has a huge strength in the fact that so much enterprise data is already stored on the platform.

“We started working with Salesforce on a lot of things and because there’s a lot of things they have a lot of our data,” Alber said. “Which makes the AI overlay work extremely well.”

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Welcome back to ITPro's coverage of Dreamforce 2025, brought to you live from San Francisco. Yesterday we heard from Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce, in an opening keynote centered around why Salesforce thinks Agentforce has transformative potential for the enterprise.

Following the keynote, Benioff told assembled press that Salesforce is farther ahead than competitors with its AI agent rollout, with Agentforce being the fastest-deployed product in the company's history.

And in the afternoon, we heard from Denise Dresser, CEO at Slack, in a dedicated keynote looking at how the collaboration platform is being overhauled with AI.

We've already had a couple of big announcements from Salesforce ahead of the event kicking off, which is a great way to get heads turning and tongues wagging.

Chief among these is the launch of Agentforce 360, a new platform for building, deploying, and managing enterprise AI agents.

The new service is essentially a rebranded Agentforce Builder, but Salesforce hopes to simplify and streamline the creation and testing of agents for enterprise users. You can read more on the announcement below.

• Salesforce just launched a new catch-all platform to build AI agents

Elsewhere, we've had some big news at Slack, which Salesforce is clearly positioning as a key tool in helping build out its agentic AI ecosystem.

Slack will now act as an “agentic OS” for customer data and become a core pillar of the aforementioned Agentforce 360 platform.

So what does this mean? Essentially, CRM data from Salesforce will now be directly accessible within the workplace productivity platform. That means data from Salesforce Sales, HR, and IT, as well as data from the CRM giant's analytics platform Tableau.

You can read more on the big plans for Slack below.

• Slack is now the key to Salesforce’s agentic AI plans

We're off! The Moscone Center is filling up by the minute, with thousands of attendees already milling about. We're due to enter the keynote hall soon and will be bringing you the latest as it happens.

Expect to hear some powerful statements on agentic AI from Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce. In the past few months, Benioff has doubled down on the potential to replace workers with AI agents – and I'd bet he'll continue on this track today.

Given the fact that Dario Amodei, CEO at Anthropic and Sundar Pichai, CEO at Alphabet are here this week, we'll be listening particularly closely to what Benioff has to say about each company's models in his speech. There's a talk between Benioff and a 'special guest' scheduled for 15:15 today – expect coverage of that later on.

The keynote hall is filling fast, with just 35 minutes to go until events kick off in earnest.

As attendees file in, we're hearing a live rendition of 'The One They Call Hawaii', performed by the family of Daniel Akaka, the former Democratic senator for Hawaii. The performers dedicate the song to Benioff, "who calls Hawaii his home".

The keynote itself hasn't yet begun, but we're hearing a little bit about Slackbot. In a live demo, the audience is being shown how the new and improved Slackbot can summarize previous product launches for a user and create a canvas for how to approach an upcoming product launch.

Denise Dresser, CEO at Slack, is now giving us more details on how OpenAI is using Slack to scale its operations and improve its productivity.

Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI, is here to explain in detail.

"OpenAI started on Slack," he says. "It was the first place I logged in at OpenAI, and it was the firehose I was drinking from when I was trying to understand what it meant to build AI and AGI."

He adds that Slack is most helpful because it moves at the pace of any company and allows workers to organize and come together. Moving onto Salesforce more generally, Lightcap says that SaaS and Salesforce continue to have a huge role to play in the age of AI. He explains that AI can bring context from different systems together and make insights actionable, supplementing existing CRM systems.

And with the preamble finished, we’re off with the keynote in earnest. As is usual for tech keynotes, we’re starting with an opening film. Matthew McConaughey is introducing Agentforce as “the fastest product we’ve ever launched”.

"Is AI going to replace us? Or are we going to be in command of it? At Salesforce, we've made our choice. We're building AI that elevates people, agents that handle the busy work, so we can focus on the work that matters," McConaughey says.

"Welcome to the agentic enterprise", we're told, as Marc Benioff takes to the stage.

"The number one thing we are going to do is thank you," Benioff begins, thanking all Salesforce's partners and customers.

Benioff is hyping the sheer scale of this year's event, with a huge roster of speakers incluing Sundar Pichai, H.E. Abdullah Alswaha. He also pays tribute to a recently departed friend, asking the audience to "put all of our political situations aside and divisiveness, come together as one ohana". He is referring to Jane Goodall, who we're now hearing from in video form.

"We don't have the luxury of millenia," Goodall explained. "We need innovative thinking here and now – business must be a platform for change and an essential source of innovation."

We're back to Benioff, who says Salesforce has given away $841 million, committed to 10 million nonprofit hours, $300 million in reskilling training and $150 million for local schools in San Francisco and Oakland.

Onto announcements in earnest now, with Benioff focusing on advancements in the past year. He says that when we use LLMs at home, we have consumer technology on his phone that isn't found in the workplace.

Benioff has handed the microphone back to Lightcap now, to explain OpenAI's vision for the future of AI. He says that new experiences will come to users rooted in a firm trust-base.

Benioff is moving quickly, as he paces around the audience, noting that there's a "very real" divide in agentic AI.

"This agentic divide is split – it's a bifurcation. Your customers are elevated, now what about your enterprise?"

He notes that simply deploying enterprise AI models isn't enough, if solutions aren't integrated and grounded in proper governance.

Salesforce, he says, has to be there for customers when AI inevitably goes wrong. Humans and agents will also have to work together in this mix, he says, which is what Salesforce means by the 'Agentic Enterprise'.

"What we realized at Salesforce is we have to be customer zero," he says. "We have to be able to go from one, to two, to three, to four, to five and show you what we're doing."

Since Salesforce Help was rolled out, he says, there have been 1.8 million conversations with agents.

Salesforce is also leaning into agents for leads, he explains.

"In the last 26 years, between 20 and 100 million customers contacted us and we didn't call them back – we did not call them back. We didn't have the people." Agents are now helping Salesforce contact 60,000 customers per week, he says.

Salesforce is "investing huge amounts in Agentforce", Benioff says, pointing to the extensive Agentforce 360 announcements this week, covering sales, marketing, commerce, field service, revenue management, supply chain, IT, HR, and more.

Benioff is leaning heavily into the potential for Agentforce across all enterprise use cases, noting Salesforce has released over 300 agents and is now using Slack as an agentic OS.

"We do 11 trillion emails a year at Salesforce, but each of those emails is a one way conversation," he adds. "But what if each of those emails was a two-way conversation?"

Benioff adds that the question that’s “haunting us at night” is what if everyone could build their own agentic enterprise. The realization of that is Agentforce Vibes, which lets users build in Salesforce using natural language.

Here to explain more is Patrick Stokes, EVP. Product and Industries Marketing at Salesforce.

Stokes runs us through a demo in which he is able to make a 'Dreamforce Command Center' app using natural language, acting as a centralized, live dashboard for data from the conference floor.

“Add the rest,” Stokes writes, after the agent first produces only a lightweight product. The agent, he explains, can search Tableau data and all the specified sources to deliver a product that can show average wait times or total session scans by location.

By asking for session scans on a map, the agent quickly produces a result.

Benioff is back, to note that none of Salesforce’s AI advancements would work or deliver value without grounding in the best data across a customer’s enterprise environment. He says five customer stories are particularly noteworthy: Williams-Sonoma, Pandora, PepsiCo, FedEx, and Dell Technologies.

Here to tell us more is Sanjna Parulekar, SVP of Product Marketing at Salesforce.

Parulekar lists off the biggest advancements of the week: Agentforce Voice, Agentforce Builder, and Agentforce Service. Focusing on the last one, we're now hearing about Williams Sonoma deployed its own agent through Salesforce.

In a demo, Parulekar shows us how she can use this agent to find recipes based on a description of an autumn dinner party, with tutorials linked to a product she just purchased from Williams-Sonoma – a dutch oven.

Parulekar is now showing us how Williams-Sonoma built its agent using Agentforce Builder. The problem with starting in natural language, she says, is it can get "a little messy".

Using the new tool, Parulekar can take the step-by-step reasoning instructions and convert them into Agent Script, which makes agents more predictable and is easy to comprehend at a glance.

We'll hear more at the Agentforce keynote, which takes place this time tomorrow.

Benioff now introduces Laura Alber, CEO at Williams-Sonoma, who explains that the firm does 70% of its business online but customers still seek out the store experience. It's attempting to bridge this gap with its personalized agent 'Olive'.

"Can you imagine if the websites gave that same warm feeling, that our stores give you when you go into them? What a difference maker that will be."

We're moving onto Pandora, with Leah McGowen-Hare, SVP, Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) in Global Growth & Impact at Salesforce taking to the stage. Pandora is using Agentforce Commerce for 'Gemma', its customer service assistant. Gemma is capable of recommending, personalizing, and helping customers purchase products, without leaving conversational flow.

Pandora is also using Agentforce Voice, as we're now being shown a live demo. McGowen-Hare can call Pandora and ask which store could offer in-store cleaning for "my bracelet", with the phone agent accessing all the context for which bracelet she's referring to based on her customer data.

Benioff hands the microphone to David Walmsley, chief digital and technology officer at Pandora, who explains that the firm now has over 6,000 stores worldwide. After a joke about how he was really missing companies pitching AI to him, Walmsley says that Agentforce is helping it to meet the level of customization and "magic in store" that Pandora customers seek.

We're moving quickly once again, now turning to MaryAnn Patel, SVP Product Management Sales Cloud at Salesforce, to hear how PepsiCo is using Agentforce Sales to "ensure no lead is left behind".

Slack, Patel explains, now gives sales workers all the information they need pulled directly through from Tableau.

Field technicians can even use Agentforce to upload photos of problems to receive tailored advice from the AI assistant.

Athina Kanioura, EVP, chief strategy and transformation officer at PepsiCo, joins Benioff onstage as he cracks open a can of Pepsi. Kanioura explains that PepsiCo is "the first company that will be agentic AI-first by the end of 2026" across every part of the business and every process.

Now onto FedEx, with Shibani Ahuja, SVP Enterprise AI Strategy, to explain how the delivery giant has used Data 360 and Agentforce IT Service to quickly answer customer queries at scale.

In a demo, Ahuja shows how Agentforce can give an unhelpful response to a customer question on how to ship a 50lb apparel box from Austin to Berlin, producing a link to a PDF rather than an answer. This is due to the broken up format of the file, Ahuja explains.

This is where Data 360 comes in. A user can upload the same, 200-page PDF to Data 360, using its built-in governance feature to mask internal FedEx employee contact details within the file. Agentforce in Slack can now answer the question in plaintext, with accurate and appropriate details included.

Ahuja also shows how Agentforce IT Service can remedy employee tickets such as asking for access to specific applications on a new laptop. Agentforce understand the employee's context and access privileges and can grant download access accordingly.

On the other end, IT workers can ask Agentforce to summarize IT tickets and queries to quickly identify widespread issues. In the example of a software upgrade breaking a corporate VPN, the IT worker can simply ask Agentforce to roll back the update. Agentforce can also autonomously message all the affected employees to note the issue has been fixed.

Richard Smith, COO at FedEx, tells Benioff that his firm is getting more questions about international shipping amid tariff changes and it needed a partner with scale – Salesforce – to address these challenges with Agentforce.

"FedEx owns one of the richest logistics and intelligence assets on planet Earth," he says. "We have networks that span over 220 countries and territories around the world – which is virtually all of them." He adds that FedEx moves 99% of the world's GDP in commerce, worth more than $2 trillion.

"So we're sitting on a very, very rich dataset – petabytes of data, a hundred billion ttansactions across various applications daily."

We're onto the final story now with Simon Mulcahy, executive advisor at Salesforce, explaining how Dell Technologies uses Agentforce Supply Chain to build processes. As a demo, he takes a hand-drawn diagram of Dell Technologies' supply onboarding processes and uploads it into Agentforce, to build all a process blueprint.

"We're training this engine all the time, on all sorts of documentation that explains everything about your operations, your processes, and that's in every language and for every industry."

Supplier onboarding managers at Dell Technologies can then access this data, using Agentforce to orchestrate the whole process automatically. An example manager 'Sarah' can ask "what can. do to go faster?" for onboarding a supplier, with Tableau data automatically pulled through to show where the main bottle neck is. Overall, Mulcahy says this can save enterprises months.

Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Technologies, is now speaking to Benioff to explain how to become an agentic enterprise.

"First of all, it's really important to understand what the major processes are inside the company," he says, adding that Dell Technologies has worked to meet the needs of its 19,000 supply chain users through AI automation to give workers more time to focus on valuable tasks.

For PowerEdge, PowerScale, PowerMax, are all business-critical hardware that Dell Technologies needs to ship smoothly, Dell says. Benioff responds that Dell is personally "leading the charge" in enterprise AI. In response, Dell says November 2022 showed the real power of unlocking "all the dark data" in the business world.

"We thought about this as 'if we don't get on this, a new company is going to come along and put us out of business," Dell admits. "I told my team we're going to have a new competitor and they're going to be better than us, faster than us in every business, lower cost. And the only way we're going to prevent that is we're going to become that company – and that's what we're doing."

Benioff now welcomes Julie Sweet, CEO at Accenture, to discuss how big tech can maximize AI potential while leaning on vendors, a broad ecosystem, and proper governance.

"It's not a small thing," Sweet says. "It's about reinventing and that's what we saw today, right? These five examples are not small – we salute them, they're operating the company differently.

Benioff rounds off by acknowledging that Salesforce is adjusting its pricing structures with the new Agentic Enterprise Licensing Agreement.

That's it for the opening keynote, but don't forget to check back as ITPro continues to cover all the latest from Dreamforce 2025.

We're sat in the Slack keynote, where Denise Dresser, CEO at Slack, is opening by acknowledging how many large companies already rely on Slack, including Box, OpenAI, Anthropic, Rivian, HPE, IBM, AWS, Accenture, and Verizon.

Customers are already using agents in Slack to fulfil functions such as HR, Dresser says. For example, reMarkable is addressing 56% of its HR enquiries using Agentforce in Slack.

OpenAI is another major customer for Slack, Dresser says. It uses Agentforce Sales in Slack and has built a custom GTM AI Assistant within Slack.

Mike Hanley, VP and CISO at General Motors, is now onstage to explain how GM is embracing AI within Slack to improve productivity and the overall customer experience.

Hanley says Slack has been "foundational" to how GM changes the way it works to meet the complex needs of the modern enterprise.

In the past nine months GM has seen its 16,000 Slack users balloon to 96,000 users. More than two million messages are sent on its Slack channels each day.

Harris is showing us a demo of Engine's custom Agentforce agents, May and Cloe. The former is a general knowledge agent, which ties into all the firm's custom data and relevant incidents or policies about which employees may need information.

Cloe is able to pull in the right team members to deal with a given incident, as raised by May when Harris asked if there's anything he needs to deal with. Harris has repeatedly stated that he would be happy if customers used AI to never need to open Salesforce Lightning again.

As shown in the opening keynote, Cloe can also roll back code that's been deployed if it's causing issues for users. When the agent does so, Harris can also see that failures have gone down – because the relevant Data Cloud and Tableau information has been brought to him in Slack.

Slack isn't just reliant on Agentforce, Harris adds, with internal AI capabilities of its own. Peter Doolan, EVP and chief customer officer at Slack, is here to tell us more.

Doolan highlights AI huddles as a particular favourite of his, with the ability to provide reminder based on previous conversations.

But the focus of today's event for Doolan is Slack Enterprise Search, which allows users to find the data in their chosen system – Google Drive, OneDrive, Asana, GitHub, and others – without leaving Slack.

"What's really powerful about Slackbot is it's grounded in your conversations, your workflows, your files," Doolan says, adding that Anthropic has used some of the AI leaps in Slack to accelerate its deal cycles by 60%.

In a demo, Slack can tell Doolan that while his pipeline is strong, Q4 renewals need attention – with a SOC 2 exception for Capricorn a particular priority. When he asks what can be done about Capricorn, Doolan is able to launch a thread with Slack and get actions that he can approve with a single button in the relevant channel.

"How many people have lost a document in a file server in the last, say, five minutes?" Doolan says, to laughter. Finding the SOC 2 compliance document in this way is a unique feature for Slack, Doolan says – he can easily find the relevant Google Drive and documentation through citation links in the Slackbot output.

To do his job quickly, Doolan asks Slackbot to create a prep document with the information, email the customer, and find the correct team and their availability.

“Imagine the power of Slackbot across your companies: it gives you the power of context and AI in the flow of work,” Doolan says.

“This is what AI was meant to be,” he adds.

Rob Seaman, CPO at Slack, has arrived to state that Salesforce wants to be the "home for all agents" – with well-appointed amenities for AI within the platform.

Seaman says Salesforce has tracked an 800% increase in agent and AI app creation in Slack this year. To give more detail, here's Gullermo Rauch, CEO at Vercel.

Vercel is building an AI cloud to bring customer ideas to life with agents and has pledged to be customer zero for its own products, Rauch says. He adds that Vercel is a strong believer in transparent, open source development and is "all about collaboration and the free flow of ideas" – and Slack is important here.

Vercel is bringing v0, its AI agent for building full-stack applications, to Slack. In a demo, we're shown how an idea expressed in a Slack channel can be built by a team of agents.

Landing pages built with v0 can then be iterated upon by sharing a link in a Slack channel, with entire teams able to collaborate on changes and additions. All of the plaintext suggestions will then be actioned by v0 agents.

That's it for our coverage of today's Slack keynote – but we'll be bringing more details on the importance of Slack to Salesforce's AI strategy as Dreamforce 2025 continues.

Dreamforce 2025 is the biggest that's taken place in years – and you can feel it on the ground. This corner of San Francisco has been well and truly taken over by the conference, with swathes of customers and partners milling about in every direction.

Salesforce has announced Slack will act as an “agentic OS” for customer data going forward and become a core pillar of its new Agentforce 360 platform.

Hot off the back of connecting Slack conversational data to AI apps via a new MCP server, Salesforce has rebranded Slack as an “agentic OS”, with the intention of bringing users closer to their business data and AI agents.

CRM data from Salesforce will now be directly accessible within Slack, starting with Salesforce Sales, HR, IT, and analytics platform Tableau.

In addition to making data more accessible, this will also allow users to interact directly with different functions within Slack.

For example, workers can resolve IT issues via the platform by speaking to AI agents rather than by logging a ticket, or logging expenses with a dedicated HR agent.

In the event that a problem can’t be resolved by an agent, an incident channel is created and relevant staff are assigned to look at the problem.

Each channel will also receive a new Channel Expert, a 24/7 agent that can answer questions specific to its organization.

A new Enterprise Search feature will also allow users to search for files across all their Salesforce data. Salesforce is also working on connectors to tie the search feature to common enterprise services such as Dropbox, Gmail, Notion, and Outlook, with a January 2026 release planned.

The firm added that a custom API, to connect Enterprise Search for internal enterprise systems, is also under development.

“We're reimagining all of Salesforce in Slack: imagine that you maybe don't log into Salesforce, you don't see Salesforce but it's there, it's coming to you in Slack, because that's where you're getting your work done,” Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce and CTO at Slack, told assembled media.

Closing the gap between Slack and competitors

Harris added that while Salesforce is working on making it even easier to bridge the gap between Slack and other productivity platforms such as Microsoft Teams, for enterprises that use both, “people aren’t really doing their work in a product like Teams”.

Slackbot, the digital assistant that has previously been used to send automated messages or reminders within channels, has been remade as a new AI companion.

For example, it will now be able to summarize threads or documents and draft project updates, as well as draw on a worker’s Salesforce, Google Drive, and OneDrive files to create drafts and to-do lists based on relevant action items.

The new Slackbot will observe users’ work patterns over time, including conversations, enterprise files the user interacts with, and organizational context with the aim of becoming a more personalized helper to individual workers.

Salesforce added that in the future, Slackbot will be able to build agents based on user requests, using only natural language inputs.

“Every company is asking where their agents will live, how they’ll get context, and

how to make them useful,” said Denise Dresser, CEO at Slack. “Slack is the answer. By making Slack the conversational interface for Salesforce, we’re giving every employee a trusted, unified home for AI and agents – and transforming how work gets done.”

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Salesforce has announced the launch of Agentforce 360, a new combined platform for building, deploying, and managing enterprise AI agents as well as for multimodal and Slack-native agent interaction.

Core to the new platform is a redeveloped Agentforce Builder, through which Salesforce is aiming to make the experience of creating and testing agents as easy as possible.

Workers will now be able to create agents conversationally, using natural language, with Agentforce capable of building agents based on the user’s brief. These agents can then be tested with rapid iterations via a live preview panel and easily exported or connected to existing systems via API or JSON representations.

This pairs with Agent Script, a new portable JSON language to define the behavior of AI agents that was designed with human readability in mind, as well as new configurable controls for Atlas Reasoning Engine, which powers Agentforce.

The announcement was made a day ahead of Dreamforce 2025, its annual conference held at the Moscone Center, San Francisco.

Salesforce eyes a more streamlined Agentforce

Slack is front and center for Agentforce 360, acting as a user interface for interacting directly with Salesforce apps, agents, and more directly within the communication platform. This includes direct interaction with AI agents, as well as connectors for third-party file storage platforms.

Read more in our dedicated write-up on all the new features coming to Slack.

Separately, Salesforce revealed Agentforce Voice, a new service that powers agents that can realistically interact with customers over the phone.

Enterprises can configure Agentforce Voice agents to follow their brand’s tone of voice, as well as the extent to which agents are allowed to interrupt customers and how long they stay on the phone to give customers a pleasant user experience.

Built on a new framework developed by Salesforce AI Research known as ‘eVerse’, Agentforce Voice can transcribe and stream audio with low latency so the conversation flows naturally.

Once built, agents can be used for phone calls, web apps, text messages and more, and natively link to contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms including Amazon Connect, Five9, Genesys, NiCE, and Vonage.

Salesforce doubles down on Agentforce for AI ROI

The CRM giant first launched its agentic AI offering, Agentforce, last September and has since doubled down on its use of the platform for internal as well as customer use.

Srini Tallapragada, president & chief engineering and customer success officer, told assembled media that Salesforce has been using Agentforce for customer service and that agents have already answered 1.8 million customer conversations.

Salesforce has repeatedly underlined the usefulness of Agentforce at both the bottom and top line, cutting across different enterprise segments.

For example, Tallapragada explained that Salesforce is also using Agentforce for lead generation, as a company that hosts huge events and often has customers express interest in its services.

“But even though we are a big company, we are also limited in the number of people – most often what happens is we are not able to follow up on all the leads,” he explained.

“We have an SDR team which only takes the top leads, top one percent, two percent. We leave a lot of leads without follow-up, it's too costly for us. Now Agentforce has an SDR which is doing thousands of leads, following up.”

Agents rooted in enterprise data

One of the standout features of the new platform is Context Indexing, which uses unstructured data from across an enterprise such as PDFs, images, flowcharts, and data tables as context for Agentforce.

The process is automatic and can be controlled by data teams using low-code inputs to analyze and fine-tune the knowledge bases upon which Agentforce draws within their enterprise environment.

Salesforce has added additional structured-level governance to Data 360 alongside the feature, to tie new context indexes to existing organizational security and privacy controls.

Tallapragada explained that without access to the right context enterprise AI pilots fall into “pilot purgatory”, citing a recent MIT study which found that just 5% of enterprise AI pilots generate ROI.

For example, Heathrow Airport's AI agent “Hallie”, which has hit a 90% chat resolution rate without needing human intervention, is grounded in data from its CRM, customer loyalty program, digital bookings, and Wi-Fi data to encompass relevant customer information alongside relevant live data such as boarding times.

The agent is accessible via WhatsApp and is core to Heathrow’s goal of increasing its digital contact efficiency by as much as 40%.

Individual parts of Agentforce 360 will be released on a rolling basis between now and the start of 2026.

Agentforce Voice and Context Indexing will be available this month, while Agent Script, New Agentforce Builder, and Agent Graph will be released in beta in November.

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Threat actors behind a spate of attacks on Salesloft Drift claim to have stolen over 1.5 billion records, according to reports.

Attacks on the third-party application have impacted dozens of organizations globally, with hackers using a combination of social engineering techniques and malicious OAuth tokens to access Salesforce instances and access data.

Responsibility for the attacks have been claimed by threat actors from the ShinyHunters, Lapsus$, and Scattered Spider groups, now referring to themselves as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters.

A host of major tech firms, including Google, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, and Cloudflare have all confirmed incidents linked to the hacking campaign in recent weeks.

According to reports from BleepingComputer, the hackers behind these attacks say they’ve hit upwards of 750 companies so far, stealing billions of records.

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and Co-founder of CyberSmart, said the recent claims are a “stark reminder that attacks aren’t just about zero days and flashy malware”.

“The exploit of trust and integrations can be equally devastating,” he said. “By leveraging third-party apps (in this case, Drift) and abused OAuth tokens, attackers have sidestepped many traditional perimeter defences to siphon off data from “trusted” CRM platforms.”

How hackers hit Salesloft

As ITPro previously reported, hackers gained access to Salesloft’s GitHub repository months before waging the campaign. This contained critical source code belonging to the company, which enabled them to source OAuth tokens used to conduct attacks.

Hackers belonging to the ShinyHunters group told BleepingComputer they used the TruffleHog security tool to scan compromised source code as part of this process, which revealed tokens for the Salesloft Drift and Drift Email platforms.

Thereafter, the group was able to steal the aforementioned records, taking information from a series of object tables where customer information was stored.

One particular object table, the ‘Case’ table, hosted information and text pertaining to customer support tickets.

BleepingComputer said the group shared a text file listing these source code folders in the breached Salesloft GitHub repository.

Previous analysis of the threat campaign by Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), published in late August, aligns with the claims made by ShinyHunters in this regard.

“The threat actor executed queries to retrieve information associated with Salesforce objects such as Cases, Accounts, Users, and Opportunities,” the tech giant said in a blog post.

“For example, the threat actor ran the following sequence of queries to get a unique count from each of the associated Salesforce objects.”

Protecting yourself from Salesforce attacks

The Salesloft attacks have been among the worst recorded in recent years, with a steady list of businesses being added to the victim list in recent weeks.

On 12 September, the FBI released a FLASH advisory urging organizations to shore up defences and remain vigilant amidst continued targeting by hackers.

The advisory detailed best practices and tips for organisations potentially at risk, including a comprehensive list of IP addresses linked to those behind the attacks.

Hackers involved in the campaign have been taking action to avoid scrutiny from law enforcement, however.

Last week, the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters announced that it plans to shut down in a series of messages posted on its Telegram channel. The veracity of these claims have been questioned by cybersecurity experts, however.

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The FBI has issued a FLASH alert over the threat posed to enterprises by threat groups targeting Salesforce environments.

According to the law enforcement agency, two threat groups, tracked as UNC6040 and UNC6395, have ramped up targeting of Salesforce customers amidst a spate of attacks in recent months.

“Both groups have recently been observed targeting organizations' Salesforce platforms via different initial access mechanisms,” the FBI said in its advisory.

The agency added it had released information to “maximize awareness” and provide indicators of compromise (IOCs) commonly associated with attacks by these groups.

So what should enterprises be looking out for?

How both groups are targeting Salesforce customers

According to the FBI, UNC6040 has been targeting Salesforce customers since October 2024, typically gaining initial access through social engineering techniques.

These include ‘vishing’ (voice-based phishing) attacks to dupe users into granting access to Salesforce accounts.

“UNC6040 threat actors commonly call victims’ call centers posing as IT support employees addressing enterprise-wide connectivity issues,” the advisory notes.

“Under the guise of closing an auto-generated ticket, UNC6040 actors trick customer support employees into taking actions that grant the attackers access or lead to the sharing of employee credentials, allowing them access to targeted companies’ Salesforce instances to exfiltrate customer data.”

During these attacks, threat actors have used ‘phishing panels’, directing victims to phony login pages which record login details and ultimately give the hackers access.

“UNC6040 threat actors have also directly requested user credentials and multifactor authentication codes to authenticate and add the Salesforce Data Loader application, facilitating data exfiltration,” the advisory added.

Meanwhile, UNC6395 has been observed using a different method, capitalizing on compromised OAuth tokens for the Salesloft Drift application.

“Using the compromised OAuth tokens and third-party app integration, UNC6395 threat actors were able to compromise victims’ Salesforce instances and exfiltrate data,” the FBI noted.

A host of organizations globally have been impacted by Salesloft Drift breaches in recent months, with Google, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare all revealing they’ve fallen victim.

Salesloft has since revoked active access and refresh tokens for Drift, preventing threat actors from accessing victims’ Salesforce platforms connected to the app.

How to know if you’ve been hit and what to do

In terms of IOCs, the FBI has detailed a list of IPs associated with both groups, with UNC6040 commanding the lion’s share. The agency recommends enterprises “investigate and vet indicators prior to taking action, such as blocking”.

A full list of UNC6040 IPs can be found below.

To mitigate the threat posed by these groups, the FBI also recommended a series of steps enterprises can take.

First and foremost, this includes training call center employees to recognize and report phishing attempts alongside implementation of MFA for “as many services as possible”.

Elsewhere, enterprises should implement authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) systems to “limit actions users can perform”.

“Apply the Principle of Least Privilege to user accounts and groups, allowing only the performance of authorized actions,” the agency said.

Other tips from the FBI include:

• Enforcement of IP-based access restrictions and monitoring of API usage.
• Monitoring network logs and browser session for anomalous activity and indicators of data exfiltration.
• Conduct reviews of third-party integrations connected to third-party software instances.

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The European Commission has accepted Microsoft concessions following an antitrust probe over its bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscriptions.

The decision by EU lawmakers means Microsoft will avoid a costly fine and brings to a close a long-running legal dispute after Slack lodged a complaint in 2020.

According to Slack, Microsoft was actively harming competition by bundling its Teams app with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. EU Lawmakers agreed with the claims, and formally charged the tech giant over antitrust violations.

As part of the agreement between Microsoft and the EU, the tech giant has agreed to make versions of its productivity solutions suites available without Teams and at a reduced price.

“Microsoft committed not to offer discount rates on Teams or on suites with Teams higher than those offered on suites without Teams,” the European Commission said in a statement.

Customers with long-term licenses will also be allowed to switch to providers without Teams, while the company has guaranteed “effective interoperability” between its own solutions and those of competitors.

“The commitments address the Commission's concerns related to the tying of Microsoft Teams to the company's popular productivity applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, included in its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites for business customers,” the EC added.

Microsoft concessions are a “meaningful step forward”

In a statement responding to the announcement, Sabastian Niles, president & chief legal officer at Salesforce, suggested the decision validates the initial complaint from Slack.

“The European Commission’s announcement of a binding and enforceable settlement to resolve Slack's complaint sends a clear message: Microsoft’s anticompetitive tying of Teams has harmed businesses, denied customers fair choice, and resulted in many years of lost competition,” he said.

Niles also described settlement as a “meaningful step forward” and urged lawmakers to hold the tech giant to its commitments.

“We applaud the Commission’s efforts to hold Microsoft accountable,” he said. “We look forward to the Commission’s rigorous monitoring and enforcement of the commitments to ensure Microsoft fully complies with its obligations.

EU lawmakers will enforce the terms of the settlement for seven years, while specific aspects such as interoperability and portability requirements will be enforced for a total of 10 years.

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The jury may still be out on whether generative AI is going to cause widespread job losses, but the impact of the technology is already being felt at Salesforce.

Speaking on The Logan Bartlett Show, CEO Marc Benioff claimed the CRM company has cut its customer support workforce by almost 50% thanks to the use of its own agentic AI platform, Agentforce.

“We’re customer zero for our new agentic service and support product at Salesforce,” Benioff said. “We have now done about a million and a half conversations with our customers (through the agentic layer) and at the same time … a million and half conversations also happened through our support agents during that same period.

“The SEASAT scores were about the same, which was stunning and also I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support – I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”

Despite these cuts, Benioff said the way the remaining humans are working with the AI agents - under the guidance of an omnichannel supervisor - “is the most exciting thing that’s happened in the last nine months for Salesforce”.

Agentforce was launched at Salesforce's annual company conference, Dreamforce, in 2024. Since then, Benioff has pitched the service as an answer to demographic changes such as global declining birthrates and labor shortages, which will make it harder to find and recruit new talent.

In a previous interview with Logan Bartlett, he mused that the company may not hire any new engineers in 2025 as it had seen “such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side-by-side with our engineers”.

Benioff noted that cost cutting wouldn’t be the main benefit of AI to businesses, but that it could also lead to an increase in revenue.

The Salesforce chief claimed that in the 26 years the company has been in operation it had over 100 million potential new client leads it hadn’t called back because there weren’t enough staff to do so.

Agentic AI, however, will supplement the human workforce and enable the company to follow up on all leads, which he claimed number more than 10,000 a week.

Expect more on agents at Dreamforce 2025

Benioff’s conversation with Barlett comes a little over a month before the company’s annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco.

While he gave away little in terms of what will be featured – other than the entertainment for the final evening – given the tone of the conversation, including claims that people entering the workforce now are “AI natives [and] agentic natives”, it’s likely to focus heavily on AI agents once again.

In recent weeks the company has launched Agentforce for Public Sector, highlighted its “advancing AI agent training” with enterprise digital twins at Salesforce AI Research, and released a blog titled “In the agentic era, human imagination must shape the jobs of tomorrow”.

In May this year, it also announced a planned acquisition of Informatica to enhance its agentic AI service – something that may well also be discussed during the event.

ITPro will be reporting live from Dreamforce, which runs from 14-16 October, so be sure to check back then for news, updates, and exclusives from the event.

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Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has revealed that hackers harvested user credentials from Salesforce customers in a widespread campaign during the first half of this month.

The attacker, tracked as UNC6395, targeted Salesforce customer instances through compromised OAuth tokens associated with the Salesloft Drift third-party application.

"The actor systematically exported large volumes of data from numerous corporate Salesforce instances. GTIG assesses the primary intent of the threat actor is to harvest credentials," researchers said in an advisory.

"After the data was exfiltrated, the actor searched through the data to look for secrets that could be potentially used to compromise victim environments."

These secrets included sensitive credentials such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) access keys (AKIA), passwords, and Snowflake-related access tokens.

"The techniques used in this campaign weren’t novel in terms of exploitation. The attacker didn’t need to break Salesforce itself, they abused OAuth tokens from a widely used and trusted third-party integration to gain access," commented Cory Michal, CSO of AppOmni.

"They then used that foothold in a very disciplined and methodical way. They ran structured SOQL queries, targeted high-value data like credentials, and attempted to cover their tracks by deleting jobs."

Salesloft, working with Salesforce, has now revoked all active access and refresh tokens within the Drift application. Salesforce has also removed the Drift application from the Salesforce AppExchange until further notice, pending further investigation.

While UNC6395 demonstrated operational security awareness by deleting query jobs, researchers said logs weren't affected. As such, organizations should still review relevant logs for evidence of data exposure.

They should search for sensitive information and secrets contained within Salesforce objects and take appropriate action, such as immediately revoking API keys, resetting passwords, rotating credentials, and reviewing permissions.

Researchers also urged enterprises to carry out investigations to determine whether any secrets have been abused.

“This campaign underscores that highly permissioned OAuth and SaaS-to-SaaS integrations represent one of the largest risks and blind spots for organizations today. Once an integration is compromised, attackers can operate with the same level of access granted to that app, often bypassing traditional MFA controls," said Michal.

"The risk is compounded if organizations are insecurely storing secrets, API keys, or credentials in Salesforce objects. In those cases, if the data was exfiltrated, it’s very likely that connected systems such as AWS, Snowflake, or VPNs have already been compromised as well. That makes the blast radius of these attacks far larger than just the SaaS application itself."

The report doesn't identify UNC6395, but the sophistication of the operation implies a state-sponsored attacker, Michal said.

"What’s most noteworthy about the UNC6395 attacks is both the scale and the discipline. This wasn’t a one-off compromise; hundreds of Salesforce tenants of specific organizations of interest were targeted using stolen OAuth tokens, and the attacker methodically queried and exported data across many environments," said Michal.

"The combination of scale, focus, and tradecraft makes this campaign stand out."

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The true scale of the Allianz Life data breach has been laid bare, with leaked credential notification site Have I Been Pwned putting the number of affected accounts at 1.1 million.

The numbers represent the vast majority of the company's 1.4 million customers in the North America region, along with the data of financial professionals and some Allianz Life employees contained in Salesforce Accounts and Contacts databases.

Data exposed in the incident is believed to include dates of birth, email addresses, genders, names, phone numbers, and physical addresses. According to Allianz, Social Security numbers were also taken.

More than seven-in-ten of the exposed email addresses had already been affected by previously-disclosed data breaches.

When the breach was first confirmed, Allianz Life said that 'most' of its North American customers had been affected, but that its core network and policy administration systems didn't appear to have been accessed.

The insurer said it would provide a full consumer notice once it has finished identifying and contacting affected individuals.

Jon Abbott, CEO of ThreatAware, described the scale of the breach as “significant”, noting that the data leaked represents a treasure trove of information to target victims.

"The sensitive and valuable information held in CRM tools is exactly why it’s targeted by attackers,” he said. “The data can be used by other cyber criminals for identity theft and phishing campaigns."

What happened with the Allianz Life data breach?

The breach, which took place on July 16 and was discovered a day later, is believed to have involved a social engineering attack that involved impersonating IT support staff.

This saw hackers ask employees to accept a connection to a Salesforce Data Loader, which was then used to exfiltrate data from the CRM system.

The attackers used malicious OAuth applications to infiltrate Salesforce instances, before downloading the company databases.

The attack has since been claimed by the notorious ShinyHunters threat group, which is believed to overlap with the Scattered Spider and Lapsus groups. They are now believed to be preparing a data leak site to pressure Allianz and other victims into making a ransom payment.

The group, which first emerged in 2020, is also believed to be responsible for attacks on Salesforce systems at several retailers, as well as at Google, Cisco, Qantas, Santander, Ticketmaster, Tokopedia, AT&T and most recently Workday.

Workday confirmed it had fallen victim to an attack last week, warning customers that exposed information could then be used in follow-up social engineering attacks - a common tactic for threat actors.

"Groups such as ShinyHunters rely on fast moving social engineering tactics – this typically involves calling and emailing employees of the victim organization and attempting to extort them. If this does not work, they then launch a leak site with the aim of pressuring victims into payment," said Abbott.

"This pattern in their attacks is why the security fundamentals are so important. Accurate asset inventories, tamper-proof identity verification and hardened service desk processes are all essential.”

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Workday has confirmed a data breach after threat actors gained access to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

In a blog post on Friday, the HR tech giant said hackers gained access to sensitive information hosted on the affected CRM system, but insisted no customer tenants – or the data contained within – were accessed.

Information exposed in the breach primarily included contact details such as names, email addresses, and phone numbers, the company revealed.

“We recently identified that Workday had been targeted and threat actors were able to access some information from our third-party CRM platform,” the company stated in its advisory.

“There is no indication of access to customer tenants or the data within them. We acted quickly to cut the access and have added extra safeguards to protect against similar incidents in the future.”

Given the nature of the information exposed in the breach, Workday warned customers to be wary of potential social engineering campaigns in the wake of the incident.

“It’s important to remember that Workday will never contact anyone by phone to request a password or any other secure details,” the firm said. “All official communications from Workday come through our trusted support channels.”

Kevin Marriott, senior manager of cyber and head of SecOps at Immersive, said this is a typical tactic observed in the aftermath of a data breach.

“This information is then used in subsequent social engineering attempts, or combined with other data already collected to make future social engineering attempts even more personalized, using the data captured," he said.

Workday data breach the latest CRM-based incident

While Workday didn’t specifically identify the CRM system affected in the breach, the news comes in the wake of a string of Salesforce-based attacks on enterprises globally.

Threat intelligence research shows that the ShinyHunters threats group has conducted a wide-reaching campaign targeting Salesforce users in recent months.

Companies impacted in the campaign are believed to include Qantas, Allianz Life, Adidas, and several other retail brands worldwide.

Similarly, Google recently confirmed it had been attacked as part of the campaign. The discovery came after threat researchers at the tech giant investigating the ShinyHunters group realized it too had fallen victim.

The social engineering campaign involves duping employees into linking a malicious OAuth app to the target company’s Salesforce instances.

Once access to an impacted database has been achieved, threat actors are then able to access, query, and exfiltrate sensitive information from customer environments, according to Google’s blog post detailing the campaign.

Marriott noted that CRM tools are a popular target for threat actors, largely due to the volume of useful information hosted on these platforms.

“CRM tooling is often a key target for threat actors as they typically store limited, but valuable information that threat actors can either use themselves or sell on, with databases full of information that is useful such as email addresses and other personal information,” he said.

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Chief financial officers (CFOs) are now betting big on AI, despite taking a cautious approach during the early days of the generative AI ‘boom’.

A new study from Salesforce shows CFOs have “fundamentally shifted their approach” to AI, now viewing it as a business-critical technology and a key revenue driver.

Nearly three-quarters (70%) of CFOs reported having a “conservative” AI strategy in 2020, but the emergence of generative and agentic AI tools mean just 4% are pursuing a cautious approach.

In contrast, a third of respondents told Salesforce they have now adopted an “aggressive approach” to the technology, ramping up adoption and integration across an array of business functions.

A key factor behind this change, Salesforce noted, lies in positive returns on investment (ROI). Concerns about whether the technology would deliver bang for its buck were a frequent talking point across 2023 and 2024.

Research from the CRM giant last year showed 65% of CFOs faced huge pressure to deliver a return on tech investments. However, with the arrival of AI agents, there’s been a marked change in tune.

Nearly two-thirds (61%) of CFOs said AI agents have changed how they evaluate ROI and are now measuring success based on other metrics such as productivity and efficiency, as opposed to simple financial rewards.

One respondent told Salesforce measuring ROI on “older technology often depends on immediate, measurable results”. With agentic AI, this is more of a slow burn situation where returns "accrue over the long term”.

“Traditional technology investments mainly focus on immediate financial returns that can be easily visible,” another respondent said. “But AI benefits are a mix of long and short term duration. KPIs are focused based on business outcomes.”

Robin Washington, president and chief operational and financial officer at Salesforce, said the introduction of the technology has prompted a “decisive and strategic shift for CFOs”.

“With AI agents, we're not merely transforming business models; we're fundamentally reshaping the entire scope of the CFO function,” Washington said.

“This demands a new mindset as we expand beyond financial stewards to also become architects of agentic enterprise value.”

What are CFOs excited about?

CFOs now view AI agents as a key revenue driver and a means to streamline operations, according to Salesforce. On average, financial officers are dedicating 25% of their total AI budgets on agents, underlining the huge appetite for the technology.

The logic behind this heightened investment lies in the long-term saving and broader revenue gains, the survey found. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of CFOs said they believe AI agents will cut costs and increase revenue by up to 20%.

There are concerns, however. Privacy risks associated with the technology were earmarked as a leading issue, cited by 66% of respondents.

“Other technology does not typically involve the ethical risks AI does, if AI goes wrong, the reputational cost affects ROI in ways regular tools never would,” one respondent told Salesforce.

Similarly, with enterprises facing challenging macroeconomic conditions, the long time to ROI was also a notable worry, cited by 56% of respondents.

Regardless, 61% said that AI agents, or “digital labor” as Salesforce dubs it, will be crucial in navigating challenging conditions and remaining competitive in the current economic environment.

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Google has revealed customer data was exposed following a breach of a Salesforce database.

An investigation by the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIC) found the database, which is used to store information pertaining to small business customers, was targeted by the ShinyHunters cyber criminal group.

“Analysis revealed that data was retrieved by the threat actor during a small window of time before the access was cut off,” Google said.

“The data retrieved by the threat actor was confined to basic and largely publicly available business information, such as business names and contact details."

While no details on the scale of breach were disclosed by Google, ITPro has approached the company for clarification.

The admission came in the wake of an investigation into the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of the ShinyHunters group, also known as UNC6040.

According to Google, the ransomware gang frequently targets enterprise Salesforce databases – albeit not through brute force or capitalizing on flaws, but by using social engineering techniques such as phishing or vishing.

“A prevalent tactic in UNC6040's operations involves deceiving victims into authorizing a malicious connected app to their organization's Salesforce portal,” the firm explained.

“This application is often a modified version of Salesforce’s Data Loader, not authorized by Salesforce,” the blog post added.

“During a vishing call, the actor guides the victim to visit Salesforce's connected app setup page to approve a version of the Data Loader app with a name or branding that differs from the legitimate version.”

Upon gaining access to impacted databases, the threat group is able to access, query, and exfiltrate sensitive information directly from customer environments, the blog post noted.

“This methodology of abusing Data Loader functionalities via malicious connected apps is consistent with recent observations detailed by Salesforce in their guidance on protecting Salesforce environments from such threats,” Google said.

Google is the latest to encounter ShinyHunters

The ShinyHunters threat group has been around for some time, having claimed a number of high-profile victims in recent years. In May 2024, the ransomware outfit claimed responsibility for a breach at Santander which affected millions of customers globally.

At the time, the group said it gained access to a tranche of financial data belonging to around 30 million customers, including credit card details, which was listed on its dark web site.

That incident occurred around the same time as a major breach at Ticketmaster which affected over 560 million customers worldwide. Once again, the group listed a 1.3TB database for sale on BreachForums.

Google’s recent investigation into the ransomware group showed it is once again ramping up activities.

“We believe threat actors using the 'ShinyHunters' brand may be preparing to escalate their extortion tactics by launching a data leak site (DLS),” the company stated in its blog post.

“We continue to monitor this actor and will provide updates as appropriate.”

William Wright, CEO of Closed Door Security, echoed the warning from Google, noting that organisations should take immediate action to shore up Salesforce database protections.

“ShinyHunters has recently executed a huge volume of attacks via Salesforce and it is essential organizations take note of these. The threat actors have also claimed many attacks are still unreported, so we can expect more victims to be announced in coming weeks," he said.

“In the wake of these attacks, organizations are recommended to take steps to secure their Salesforce databases,” Wright added.

“This can be achieved by teaching employees about this attack trend, ensuring MFA is applied to all employee and enterprise accounts, and limiting employee access to the minimum level of privileges they require.”

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Marc Benioff isn’t convinced AI will result in mass layoffs despite repeated warnings in recent months – and that's all based on how Salesforce is approaching the technology internally.

Speaking at the 2025 AI for Good Global Summit, the Salesforce chief exec told Nicholas Thompson, CEO at The Atlantic, that fears over AI devastating white collar workers aren’t being reflected in the company’s experiences so far.

“That isn’t how I see AI,” he said. “Maybe they have AI I don’t have. But in the AI I have, it’s not going to be some huge mass layoff of white collar workers.”

Benioff added that AI adoption will result in a “radical augmentation of the workforce” rather than its deterioration.

His comments came just weeks after research showed AI has the potential to severely impact entry-level workers across a range of industries. It’s a talking point that’s been thrust into the media limelight in recent months amid warnings from leading industry figures.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for example, warned AI may cut half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years.

“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” he told Axios. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”

In contrast, Benioff maintains a more optimistic outlook on the technology, largely based on engagement with Salesforce customers. Simply put, he stated, no one he’s spoken to in recent months has hinted at widespread job cuts as a result of AI.

“When I’m talking to our customers, I’m not hearing them say ‘oh, now I’m laying off these people because this A, B, C technology increase because of AI’,” he said.

“So I think we need to somehow shed the fear of what that all means.”

Salesforce’s hiring pause and big sales push

Salesforce has implemented some hiring restrictions in recent months as a result of AI, which Benioff acknowledged.

The company paused hiring of software engineers due to its success with agentic AI, while hiring for customer service staff has also been paused.

This, Benioff added, is so the company can “let AI productivity really take hold”.

“Because of the incredible productivity opportunity for AI in engineering, this year let’s take some time to actually incorporate that in so we’re not focused on hiring another thousand, two thousand, three thousand engineers,” he said.

Running parallel to hiring pauses in some areas of the business, Benioff told Thompson the company is accelerating hires in sales. This approach was first revealed in February this year when the company announced plans to cut 1,000 roles while hiring for roles in the sales segment.

A key factor here is to meet growing demand for AI solutions, particularly its agentic AI service, Agentforce. Announced in September last year, The success of Agentforce has prompted a sharp pivot at the company, and reports from Fortune show it recently surpassed the one millionth agent-customer interaction.

How Salesforce is approaching AI internally

Benioff’s views on the impact of AI appear to be reflected in how Salesforce is shaking up areas of the business. In a recent op-ed for the Financial Times, he revealed that thousands of employees have been redeployed to other areas and roles.

Indeed, 51% of Salesforce hiring in the first quarter of this year was internal, highlighting the lateral movement of staff throughout the company.

Notably, Benioff wrote that humans “must remain at the center of the story” as the technology continues to take hold across enterprises globally.

“As the CEO of a technology company that helps customers deploy AI, I believe this revolution can usher in an era of unprecedented growth and impact,” he wrote.

“Jobs will change, and as with every major technological shift, some will go away - and new ones will emerge,” Benioff added. “At Salesforce, we’ve experienced this first-hand: Our organization is being radically reshaped.”

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When Marc Benioff cut the ribbon on Salesforce’s agentic AI strategy at the company’s Dreamforce conference last year, the announcement marked what he described as the next step in the evolution of the technology.

Clunky AI assistants, glorified chatbots, and repackaged solutions with a sprinkling of AI were last year's news – the future for enterprise efficiency was an army of automated, self-sufficient bots picking up the slack for human workers.

So far, it seems his gambit paid off. In the months following the announcement a host of industry competitors and tech sector heavyweights jumped on the bandwagon, and at this point you can’t go a week without a new agentic AI product announcement.

Salesforce struck an early lead with its Agentforce service, and since then agentic AI has dominated the CRM giant’s messaging - from customer service and sales to frontline trade workers, its agents are everywhere.

The approach here isn’t a slapdash bombardment of agents akin to the early days of the generative AI boom where assistants were flying out the traps. The company is investing heavily in the underlying infrastructure which supports this.

In recent weeks the company announced the acquisition of Informatica, its largest since Slack in 2021. Informatica will, as Salesforce points out, bring a broad data catalog, new integration capabilities, and governance, quality, and privacy controls aimed at underpinning the Agentforce service.

Combined with MuleSoft, another data integration specialist in the portfolio, and Tableau, its data analytics and visualization platform, the firm’s solutions ecosystem is all centered around facilitating Agentforce.

Even agentic integration with Slack is ramping up, with CPO Rob Seaman noting that it’s now the “cockpit” for orchestrating AI agents across its solutions estate.

Simply put, Salesforce is putting in the legwork to frame itself as a one-stop shop for agentic AI services, and it’s working.

Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UK, told assembled media at the Agentforce World Tour event in London this week that enterprise interest in AI is soaring.

“I’ve got a very, very strong C-suite agenda,” she said. “Honestly, the strongest I’ver ever seen in my career. But at the same time a strong board pull, I’ve never seen that. I’ve never had to host a board alongside a C-suite or exec team in the same briefing session.

“We’ve been doing that systematically on AI at least for about 18 months now. That tells us something.”

In response to a later question, Bahrololoumi noted that Salesforce is also putting its money where its mouth is on AI, unlocking marked benefits from its own agents.

“I wasn’t kidding about the benefits we’re seeing at Salesforce. We knew we had to be customer zero, we applied it to our own business.”

The Salesforce UK chief exec said the company explored how agents could be deployed in areas such as sales, service, commerce and marketing. All told, the move paid dividends.

“I remember putting a metric and I thought of being a bit bold, but I estimated between 30 and 65% average call time reduction,” she said. “What I didn’t count on was 85% resolution without human intervention. Only 2% of our conversations that came through Agentforce required human intervention.”

Her keynote address earlier in the day specifically highlighted the fact the company is saving $50 million internally through the use of AI agents, showing it’s not just lip service and marketing jargon.

Agentic use cases are Salesforce’s bread and butter

Internal value is all fine and well, but what about customers actually using the Agentforce service? Again, the picture painted by the CRM giant seems rosy.

At the conference, examples of the service being used in frontline operations were abundant. Capita, for example, has been using Agentforce to streamline recruitment activities and CEO Adolfo Hernandez joined Bahrololoumi on stage to wax lyrical about the benefits of the technology.

These use cases are critical for the company moving forward, as it allows it to show tangible, real-world examples of Agentforce actually being used to unlock value from the technology. This was severely lacking across the industry during the early days when concerns over return on investment (ROI) were commonplace.

Speaking to ITPro, Matt Mullen, analyst at Deep Research, said early examples of Agentforce in action will be vital in broadening the appeal to a wider enterprise audience.

“We are eight months into Agentforce and at the last earnings call, they've got 8,000 Agentforce customers signed up, 4,000 of which are paying and 800 are in production,” he explained.

“So there's a funnel of getting customers actually using the software, and because of the way it's been paid for, that keeps the cash register ringing.”

Mullen noted that Salesforce has been candid about the short-term impact of the service, with public comments noting that it doesn’t expect to be making any large financial gains this year.

But that’s part of the process for Salesforce. It’s building up a catalog of use cases that will inevitably snowball and deliver long-term value.

“This year for them is about building that flow of customers to the on-ramp and using the platform,” he said. “Key for that is getting the customers to bring use cases that they’re familiar with, or Salesforce enabling them to develop use cases for agents”

This initial customer interest is typically from those with a mature foundation within the Salesforce ecosystem, Mullen added, with examples from firms like Capita, Saks Fifth Avenue, Formula One, and Shark/Ninja making perfect sense.

“I think in the first instance, this first wave is customers who are mature with the rest of the Salesforce stack, using Agentforce to augment those processes with things you can do with AI that you couldn't do with the previous technology,” he explained.

“But what needs to come behind that are the next wave of people who are building net new processes, who are developing net new sets of tasks to follow behind, to use the praxis demonstrated by the mature customers who come on stage, the customers that come to these [events], they're the lighthouses,” Mullen added.

“They're the lighthouses which the next generation, the bulk, the mass of customers will want to follow later on.”

Salesforce’s UK chief executive Zahra Bahrololoumi believes the UK tech industry has huge potential and emphasized the CRM giant’s commitment to the market.

Speaking at the Agentforce World Tour conference in London, Bahrololoumi told ITPro the UK has a variety of key advantages - particularly compared to European counterparts.

Looking back, she noted, the volume of investment in AI-related startups just two years ago was a “very strong indicator” of the state of the industry.

“If you look at the UK number it’s probably larger than a couple of our neighbours in mainland Europe put together,” she said.

The potential of the UK’s tech sector isn’t just measured by investment figures, however. Bahrololoumi also highlighted the country’s deep talent pools as a key differentiator alongside the collaborative nature of the national tech ecosystem.

“You also look at the density of talent, you look at the profile of leadership, you look at the quality of the organizations that we have and the customers, the nature of the businesses we have in the UK - plus progressive educational institutions,” she explained.

“I think the thing that makes us quite unique is the level of collaboration that actually exists across all of those stakeholders. None of us are going to win alone. Everything we talked about, whether it’s skills, whether it’s regulation, whether it’s policy, all comes from the interconnectedness of all of the key stakeholders - government, education, business, communities, people.

"So I think we've got some fabulous conditions within the UK."

It’s these conditions that make the UK a “priority market” for Salesforce, Bahrololoumi added, and the company has made no secret of its continued focus on its activities across the country.

Last year, the firm announced a new AI Centre focused on research and development and community engagement. The London-based center marked the first of its kind for the CRM giant, which at the time said represented a huge “vote of confidence” in the UK.

Salesforce doubled down on this commitment at the World Tour event today, with Bahrololoumi announcing a new collaboration with Brunel University during the opening keynote session.

The partnership will see closer ties developed between the Salesforce UK AI Centre and Brunel’s own Centre for Artificial Intelligence. This again will focus on research and development in AI, as well as education in the form of workshops, community engagement, and conferences.

All praise for UK tech

Bahrololoumi's comments come hot on the heels of Jensen Huang’s praise for the UK tech sector this week.

During a discussion with prime minister Keir Starmer at London Tech Week, Huang suggested that the UK is in a “Goldilocks circumstance” on account of its burgeoning AI sector and sizable investment.

The UK ranks third on AI investment globally, sitting behind the United States and China.

While Huang may have high hopes for the sector, there were lingering concerns voiced at London Tech Week - most notably around the UK’s infrastructure.

The Nvidia chief exec described the UK as the “largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure”, and compared the challenge for the sector as akin to astronomers trying to work without modern telescopes.

“You can’t do machine learning without a machine – and so the ability to build these AI supercomputers here in the UK will naturally attract more startups, it will naturally enable all the rich ecosystem of researchers here to do their life’s work,” he explained.

Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica could be a game changer for the company’s agentic AI ambitions, according to industry analysts, but questions still remain over how it will fit under the CRM giant’s umbrella.

The $8 billion deal, announced earlier this week, will create the “most complete, agent-read data platform in the industry”, according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

By bringing it into the fold at the second time of asking, Salesforce will be combining the extensive data management expertise Informatica has to offer with its Agentforce and Data Cloud services.

Agentforce was unveiled by the company last year at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and gives users access to a range of autonomous AI agents which can carry out tasks in place of humans.

Agentic AI has quickly become the big buzz word in the industry, with all the big players capitalizing on this trend. Agents require a vast pool of high-quality data to function correctly, however, and crucially, this data has to be relevant to the particular use-cases and domains in which enterprise users operate.

Informatica helps solve this problem for Salesforce by essentially providing a more robust data foundation from which agentic AI solutions can be deployed. The company boasts a “rich data catalog”, according to CEO Amit Walia, while similarly offering new governance and data management capabilities.

Forrester VP principal analyst Noel Yuhanna said integrating these aspects of the Informatica portfolio shows why the deal is a “bold and highly strategic move” by Salesforce, addressing a critical gap in its own data management tools.

“The acquisition markedly elevates Salesforce’s position across all critical dimensions of modern data management, including data integration, ingestion, pipelines, master data management (MDM), metadata management, transformation, preparation, quality, and governance in the cloud,” Yuhanna said.

“These capabilities are no longer optional — they are foundational for building an AI-ready enterprise, especially as the industry accelerates toward agentic AI.”

Yuhanna added that the current agentic AI craze has created an impetus for enterprises to more tightly integrate data and AI. They’re “two sides of the same coin” now, and it’s a balancing act that can’t be ignored.

“This acquisition strengthens Salesforce’s ability to do just that, laying the groundwork for next-generation data that can power intelligent, autonomous, and personalized experiences at scale to support AI use cases,” he said.

“Crucially, this positions Salesforce to deliver a unified customer data fabric, enabling a truly end-to-end platform for data, AI, and analytics, tailored to customer-centric use cases. Real-time data integration across diverse sources is becoming critical for advanced customer engagement, and this move brings Salesforce much closer to that vision.”

Salesforce needs to nail the Informatica integration

The acquisition does raise questions about exactly where Informatica fits within the broader Salesforce ecosystem. Informatica provides data management and integration tools and operates in roughly the same domain as MuleSoft, which the company acquired for an estimated $6.5 billion in 2018.

While the two companies will complement each other post-acquisition, Gaurav Dhillon, CEO of SnapLogic and co-founder of Informatica, suggested this could create an overlap that will pose challenges for customers.

"I have at best, a mixed feeling about this. On the one hand, I understand why it might be happening and it makes sense in theory. It is a crystal clear ‘I-told-you-so’ moment for me and why I founded SnapLogic, because most enterprises are going to need one platform, for application and data integration,” he said.

“But on the other hand, it will likely create massive turmoil for Informatica (and MuleSoft) customers.

“That turmoil is inevitable when two legacy integration platforms like MuleSoft and Informatica have to be squeezed down to one; to truly get a grip on important business data about customers, suppliers and markets.”

Dhillon noted that this integration could be a “slow, painful process” that takes years, even if all goes to plan.

“This challenge is compounded because you can’t go backwards in time to pre-cloud and pre-GenAI technology.”

Yuhanna echoed Dhillon’s comments with regard to integration challenges, noting that timely execution will be vital to avoid disruption for customers.

“The ultimate success of this acquisition will depend on how quickly and seamlessly Salesforce can integrate Informatica’s capabilities into its broader data ecosystem,” he said. “The strategic rationale is clear, but execution will be the decisive factor.”

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Salesforce has announced plans to acquire Informatica in a deal valued at $8 billion as the firm continues with its AI focus.

In a statement confirming the acquisition, Salesforce said the deal will enhance its data management capabilities and will complement its agentic AI service.

Salesforce launched its Agentforce service in September last year, which gives users access to a range of autonomous AI agents focused on various areas, including customer service, HR, and recruitment.

The firm has even touted the use of AI agents to support frontline trade workers in recent months. More than 1,000 deals have been struck with enterprises for the Agentforce service since it launched, according to Salesforce.

“The combination of Informatica’s rich data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services with the Salesforce platform will establish a unified architecture for agentic AI — enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across the modern enterprise,” the company said in a statement announcing the acquisition.

By integrating Informatica’s solutions, Salesforce aims to bolster data transparency and governance capabilities, as well as provide a broader pool of metadata used to train and inform AI agents.

Salesforce eyes unified agentic AI gains

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who has been highly vocal on the potential of the firm’s Agentforce service over the last eight months, said the deal will create the “most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry”.

He added: “By uniting the power of Data Cloud, MuleSoft, and Tableau with Informatica’s industry-leading, advanced data management capabilities, we will enable autonomous agents to deliver smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes for every company, and significantly strengthen our position in the $150 billion-plus enterprise data market.”

The acquisition is expected to close early in the next fiscal year, according to Salesforce, and the company expects the deal to boost operating margins from the second year.

Informatica is Salesforce’s largest acquisition since it purchased Slack in 2021 as part of a $28 billion deal. The company acquired Tableau Software two years prior in a deal valued at $15.3 billion.

Salesforce shelved talks with the company last year after negotiations over an acquisition fell through.

“Joining forces with Salesforce represents a significant leap forward in our journey to bring ​​data and AI to life by empowering businesses with the transformative power of their most critical asset — their data,” said Amit Walia, CEO of Informatica.

“We have a shared vision for how we can help organizations harness the full value of their data in the AI era.”

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claims Microsoft did "horrible things" to Slack prior to its acquisition — and could be ready to repeat its "playbook" of anti-competitive behaviour with OpenAI.

The Salesforce CEO isn't one to mince his words, having previously compared Microsoft Copilot to "Clippy," and called its AI tools a "huge disaster".

In his latest war of words with the tech giant, sparked in a recent podcast appearance, Benioff told SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin Microsoft did “horrible things” to Slack before it was acquired by Salesforce.

Salesforce purchased the enterprise messaging app in 2020 in a deal worth over $27 billion, The move came four years after Microsoft reportedly decided against buying the platform for $8 billion, choosing instead to focus on Skype and launch Teams.

Slack and Microsoft had a long-running feud, with the former having accused Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior for bundling Teams with Office 365. The company alleged this constituted "illegal behaviour".

Six months later, Salesforce bought Slack and last year Microsoft agreed to unbundle Teams from Microsoft 365 and Office 365.

"You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to Slack before we bought it," Benioff said. "That was pretty bad and they were running their playbook and did a lot of dark stuff. And it's all gotten written up in an EU complaint that Slack made before we bought them."

Without going into further details, Benioff said Microsoft's treatment of Slack was "pretty nasty", pointing to a similar "playbook" that the Redmond giant has allegedly employed before.

Benioff referenced the ‘browser wars’ with Netscape in the late 1990s and Microsoft’s conduct during that period.

"That playbook should get ripped up and thrown away," Benioff said.

ITPro approached Microsoft for comment on Benioff’s claims, but the company had not replied by the time of publishing.

Benioff thinks OpenAI could be in Microsoft’s crosshairs

Lemkin suggested it was no surprise there is "an inherent aggressiveness in enterprise software," adding that it was funny to think of Microsoft bothering to worry about Slack as Azure is "so rejuvenated right now".

But Benioff warned that the pattern he previously described could happen again with OpenAI and Microsoft.

While Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI — and CEO Sam Altman once called it the "best bromance in tech" — the partnership showed signs of stress early this year with an announcement that included changes to exclusivity, though Microsoft retained a right of first refusal.

Reports in December last year also suggested Microsoft had been exploring the possibility of using internal and alternative third-party models to power its flagship Microsoft 365 Copilot service.

The tech giant told ITPro in January that OpenAI “continues to be our partner on frontier models”.

More recently, Benioff noted that OpenAI revealed its technology stack without any mention of Microsoft, hinting that this further highlights the two companies pursuing separate paths.

"That was extremely interesting and you can see how Microsoft is really starting to run a separate playbook against OpenAI," he said.

"I think that's now how Microsoft thinks," he added. "Microsoft is a company that wants to own it all, control it all, if they see a hot company or hot startup, they ask themselves: ‘hey why is that not in our world’.

“They feign an acquisition and then based on that they execute a playbook — or in the case of OpenAI, a partnership is gonna become a competition."

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Business leaders are under immense pressure to back up their decisions with data, but data skills and literacy issues are creating a crisis of confidence.

Research from Salesforce, released as part of a new product launch, found that more than three-quarters of business leaders think the growth in AI increases their need to be data-driven.

Unfortunately, though, many are struggling. More than seven-in-ten said they were under pressure to use data to demonstrate business value. Indeed, they said their career depended on their ability to use facts, metrics, and data to drive decisions.

86% went a step further, saying their careers are reliant on how data literate they are in terms of using methods and tools to extract actionable insights from data. This drive for data literacy was felt by nine-in-ten leaders in sales and marketing.

"There is an increasing amount of pressure on business leaders to use data in today’s hyper-competitive environment," said Southard Jones, chief product Officer of Tableau, Salesforce's analytics platform.

"Yet fragmented enterprise data and complex analytics tools are common obstacles leaders face that can significantly hinder confident decision-making."

Confidence in data quality is dipping

Meanwhile, business leaders don't trust the data itself. Confidence in data’s relevance to business objectives is down by 18% since 2023 while confidence in its accuracy down 27%.

Fewer than half said their data strategies fully align with their business priorities - another big drop since 2023. The answer, said Salesforce, is agentic analytics.

"Agentic analytics offers a solution by unifying data and empowering AI agents to proactively deliver trusted, real-time insights to everyone, enabling data-driven decisions for everyone – even those who don’t consider themselves ‘data people," said Jones.

These claims come amidst the launch of new features for its Tableau Next product, including three AI agents. Data Pro helps convert raw data into business language, automating extract, transform, load (ETL) processes.

Concierge is a natural language interface allowing users to ask questions in everyday terms and receive visualizations and recommendations - "What are my best sales opportunities?", for example.

Similarly, the firm said its Inspector tool continuously monitors data for key changes, identifies patterns and trends, and surfaces insights that humans might never think to look for.

"We’re shifting from basic reports to a world where AI is a collaborative decision-making partner," said said Ryan Aytay, CEO of Tableau.

"By combining AI agents with trusted data and easy-to-use tools, we’re making data accessible to everyone and transforming the data-to-action process into an automated, proactive, and insight-driven cycle. This empowers users to improve decision-making, boost efficiency, and manage risk more effectively."

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Tradespeople and technicians spend almost a full day every week filling out paperwork and completing admin tasks, and it’s having a huge impact on productivity. Salesforce thinks its agentic AI tools could be the key to solving this.

A survey conducted by the firm showed respondents waste an average of seven hours per week inputting manual data, summarizing jobs, and other ‘low-value’ tasks.

Notably, the data showed these professionals spend as much time on administrative tasks and general information gathering as they do on using the skills they’re paid for.

Filling out job briefs, customer documentation, permit filings, and other tasks take up around 30% of a technician’s working hours. In contrast, they spend around 28% of their time actually delivering or performing services.

This barrage of administrative duties is having a major impact on the workforce, Salesforce found. More than four-in-five (81%) reported working overtime to finish admin tasks on a monthly basis, resulting in longer hours and higher rates of burnout.

In monetary terms, the impact is equally concerning. Based on the average US hourly wage, a company with 1,000 full-time technicians is losing over $260,000 as a result of admin work.

“Technicians and other workers in the field are the backbone of our economy. Yet amid a growing skilled labor shortage, a tightening economy, and rising materials prices, they are being stretched thinner than ever before,” said Taksina Eammano, EVP & General Manager of Field Service at Salesforce.

Naturally, Salesforce says AI agents could help alleviate the pressure and reduce workloads. The survey showed 81% believe agents can help them do their jobs more efficiently and cut down on administrative tasks.

Respondents highlighted the potential benefits of AI agents in a number of areas, specifically pointing to areas such as scheduling conflicts.

Automating this process could go a long way to cutting administrative strain, Eammano noted, and early use-cases show a clear enthusiasm among technicians.

“AI agents can autonomously schedule service appointments, optimizing scheduling and intelligently filling gaps, help technicians more efficiently troubleshoot issues onsite to keep their days on track, and reduce the number of return visits,” Eammano said.

While scheduling efficiency gains received a positive reaction from technicians, 80% of respondents also told Salesforce that AI agents would allow for “greater focus on the more fulfilling aspects of their jobs”.

Time savings for other tradespeople were also a key talking point, according to Salesforce. Contractors, plumbers, and electricians, for example, estimated that by using AI agents they could save up to 30% of the time spent on administrative tasks each week.

Salesforce is all in on AI agents

The survey results coincide with the latest expansion of the CRM giant’s agentic AI service, Agentforce.

Salesforce unveiled the launch of the service at its annual Dreamforce conference in September last year, and it’s become a key focus for the firm.

Customer service roles, particularly in retail, were in sharp focus at the Dreamforce conference, with the company highlighting a number of use-cases and real world examples of agents in action.

The new, expanded service, Agentforce for Field Services, appears centered around replicating the early use-cases in the retail sector to help reduce manual toil for technicians and tradespeople.

Through the service, agents can be programmed to manage tasks such as the aforementioned appointment scheduling, or summarization of contracts and permits.

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Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has explained his firm’s decision to stop using Salesforce in favor of its in-house AI tools, but admits he thinks the CRM giant isn’t going anywhere soon.

Siemiatkowski comments on X come after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff questioned Klarna's decision to move away from the platform in 2024, which prompted Siemiatkowski to clear everything up.

“I mentioned that we had removed some SaaS software including Salesforce. It turns out that the recording was leaked to @SeekingAlpha, and they put out a news post about it,” Siemiatkowski wrote.

“Suddenly, @Benioff was asked on stage why Klarna was leaving Salesforce. I was tremendously embarrassed,” he added.

Siemiatkowski said Klarna has shut down the use of Salesforce internally - as it has done with around 1,200 other software as a service (SaaS) platforms - as a part of a strategic shift in its operations.

Through an exploration of data modeling, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and other concepts, Klarna concluded that its data had become fragmented across many different SaaS platforms and difficult to navigate.

“So, we decided to start consolidating; to put things together, connect our knowledge, and remove the silos. The side consequence of this was the liquidation of SaaS—not all of them, but a lot of them,” Siemiatkowski said

“We did not replace SaaS with an LLM, and storing CRM data in an LLM would have its limitations. But we developed an internal tech stack, using Neo4j and other things, to start bringing data=knowledge together,” he added.

This isn’t the end of Salesforce

The Klarna CEO was careful to say that he doesn’t think this move is a sign of things to come for Salesforce, or that other firms are likely to follow suit and move away from CRMs in the way it has done.

“No, I don't think it is the end of Salesforce; might be the opposite,” Siemiatkowski said.

“Will all companies do what Klarna does? I doubt it. On the contrary, much more likely is that we will see fewer SaaS consolidate the market, and they will do what we do and offer it to others. Those are likely to be your next SaaS,” he added.

He said that it is “very likely” that Salesforce will be one of those companies, considering they are more than just a CRM platform.

“I hope with sharing this we can clarify a lot of speculation and misunderstandings and, in the end, same thing as is always true - just like when mobile came along, we talked about mobile first, now you need to be AI first,” Siemiatkowski concluded.

“Of course all SaaS companies will need to learn adopt and evolve. But if they do there is tremendous opportunity ahead.”

Benioff’s questions may have been answered

Siemiatkowski’s comments in September last year not only sparked a brief war of words, but prompted questions over Salesforce’s position in the CRM space.

In a press briefing ahead of Salesforce Dreamforce 2024, Benioff said he had seen the leaked comments and had asked people to reach out to Siemiatkowski to clarify how the firm was managing its data without a CRM.

“How is he achieving compliance, governance of his company? What is his institutional memory?” Benioff also wondered.

Benioff pondered whether Klarna had developed a new way of managing data or new applications that can function in place of a CRM platform.

“I just know from my own perspective at Salesforce that I need to know who my employees are, who my customers are; their transactions, history,” Benioff remarked.

“I think there’s a broad misunderstanding of artificial intelligence and how it relates to data management and applications," he added.

Klarna's bullish push on AI

Klarna’s SaaS consolidation comes after months of investment in AI use internally that has seen the fintech firm rollout a generative AI assistant for staff that can do the work of 700 workers.

The firm has seen such strong efficiency gains through internal AI use that it has stopped hiring new members of staff, allowing natural employee attrition rates to bring headcount down.

At the time, Siemiatkowski said staff would see direct benefits from these efficiency gains as Klaran would be shifting the money saved into the wages of remaining employees.

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In recent months there’s been a big push on agentic AI in the tech industry, in particular with regard to ‘do-it-yourself (DIY)’ platforms that give businesses the tools to design their own agents.

Just this week, Oracle launched its ‘AI Agent Studio’ that embeds agentic tooling within the Oracle Fusion Platform, allowing customers to both create and manage agents or teams of agents across enterprise platforms.

OpenAI dropped a new set of tools and APIs earlier in the month that serves a similar purpose, allowing users to build agent logic and orchestration processes for agents to complete tasks.

Other firms such as AWS, Salesforce, and Workday have released their own platforms, all with a focus on giving users the tooling to make agents rather than simply providing off-the-shelf agents for businesses to use.

The reason that the emphasis is being placed on user customization and direction speaks to the use cases of agentic AI, which according to Gartner analyst Pieter J. den Hamer are often less deterministic or pre-defined than with other technologies.

“You need to tailor them,” Hamer told ITPro. “You need to customize them to the business context at hand.”

That may be why AI vendors are ramping up offerings in this regard, Hamer noted, as they know that end-users will get the most use out of agentic tools if they have full control over how they work, and what they do. It’s all in their hands.

Agentic AI in the hands of the enterprise

With the onus on the end-user, this raises questions over how these platforms will compete when they all offer similar tooling and the end result is largely dependent on implementation.

From an enterprise perspective, this also presents a conundrum over which platform to choose.

Ultimately, businesses need to pay attention to the nuances of different agentic platforms and assess whether the controls they provide align with their needs in terms of management, security, and scale.

Ease of development will be a key differentiator, according to Hamer, and there will be differences in whether agents can be created via low-code or no-code processes, or whether more complex engineering is required.

Integration with other tools and workflows - or with other agents - will also be a deciding factor, he added, as well as the flexibility or openness of the framework that the agents are running on.

If the technology is being targeted at staff as a means of letting them create agents for their own personal tasks, for example, then ease of use and configuration capabilities also become more important.

“I think importantly it's also the financial costs that also need to be monitored,” Hamer added, referencing the potential for vendors to charge users on a pay-per-use basis.

“If you have 10 agents that may be okay, but if, you know, if you're successful you get hundreds or 1000s of agents, then this cost may quickly spiral out of control,” Hamer said.

The ideal agent platform should also be able to integrate with agents from different vendors or origins in Hamer’s opinion, as customers may eventually want to, for example, make their Workday agents collaborate with their Salesforce agents.

With this in mind, as the agentic AI space matures in years to come, its development may mirror that of the broader cloud computing space, which initially started as a rush to the public cloud, but more recently has evolved to a point where many enterprises adopt a multi-cloud approach.

The risk of agent sprawl

While agents bring with them great possibilities in terms of driving efficiency and productivity, there is potential for them to create problems, particularly when businesses get to the stage of mass deployment.

Businesses could find themselves facing ‘agent sprawl’, whereby different staff members and teams are using multiple agents that may be siloed or not configured to communicate correctly with one another.

There may be hundreds of different models operating on different devices, according to Forrester analyst Craig Le Clair, meaning the importance of proper governance becomes more vital.

“Keeping the number of platforms to a minimum, having them be approved by corporate IT - that's really a critical governance function that we find,” Le Clair told ITPro.

If proper housekeeping isn’t done on the agentic front through the removal of excess tooling, then businesses may find themselves facing sprawl issues, Hamer said.

“If you do nothing then your agent ecosystem will quickly become an agent jungle,” Hamer added.

The prospect of agent sprawl mirrors a trend already witnessed in the broader enterprise space in recent years, with firms across a range of industries reporting problems with tool or application sprawl.

Many had already developed oversized software ecosystems before AI came along, and research shows this can have a huge impact on both efficiency and security.

Red Canary’s 2024 Security Operations Trends report last year showed many businesses were contending with heightened costs as a result of tool sprawl, for example.

Discussing the looming prospect of agent sprawl with ITPro, Oracle’s VP of AI business value Neil Sholay made similar comments about the issue and the need for proper agentic management.

“My personal view is we are very quickly going to move to a world where you have agents coming from multiple vendors,” Sholay said.

“I think we need to very quickly start looking at things like portability, reuse, and some kind of standard framework for how you have agent-to-agent interoperability,” he added.

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Salesforce and Google have expanded their partnership with a seven-year, $2.5 billion deal that could represent a challenge to Microsoft’s dominance in enterprise AI.

Agentforce will gain access to Google’s Gemini models, allowing agents to work with images, audio, and video. More complex tasks can be handled using Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities and two-million-token context windows, and real-time insights and answers will be provided via Google Search with Vertex AI.

There will also be tighter integration of Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Customer Engagement Suite, boosting AI-enabled contact center capabilities such as real-time voice translation, intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs, personalized agent recommendations, and AI-driven conversational insights across all channels.

For example, Salesforce said an insurance customer can submit a claim with photos of the damage and an audio voicemail from a witness. Agentforce, using Gemini, can then process all these inputs, assess the claim's validity, and even use text-to-speech to contact the customer with a resolution, speeding up the claims process.

Meanwhile, Salesforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 Apps will run on Google Cloud infrastructure, with access to new regions and an easier procurement process through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Salesforce also said it's looking at better ways to connect Slack and Google Workspace products, such as Google Chat, to easily communicate across platforms.

"Through our expanded partnership with Google Cloud and deep integrations at the platform, application, and infrastructure layer, we're giving customers choice in the applications and models they want to use," said Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce president and chief engineering and customer success officer.

"Salesforce offers a complete enterprise-grade agentic AI platform that makes it easy to deploy new capabilities easily and realize business value fast," Tallapragada.

"Google Cloud is a pioneer in enterprise agentic AI, offering some of the most powerful, capable models, agents, and AI development tools on the planet. Together we are creating the best place for businesses to scale with digital labor."

Partnership marks major Salesforce shift

Historically, Salesforce has been an Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer, but this deal means fewer eggs in one basket. It may also be a challenge to Microsoft, which has integrated its Copilot AI assistant into Office 365 and currently holds much of the enterprise market.

"Salesforce’s selection of Google Cloud as a major infrastructure provider means enterprise customers can now deploy some of their most critical applications on our highly secure, AI-optimized infrastructure — with minimal friction," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

"Our mutual customers have asked us to be able to work more seamlessly across Salesforce and Google Cloud, and this expanded partnership will help them accelerate their AI transformations with agentic AI, state-of-the-art AI models, data analytics, and more."

According to Salesforce research, agentic AI already represents a $2 trillion market opportunity - and 84% of CIOs believe AI will be as significant to businesses as the internet.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff thinks current chief executives will be among the last to oversee an all-human workforce as the use of AI agents becomes more widespread.

Benioff’s prediction came during a conversation with Axios at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, where he referred to AI agents as “digital labor” capable of handling roles previously reserved for human workers.

"We are really moving into a world now of managing humans and agents together," Benioff said, referring to Salesforce’s own agentic offering dubbed Agentforce.

"Because I'm using Agentforce, I just have that much more productivity," he added.

Benioff pointed to the ability of Salesforce agents to resolve support inquiries, adding that he is working out ways to reposition human support agents in sales positions as those employees now have much less work.

This is not the first time Benioff has made comments about the future of enterprise workforces in the age of AI. The Salesforce chief previously claimed it was considering a hiring freeze on software engineers on the back of heightened productivity.

“In engineering this year at Salesforce, we're seriously debating - maybe we aren't going to hire anybody this year,” Benioff said on a podcast in January.

Benioff claimed Salesforce has seen huge productivity gains as software engineers work side-by-side with agents. Agents give businesses the ability to do more, he noted, particularly when it comes to engineering and development.

“There's no question the world is changing, when it gets down to labor and delivering the next generation of labor.”

Salesforce is bullish on AI agents

Salesforce was among the first major tech companies to flock to agentic AI, which has become the new industry obsession. The company unveiled the Agentforce service at its annual Dreamforce conference in September 2024, firing the starting gun in a new AI ‘race’ across the industry.

During the launch, Benioff was highly vocal over the potential of agents, touting this as the next natural step in the evolution of generative AI.

Since emerging in late 2022, generative AI tools have largely been focused around AI ‘assistants’ such as Microsoft’s Copilot service, which sits adjacent to the human worker in a supporting role.

With agents, however, Benioff insisted enterprises could begin to unlock significant gains by reducing workload pressures on human staff.

The Salesforce chief exec also took the opportunity to criticize industry competitors such as Microsoft over their approach to AI assistants during the launch event – and this has since become a recurring trend.

Bold predictions on the future of work

Benioff isn’t the only one who thinks AI is going to affect workforce hiring, as several other big names in tech seem to be predicting a similar future.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed earlier this month that it could start replacing software engineers with AI as early as 2025 when speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

“Probably in 2025 we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg said.

Fintech firm Klarna has stopped hiring new staff members through its use of AI, with CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowsk claiming that its headcount had fallen by 22% over a year as AI had allowed for natural attrition to reduce the workforce size.

Siemiatkowski has even suggested that AI could replace his own job as a CEO because all work can essentially be broken down into a combination of reasoning and knowledge, and AI reasoning has reached such a point that it could carry out tasks reserved for execs.

Despite big tech’s enthusiasm, though, the age of the AI worker has run into a few hiccups already.

An AI software engineer designed by AI firm Cognition recently disappointed by performing badly on tasks and struggling to compete with human workers.

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Salesforce is expected to cut around 1,000 roles while simultaneously hiring sales staff as part of its AI push, according to reports from Bloomberg this week.

Details on which business units are set for cuts are yet to be confirmed. However, a source familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that affected employees will be able to apply for alternative internal positions.

If confirmed, the layoffs mark the third round of cuts at the CRM giant in the space of two years. The company laid off 10% of its global workforce in early 2023 as part of a restructuring program aimed at reducing costs.

These significant cuts were followed by another round of layoffs in January 2024, which saw around 700 staff let go.

The cuts would also make Salesforce the latest in a long line of companies to cut jobs to make space for expansion into AI — including Workday this week cutting 10% of its staff in order to further invest in the technology.

In a statement confirming the move, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said AI was changing how work gets done and opening up potential areas of growth for the company.

"This creates a massive opportunity for us, but we need to make some changes to better align our resources with our customers' evolving needs," he said in an announcement.

In 2023, Dropbox cut 16% of roles in order to beef up AI hiring. Last year, SAP announced a restructuring plan that would impact 8,000 jobs as it shifted to AI, while Intuit announced plans to lose 1,800 roles but replace them in critical areas including AI.

Of course, other companies aren't saying the AI part out loud, with plenty of tech companies announcing layoffs in order to boost efficiency or focus on "high-growth areas", notably AI.

Both Cisco and Dell announced job cuts last year aimed at focusing on "high growth" business segments, though plenty of layoffs happened across the industry, with Layoffs.fyi tracking more than 152,000 job losses over nearly 550 companies — though that's a decline from the massive cuts seen in 2023.

ITPro has contacted Salesforce for confirmation of the job cuts, but is yet to receive a response.

Salesforce is bullish on AI

Salesforce has been ramping up its AI ambitions over the past two years, with the company unveiling the launch of its agentic AI service, Agentforce, in September 2024.

AI agents now form a key part of the company’s strategy, and Marc Benioff has been highly vocal about the potential of the technology, along with the prospect of agents taking over from human workers in certain business areas.

Last month, Benioff said the company could consider a freeze on software engineering hires in 2025 due to the productivity boosts delivered by AI.

"In engineering this year at Salesforce, we're seriously debating — maybe we aren't going to hire anybody this year," Benioff said on a podcast. "We have seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side by side with our engineers."

That prediction echoed a similar statement by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who told a different podcast that he believed AI could begin to do the work of "mid level engineers" this year.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has suggested the company may freeze hiring for software engineers amid the firm's growing success with AI agents.

Productivity gains delivered by AI agents internally at Salesforce mean the firm may not need to onboard new staff in this area of the business, Benioff told ‘The Logan Bartlett Show’ podcast.

“In engineering this year at Salesforce, we're seriously debating - maybe we aren't going to hire anybody this year,” Benioff said.

“We have seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side by side with our engineers,” he added.

When asked about global labor shortages and the economic outlook for the agents, Benioff said that this is a big moment for customers to restructure and ramp up the adoption of AI agents.

“We are going through a global labor shortage where we see all these declining birth rates. We understand that it is harder to hire - especially people here right in the United States - in sales and service,” Benioff said.

AI agents will give businesses the ability to do more, he added, providing the example of engineering.

“We can all agree that software engineering has become a lot more productive in the last two years with basically these new models,” Benioff said.

“There's no question the world is changing, when it gets down to labor and delivering the next generation of labor,” he added.

Software engineering could be in for a rough ride

Benioff isn’t the first big tech CEO to hint at pausing hiring for roles in software engineering due to AI. Others have gone so far as to suggest roles could be lost to the technology in years to come.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted a similar trend at the social media giant. Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast earlier this month, Zuckerberg said AI could be doing the work of mid-level engineers in 2025.

While it will be an expensive change in the short term, Zuckerberg said it’s a move that he thinks will pay dividends in the long run through efficiency gains.

Salesforce was among the first big tech companies to jump on the agentic AI bandwagon last year, and Benioff has been vocal about the potential of AI agents for enterprises, hailing this as essentially the next step in the evolutionary path of AI.

At the company's Dreamforce conference in September 2024, Salesforce unveiled its Agentforce service, for example, with the company specifically highlighting the use of AI agents in customer service roles.

Agents do represent a step change in the AI ‘boom’. While AI assistants such as Microsoft’s Copilot tool sit adjacent to the human worker to provide support, agents are fully autonomous and can carry out tasks on behalf of the worker.

But does this mean software engineers should start looking at potential career changes? Not exactly. Research suggests that while AI will have a transformative effect on the profession, this won’t necessarily equate to widespread job losses.

In a study by Gartner last year, around 80% of the software engineering workforce could be forced to upskill by 2027 to compensate for the changing demands placed on them by AI tools and agents.

This doesn’t mean their jobs will be rendered obsolete, but more the fact that the profession itself will be transformed due to the influx AI, with the consultancy predicting the technology to play an increasingly larger role in daily tasks.

The study noted that, in the short term, AI tools have delivered modest productivity increases by supporting them in their daily workflow.

An influx of AI agents in software engineering will likely create the biggest upheaval, however. Gartner noted that the integration of agentic AI within teams will enable the full automation of tasks and result in the emergence of ‘AI-native software engineering’ where most code is AI-generated.

The UK is leading other G7 nations in terms of its private and government sectors’ readiness to adopt, deploy, and integrate AI, according to a new study commissioned by Salesforce.

Salesforce’s UK AI Readiness Index found that both public and private sectors in the UK have embraced AI, citing a strong innovation culture, robust tech investments, and pragmatic regulations putting the UK ahead of its G7 peers.

The study is a composite index consisting of 15 proxy indicators taken from a combination of qualitative and quantitative data sources, including think tanks and research from the UN.

Overall, the UK scored a 65.5, which marks an increase of just over 4 points on the G7 average of 61.2.

The proxy indicators are split between the private and public sector with seven indicating business readiness and eight measuring the government's ability to take advantage of AI.

The UK’s government readiness outperformed its business readiness handily with a score of 78.9 compared to 52, and both of these scores were higher than the G7 average of 75.6 and 46.8.

Dr Samantha Torrance, head of global government advisory at Access Partnership, the public policy consultancy that conducted the research, said the UK is struggling to convert strong governmental performance across to the private sector.

“We’re seeing a bit of a lack of a transfer [in terms of] the government’s activities and direction to the private sector. The UK is ahead when we look at business sectors, but if we look at the absolute numbers, there is still a way to go in terms of really improving how ready businesses are.”

The study found the UK’s strong government score was driven by its high levels of e-participation, referring to the degree of engagement citizens have with digital government activities, as well as its principle-based regulation like the Online Safety Bill.

However, investment in emerging technologies is a weak spot for the UK government.

R&D and skills investments required for UK to push on in AI era

The UK’s private sector, on the other hand, exhibited a “robust adoption of emerging technologies and technology outputs”, but smaller enterprises including SMBs and scale-ups need further assistance.

Torrance highlighted the labor market, noting that skills shortages are negatively impacting both the private and public sector’s readiness to implement AI.

“A core and similar factor between both the business index and government index is human capital, both in terms of investment in human capital, but also their participation in the workforce,” she explained.

“If you look at the business index, you see that there’s a high rate of churn in that sector, so that really drives down that score in that sense. On the government side, it’s a lack of promotion of broader investment."

The recommendations outlined to uplift the UK’s AI readiness included improving talent development, developing more adaptive regulatory frameworks for enterprise AI, sustained investment in R&D, as well as boosting financing and venture capital capacity.

Torrance said that despite its strong performance overall, the UK is falling behind in terms of financing and venture capital, and its regulatory framework will require continued attention and updating to keep up with technological innovation.

“We see that the UK really falls behind on the financing element. So skills, financing, but also regulatory frameworks,” she concluded

“I think there’s opportunity, from an enterprise and a business perspective, to really make sure that the regulation is principles-based in that we’ve got ethics at the heart of it, but it’s really contextualized to risks that we’re looking at and considering this type of AI, and that there’s flexibility to end that regulation as the develops.”

OpenAI could be set to release its own AI agents in January of next year, marking the latest of the big tech players to capitalize on the growing industry trend.

Reports from Bloomberg suggest the plans were discussed at a staff meeting this week.

While OpenAI has yet to confirm the plans, and is yet to respond to a request for comment from ITPro, CEO Sam Altman said at a developer conference that next year is when "agents will work", showing off a short demo of a voice assistant ordering fruit via a phone call.

Additionally, last month OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil told the Financial Times that his company's aim was to make it possible to interact with AI in all the same ways you would a human.

"These more agentic systems are going to become possible, and it is why I think 2025 is gonna be the year that agentic systems finally hit the mainstream,” Weil told the publication.

So it's no surprise that OpenAI is working on agents — after all, so too are its rivals. But the latest reports suggest that the company's technology is near enough ready to launch, given the January release prediction.

Alongside the launch date, the report suggested the OpenAI agent is code-named "Operator", and that it will be able to take over tasks to run them independently, finally delivering on the promise of autonomous support that those developing the latest round of large language models have promised.

OpenAI faces stiff competition in the agents space

OpenAI won’t quite be the trailblazer in this part of the evolutionary path of AI, with other tech companies having already rolled out early versions of their own agentic AI services.

Microsoft unveiled new agents for Copilot last month, for example. These are designed to work without further training, helping to automate tasks such as triaging client emails, managing expenses, and so on. The service is expected to be released via a public preview later at its Ignite conference next week.

"Agents are very focused on augmenting business processes and workflows, teams and departments," Charles Lamanna, CVP for Business & Industry Copilot at Microsoft, said at the time. "They’re able to work on behalf of a system as opposed to a person, work asynchronously, or even autonomously to complete tasks."

Similarly, in September Salesforce launched its Agentforce service, allowing companies to make customizable AI agents to support business functions, including automating customer service interactions. They were made generally available in October.

"Agentforce goes beyond chatbots and copilots, using advanced reasoning abilities to make decisions and take action, like resolving customer cases, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns," the company said at the time.

"Agentforce doesn’t depend on human engagement to get work done; these agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, pre-built automations, or signals via API calls from other systems."

Earlier this month, reports suggested Google was working on its own version of AI agent service, dubbed 'Project Jarvis', which would automate email management, research and appointment scheduling, among other tasks.

If such reports prove correct, Google plans to demonstrate the tool in December alongside an update to its Gemini large language model (LLM).

Google Cloud unveiled its own version of AI agents under the Vertex brand earlier this year, and has been keen to emphasize the productivity gains and return on investment (ROI) for users thus far.

Though tech companies clearly see AI agents as the next big thing, early versions will be limited. Anthropic, which is working on its own autonomous agents service, admitted the tool remains "experimental… at times cumbersome and error-prone".

AI adoption is slowing among workers globally as employees report hiding their use of the technology from leaders amid concerns over how it reflects on them.

Slack’s Autumn 2024 Workforce Index surveyed 10,000 desk workers around the world and found the growth in AI usage has cooled, with the study noting that usage rates plateaued after steady growth earlier this year.

This deceleration was particularly pronounced in the US, where AI usage grew from 32% to 33% in the last three months, compared to a 9% growth recorded during a three-month period earlier this year.

Slack found many workers are actually hiding their use of AI out of fear or confusion over whether it’s professionally acceptable to use the technology at work.

When presented with a list of 11 common workplace tasks, including writing messages, generating new ideas, analyzing data, or writing code, nearly half 48% of all desk workers said they were uncomfortable admitting to their manager that they used AI during these activities.

For those who reported feeling uncomfortable about their AI use, the most popular reasons offered were feeling like using AI is cheating (47%), the fear of being seen as less competent by using AI (46%), and the fear of being seen as lazy (46%).

Slack noted that the least common reason given for not being comfortable using AI was that ‘AI use is discouraged or not allowed by company policy, indicating its the perception around using AI rather than its permissibility that is putting employees off.

Christina Janzer, head of Workforce Labs at Slack, said this underscores an important takeaway for business leaders - that shifting the norms around AI could unlock confidence in their teams to leverage the technology in their workflows.

“Our research shows that even if AI helped you complete a task more quickly and efficiently, plenty of people wouldn’t want their bosses to know they used it,”she said.

“Leaders need to understand that this technology doesn’t just exist in a business context of ‘can I get the job done as quickly and effectively as possible,’ but in a social context of ‘what will people think if they know I used this tool for help?'”

Excitement for AI slows as workers struggle with norms around its use

Excitement around AI is also falling, according to Slack, which found that hype around the technology fell 6% among the global population from March to August this year.

Once again, this fall off in AI excitement was most prominent in the US, which fell by 9% over the same time frame.

Slack cautioned that this pattern matches a typical maturity curve for new technologies, but its data has highlighted a number of blockers that could be inhibiting confidence in the technology.

First among these was discomfort with AI norms, with workers unsure about what types of AI are permitted in their organization, and when it's professionally and socially acceptable to use the technology at work.

Some workers also raised the view that AI is not yet living up to the hype it has generated, with Slack’s data revealing a disconnect between workers and leaders on how they should spend the new time AI saves them every week.

“Employees are worried that the time they save with AI will actually increase their workload – with leaders expecting them to do more work, at a faster pace,” Janzer added.

“This presents an opportunity for leaders to redefine what they mean by ‘productivity,’ inspiring employees to improve the quality of their work – not just the quantity.”

Finally, workers said a lack of clear company permissions and training around AI was limiting their ability to fully embrace the technology.

For example, just 7% of desk workers consider themselves AI experts, whereas 61% of respondents said they had spent less than five hours learning how to use AI and 30% of workers said they’ve had no AI training at all.

As a result, Slack recommended that leaders ensure they give explicit permission for workers to use AI tools, and create a mix of employer and employee-led training programs, which 70% of workers said would be the most beneficial approach to AI training.

Slack also suggested businesses try to use AI more publicly to reconfigure company norms around its use, as well as making AI use more visible by creating specific communication channels for AI support, troubleshooting, and training.

The survey data revealed that those who are comfortable sharing AI use with their manager are 67% more likely to have used it for work, indicating that shifting these norms could go a long way in boosting adoption among staff.

Watching Pink soar above crowds at Oracle Park during an acrobatic rendition of ‘So What’ seemed an appropriate finale to Dreamforce 2024, especially given Salesforce’s ambitious new strategy was described as a “high wire act” by CEO Marc Benioff.

It’s been nearly two years since generative AI burst onto the scene, and while the early days may have been exciting, at this point I’m sure most of us are absolutely sick to death hearing about it.

Virtually every tech conference was saturated by generative AI last year and this has kept up so far across 2024. It’s become tiring.

To say Dreamforce was no different would be harsh. Yes, AI was the big talking point again, but something about it felt different. First and foremost, Salesforce didn’t actually use the term ‘AI’ too heavily considering that its big announcement was centered around the technology.

‘AI agents’, we learned, are the new big thing in the world of AI. And it’s not just a newfangled piece of corporate jargon either. If Benioff is to be believed, agents are the future of AI.

Salesforce’s big gambit in the coming years now rests on its new Agentforce service. This allows customers to create AI agents that essentially carry out tasks on behalf of a worker. From customer service to healthcare and retail, Salesforce thinks everyone will be using agents within a year or two.

Whether or not this strategy pays off is unclear and another discussion entirely, but what is clear is that Benioff is very excited and fiercely protective of his new vision.

Salesforce goes for the competition

During the opening keynote, Benioff fired a broadside at Microsoft over the supposedly poor performance of its flagship Copilot service, referring to it – and others – as ‘DIY AI’ that simply hadn’t delivered on grandiose promises.

Organizations are wasting money trying to build AI solutions with popular large language models (LLMs) and failing miserably, attendees were told. Making matters worse, the outputs from popular LLMs are substandard and unreliable while hallucinations are still wreaking havoc.

The statement was bold, but the follow-up was bizarre. Asking the crowd if they knew what DIY was, he suggested it may just be a “San Francisco thing”.

I find it hard to picture Benioff upcycling IKEA bookshelves, but you never know.

Regardless, Salesforce’s latest pitch now rests on the idea that big tech vendors have shoved generative AI copilots down the throats of enterprises while promising to make their dreams come true. Worse still, they’re placing too much burden on customers by just dropping tools in their lap and sauntering off with a big cheque.

Agents are the new frontier and the next step, according to Benioff. But some may wonder how they’re actually any different to a copilot or general AI assistant.

Hot on the heels of the opening keynote, a Bloomberg journalist said the quiet part out loud, asking whether Agentforce represented a “meaningful new step” and not just a Copilot rebrand – and this set the tone for the rest of the press briefing.

Benioff went all-in on the criticism of Microsoft, describing Copilot as nothing better than Microsoft Clippy before slamming the capabilities of ChatGPT.

While the comments were jarring, it has to be said they were equally refreshing. Maybe Microsoft and OpenAI have shared too much of the limelight these last 18 months. Google can’t publicize a product announcement without OpenAI nudging the company out of the spotlight with its own tactical announcements.

The numbers don't match the hype, either. Reporting from The Information in early September estimated that between 0.1% and 1% of the tech giant's 400+ million Microsoft 365 user base actually pays for its AI features.

This small percentage suggests that perhaps Microsoft's fancy AI tools aren't quite as hotly-desired as the company - or its vocal supporters - would have you believe.

With this in mind, hoisting Microsoft up as the gold standard when there are obvious issues at play must be frustrating for other industry players.

Benioff appears to have real confidence alongside his desire to make a statement. We’ve come to expect the bold, brazen comments from the Salesforce CEO over the years, but this year it was critical he made it clear the company means business.

In the week prior to Dreamforce, Klarna revealed it planned to cut ties with Salesforce and replace the CRM provider with AI tools developed in-house. Benioff openly questioned this decision and challenged the firm to explain how it could replace all the functions of a CRM through AI.

This marked the latest lingering question mark for the company in recent months. A blog post from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in July raised doubts over whether Salesforce can maintain a competitive edge in the era of generative AI.

The post, titled ‘Death of a Salesforce’: Why AI Will Transform the Next Generation of Sales Tech’, suggested that generative AI could have a major transformational impact on the “core system of record and the sales workflows”, meaning that “no incumbent is safe”.

As the incumbent in this space, it’s not hard to see why the Agentforce announcement was so vital for Salesforce and Benioff. It's set the tone for the year ahead and showed the industry it's ready for a fight.

Salesforce has unveiled a raft of new updates and features for Slack as part of an effort to foster greater operational synergy for users of the workplace collaboration platform.

Announced at Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce said the updates will help “unify” data across Slack and Salesforce, bringing together enterprise data, apps, and automation in a more aligned and easily digestible manner.

Key to this overhaul is the integration of Agentforce in Slack, which has been a major talking point at the CRM giant’s annual Dreamforce conference.

Under Agentforce, enterprises are able to build customizable, autonomous AI agents aimed at both assisting human workers and taking over aspects of their daily work.

As part of the integration, Slack users will be met with a new interface designed specifically for agents, allowing teams to “talk to their data, surface insights, and take action on tasks”, according to the company.

“Users can ask questions or give instructions in natural language, and they’ll receive trusted responses grounded in both structured CRM data and unstructured conversational data,” Salesforce said in a statement..

“Agentforce can provide a status update on opportunities and cases, recommend next steps, draft emails and action plans, share those details in a direct message or channel, and more.”

Agent integration within the platform isn’t limited to Salesforce’s in-house offering, however. Third-party AI agents and assistants from a range of partners can also be deployed within Slack moving forward.

This includes agents from firms including Cohere and Adobe Express, the company revealed. More third-party agent options from Anthropic, Perplexity, IBM, and Amazon Q Business will be “coming soon”. Exact details on a timeline for these rollouts are yet to be confirmed.

In addition to Agentforce integration, Salesforce also announced the launch of several new features, including Salesforce Channels. This new feature connects Salesforce CRM records to channel conversations within the platform.

The company said this will give teams a “comprehensive space to collaborate on every account and opportunity, increasing alignment”.

Slack AI is delivering results

Salesforce has given Slack’s AI features a slight boost as part of this latest update, with new capabilities such as huddle notes and improved AI search within the platform to deliver more accurate results.

Slack AI launched in February this year with a host of features aimed at streamlining productivity for users, including automated thread, channel, and meeting summarization capabilities.

The company isn’t alone in launching AI-powered productivity tools, however, with Microsoft and Google both rolling out similar features across their Microsoft 365 and Workspace platforms.

Zoom, meanwhile, offers similar tools for users. With the widespread rollout of AI-powered features within leading productivity platforms, questions have been raised over exactly how providers can differentiate themselves.

Speaking to ITPro, Rob Seaman, interim chief product officer at Slack, said updates to the platform over the last year aim to make Slack “more of a work operating system” for enterprise applications.

Slack AI is also delivering results, Seaman told ITPro, with users reporting productivity improvements and consistent time savings on a weekly basis.

“Our research team surveyed existing Slack AI users and it’s saving people an average of 97 minutes a week,” he said.

These time savings are largely bolstered by automation of the search function within the platform, Seaman noted. “People spend a lot of time searching for information, so it makes that faster,” he said.

Similarly, the recap function for channels and threads is also delivering marked improvements for users.

“Recap, which is where you can add a bunch of channels to recap every morning and it gives you a daily digest, if you will,” he explained. “It summarizes what’s happened in those channels. Previously, you had to read the entire channel.”

“It’s a bunch of micro improvements and time savings that, at least self reported by the customer, add up to about an hour and a half a week.”

Additional research from Slack reported a 47% increase in overall productivity among users, and since launch customers have summarized more than 600 million messages, saving a collective 1.1 million hours.

Salesforce Ventures has unveiled another $500 million AI investment fund, bringing its total funding for AI entrepreneurs to $1 billion – and the company is sharpening its focus on supporting 'ethical' startups, according to a senior company figure.

The expansion of the fund doubles down on its backing of high-growth companies operating in the AI industry. When it first launched, the AI fund initially set a pot of $250 million, but this was doubled within months amid rapid acceleration in the generative AI space.

To date, Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than two dozen companies, including some big names in the generative AI industry such as Cohere, Mistral, Hugging Face, and Anthropic.

In a press briefing with assembled media, Paul Drews, managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, said the rapid expansion of the fund has come in direct response to the significant growth seen across the AI industry over the 18 months.

“We were just blown away by the number of entrepreneurs we were meeting that were building generational businesses,” he told jouarnalists. “So given the pace at which we were seeing entrepreneurs investing, it made sense to increase that to $500 million.”

“It was a really good signal to entrepreneurs to show where we’re spending our time,” Drews added. “The vast majority of our time now is spent looking at enterprise AI and generative AI, and that’s one of the reasons we wanted to upsize the fund.”

Salesforce Ventures wants to back ‘ethical’ innovators

Anthropic is a notable success story as far as Salesforce Ventures’ portfolio goes.

The AI firm has grown rapidly in recent years, is a major partner for hyperscalers such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and even launched its own AI investment fund earlier this year.

Speaking to ITPro, Drews said a key factor in the decision to back Anthropic initially was that the company’s values aligned closely with those at Salesforce. This values-led approach to investment appears to be a common theme at the venture capital unit.

“We think it’s critically important to be investing in the most innovative companies out there, who are innovating in an ethical and responsible way,” Drews told ITPro.

“Since we launched our first generative AI fund, what we’ve seen in the market is we talk to CIOs in the industry, they’re really excited to adopt generative AI solutions, but they need those solutions to be secure, compliant, and be trusted.

“They want to make sure that the founders they’re potentially partnering with are innovating in that way. “

Anthropic’s ‘Constitutional AI’ approach, which values human oversight and the responsible development of large language models (LLMs), not only caught Salesforce’s attention, but has positioned it as a trusted firm.

With that in mind, it made perfect sense from both a business and cultural perspective to back the firm. Salesforce itself has been keen to frame itself as the go-to, trusted partner for enterprise AI over the last 18 months.

Dreamforce 2023, for example, saw the company focus heavily on promoting its Einstein Trust Layer and responsible approach to AI development.

During his keynote speech at last year’s conference, CEO Marc Benioff hit out at industry counterparts over a lax approach to safety and problems with model hallucinations.

“We like to say ‘values drive value’ - we don’t think that companies embedding ethics into what they’re doing slows them down, we actually think it can accelerate their adoption in the enterprise,” Drews told ITPro.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wants enterprises to ignore the culture of AI “hypnosis” created by major industry vendors over the last two years.

During a briefing with assembled media at Dreamforce 2024, Benioff hit out at Microsoft in particular, suggesting that it, along with industry competitors, have over-hyped the capabilities of AI assistants, or ‘copilots’.

Following a scathing comparison between Microsoft Copilot and the now defunct Microsoft ‘Clippy’ tool, the Salesforce CEO said recurring claims around the potential promise of generative AI have fallen flat.

“There’s a lot of narratives out there from vendors, and a lot of it is not true,” he told journalists.

“‘I think one question is, you’ve deployed copilots, you’ve trained and retrained your models, two three hundred billion dollars invested in the industry so far in these AI platforms, but how much productivity increases are you getting?”

Benioff suggested that the current trends in AI equate to a ‘DIY’ approach, a comment that echoed previous claims during his opening keynote address on the day.

Meanwhile, Salesforce’s position on the matter is that their new approach will essentially be the gold standard in AI innovation moving forward.

Central to this is the launch of AgentForce, which enables enterprises to create customizable, autonomous AI agents capable of acting independently to support roles spanning a range of business functions.

The launch of this new service dominated the opening keynote session, with Benioff and a host of senior executives providing users with in-depth previews of the capabilities AgentForce will provide.

This includes automated customer service interactions and the ability to essentially allow users to step back and let agents take the reins in a range of circumstances.

“That’s our gambit that we’re running here at the show,” Benioff told journalists.

“It’s this idea that we have a different approach, the salesforce platform, we have all of our customer touchpoints, we have our AI, our AgentForce platform, and now we’re deploying it with customers.”

Notably, early pilot schemes for AgentForce have delivered promising results for customers, with the keynote showcasing practical examples of the service in action with top clients including Saks 5th Avenue.

Salesforce is capitalizing on the next evolutionary step

Crucially, Salesforce appears to be targeting an early lead in what some industry figures believe is the next step on the evolutionary path of generative AI.

Enterprises globally have deployed chatbots en-masse in recent years, and copilot assistants have gained significant traction.

But both these require a great degree of oversight and are designed specifically to support human workers, not replace certain activities outright. Benioff touched on this evolution during a pre-briefing last week ahead of Dreamforce, and it’s clear the company is bullish on this new strategy.

Taking a lead in driving adoption of AI agents is a “high wire act”, Benioff admitted during his keynote, but he appeared confident that the impact will be profound.

The company isn’t alone in this push, either. This week Microsoft announced plans to begin developing and rolling out its own autonomous Copilot agents.

Looking ahead, Benioff said Salesforce has bold plans to drive adoption, noting that by the end of the three-day conference it plans to have the “largest deployment of agents” globally.

“By the time we start our next fiscal year, February 1, our goal is to have thousands of customers live on AgentForce,” he said. “Our goal is by the time we get back to Dreamforce next year, to have a billion consumers interacting with agents globally."

Dreamforce 2024 has come and gone, and there was certainly no shortage of talking points from the annual Salesforce conference.

More than 45,000 attendees flocked to San Francisco for the three-day event, and there was a real buzz around the city center across the week.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff kicked things off on Tuesday with a keynote address that set the stage for a massive week at the CRM giant. The big announcement? The launch of Agentforce, the company's new flagship service which allows enterprises to create autonomous, customizable AI agents.

Salesforce certainly appears to be all-in on Agentforce, with Benioff suggesting the launch marks the first tentative steps into a 'new era' of enterprise AI. First came the chatbots, then came the copilots, now we'll be swamped by agents.

A big talking point from the keynote was Benioff's vocal criticism of Microsoft Copilot and claims that businesses the world over have been lumbered with 'DIY AI' solutions that haven't quite lived up to expectations.

Benioff doubled down on these comments in a subsequent press briefing on Tuesday, during which he once again hit out at the tech giant. You can read all about Benioff's comments below.

• Salesforce CEO wants to “break the hypnosis" coming from major AI vendors

Elsewhere across the week we had a thought-provoking keynote from Slack CEO, Denise Dresser, who discussed the role of AI in the future of work, and Slack's place in helping to supercharge enterprise productivity.

Several new AI-related updates were announced for the workplace collaboration platform, including the integration of AI agents. You can read more on the latest Slack updates below.

• Slack AI agents shift looks to “unify” enterprise data and drive team synergy

While Dreamforce may have come to a close, we still have more news, analysis, and opinion coming, so make sure to revisit ITPro.

AgentForce was announced ahead of Dreamforce this week, with the company clearly aiming to raise interest around the new service. You can read more about how this could benefit customers and Salesforce's approach in our Dreamforce 2024 preview below.

• Salesforce wants to show what Salesforce wants to show what “AI was always meant to be”

Arriving in San Francisco yesterday was an interesting experience to say the least. The city is absolutely awash with thousands of attendees. Every second person on the street seems to have a lanyard on - myself included.

With the conference held at the Moscone Center, it really feels like the heart of the city is just all-in on Salesforce.

As mentioned, Salesforce clearly wanted a head start in raising the hype around AgentForce ahead of the opening keynote. Last week's press briefing was a lively affair, but there was one key talking point that stood out.

Klarna, which is making a name for itself banging the generative AI drum of late, recently revealed it had cut ties with Workday and Salesforce in a bid to cut down SaaS spending.

It's a bold move, but one that CEO Marc Benioff seemed rather perplexed at. You can read all about what's going on there below.

• Marc Benioff questions Klarna CEO's move to scrap Workday, Salesforce in SaaS ‘consolidation’ drive

Things are picking up now at the Moscone Center - a steady flow of attendees making their way into the conference

It feels like a lifetime since Dreamforce 2023. Last year's conference took place during while generative AI was still very much in its 'non-starter' period. Concerns over hallucinations, data privacy, and security were rampant.

One year on, and these concerns are still lingering, but we're seeing adoption rates accelerate and investment surging.

With under two hours to go until the opening keynote here at Dreamforce 2024, catch up on our roundup of last year's conference.

• AI, hallucinations and Foo Fighters at Dreamforce 2023

Wouldn't be Dreamforce without some chilled music before the opening keynote. The conference hall is filling up rapidly now - what was a steady flow is now a torrent here at the Moscone Center.

Even the queue for pictures with the Einstein mascot is at least 30 people.

We have our first speaker of the day on stage here at the Moscone Center. Lynne Zaledonis, EVP for partner and customer success at Salesforce kicks things off with a welcome for attendees.

Zaledonis has welcomed Keir Dowden, CTO Salesforce Digital at Credera onto stage now to talk about how AI is helping improve productivity for partner organizations.

We had a short snappy promotional video showing workers using the Einstein AI tool to fine tune email, and simplify client communications.

"The first thing is to embrace it {AI], this is the future of work," Dowden says. AgentForce, Dowden adds, is a potential game changer for customers.

The next partner success story we're hearing about this morning is OpenTable, one of the biggest hospitality booking providers on earth. One billion diners, tens of thousands of restaurants globally, and they've got to keep both users and clients happy.

To achieve this, OpenTable has adopted AgentForce - we're going to hear a lot about AgentForce this week - to automate processes and help improve productivity for operations teams.

It's just about time to welcome Marc Benioff to the stage now. Excitement building.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff takes the stage to a rapturous applause.

"This Dreamforce is really like no other Dreamforce we've ever had. This is about humans and robots driving customer success together."

There's 45,000 people here today at Dreamforce, Benioff says. Going by the cramped conditions on the streets earlier on today, that seems about right.

Benioff is making his way through the crowd now, as is customary.

"Through Dreamforce's for the last 10 years, we've been talking about the emergence of AI and how AI has been a critical part of our future. We've introduced you to Einstein," he says.

"As we've added to our own technology, in AI this became clear to us - this was a moment of change. We saw this first generation of AI happen, and it was predictive,"

Salesforce helped pioneer predictive AI with Einstein, Benioff says. But we're at an inflection point in the age of AI. We've moved into the 'copilot world', but it's not quite what we expected.

The Copilot world has been a 'hit or miss world', however. "We don't see how this copilot world is going to get us better business results that we've been looking for," he adds.

We’re now reaching the ‘third wave’ of AI, according to Benioff. This period of evolution will be dominated by autonomous agents.

"We're now all going to be using agents, but we're going to do it all within our Salesforce platform," he says. "We've rewritten all of our customer 360 apps into a singular platform.".

"This platform has the best AI in the world, and the best agents. And the reason why that's so important is because it's going to empower you and enable you to bring that to your customers, your customers, to yourselves."

The wide reaching nature of AI agents will be profound, Benioff says. Applications spanning sales, customer service, marking, data analytics, and commerce.

This is a 'high wire act', Benioff says. Salesforce is really leading the charge here with autonomous AI agents, but if it pays off the impact could be profound.

Early indications are very promising though. Businesses are unlocking marked benefits through AgentForce.

"AgentForce has to be the biggest breakthrough in our technology, and the biggest breakthrough in a long time in artificial intelligence," he says.

Benioff is pulling no punches with his criticism of AI copilots. Data privacy and security-related issues are pervasive. Hallucinations are still an issue.

This won't be the case with agents, however. Salesforce has invested heavily in placing the fundamental building blocks for agents as far as safety goes.

"You're going to have the most accurate AI in the world. The platform also has all these customer 360 apps. The apps are inside the platform, it's one reason why the AI is so accurate - it's because it understands what's coming out of the apps," he says.

AgentForce will be generally available in October this year. “The early customer stories are blowing my mind.”

Wiley is a great example, Benioff says. They’ve been a long-term partner and have unlocked significant benefits from AgentForce so far.

“WIley is already reporting that they’re resolving 40% of cases through AgentForce,” he says.

Disney is another big client for Salesforce, and they're using AgentForce extensively to support customer services and to improve experiences for visitors at Disney Land.

"AgentForce looks across the whole park. It looks across the whole park and says 'what rides have long lines, how do we do flow control and keep the park moving?'" Benioff says.

Using AgentForce, guides are able to curate visitor experiences in a more efficient manner.

"When I think about Salesforce today, I think about it in three layers, maybe four. I think about the last 25 years we've been automating every customer touchpoint," he says.

"Anywhere your customers are coming in, we're connecting. We're also building a data cloud so that you have a data lake that is able to absorb all of that customer connectivity, federated that data cloud out, but to other types of data lakes.

"We're able to take all of that data and bring it down into customer 360. Now we want to wrap that with agents and make you even more productive and more capable."

It's an extension of Salesforce's core platform here, when you really boil things down, just with agents woven into everything.

Benioff is back having a pop at AI hype over the last year, comparing a lot of what's out there to a 'DIY' approach.

"We've all struggled these last two years with copilots and LLMs, and how we're putting this all together," he says. Again, agents are the antidote to this AI solutions overload many organizations are dealing with right now.

With AgentForce, however, this new approach aims to combine chatbots and copilots and building out from there. A complete all-rounder, automated, and easy to use.

This will be a major shift, not just for Salesforce, but for customers, partners, and clients. So next up today we've got Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI to look under the hood and explore how these will work in action for customers.

"The very first thing we built in this journey was our Einstein Trust Layer," Shih says. Salesforce is keen to emphasize the safety element within AgentForce. This will likely be a key differentiator for the firm in helping drive adoption of agents and pry potential customers away from copilots.

"We're seeing amazing results," Shih says. AgentForce agents are 33% more accurate compared to comparable 'DIY AI' solutions out there on the market right now. Data insights through AgentForce are also twice as relevant, helping users cut out the chaff.

We're getting a run through how AgentForce can be used in a customer service context. Ever tried - and failed - to get through to a real human customer service agent to query an order?

Looks like you'll probably be interacting with an AI agent soon enough. And if we're being honest, it'll probably be easier. No more 'case deflection', according to Salesforce.

We're back with Benioff now.

"Are you getting jacked? You can see why we're so excited," he says. "It's not just about what's possible, it's about what you can make possible."

"Our goal is simple. For you to augment your employees, create better experiences for customers, and deliver high revenue for your companies."

AgentForce is outperforming OpenAI on Azure in terms of pricing, Benioff says. Big statement, and he's doubled down on it, telling customers to call them out on this.

Salesforce's big push on its Data Cloud offering in recent years has, inadvertently, it appears, laid the perfect foundations for this next stage in AI innovation, Benioff says. With customers flocking to Data Cloud and consolidating all their customer 'touchpoints', this creates the perfect scenario for AgentForce adoption.

Sanjna Parulekar, VP of product marketing, is up on stage now to give us a run down on how enterprises are maximizing the use of their data in the age of AI.

We're getting a run down of how the AgentForce prompt builder functions. Low-code, easy to use prompt engineering capabilities. This looks very much like a 'plug in and play' approach to AI, and will likely resonate with customers.

AgentForce is prompting a big overhaul of workflows and data environments. It's also resulted in a big re-write of Tableau, Benioff says.

"We've got one consistent interface, one platform for the whole customer," he adds.

We're starting to reach the end of the opening keynote session here. It's been a lot.

"We really think this is an unbelievable opportunity," Benioff says. "You can see this vision is starting to unfold".

Salesforce is all-in on AgentForce, that's for sure. The company looks keen to frame this as a far easier experience for enterprises to ramp up AI innovation - and also safer. No more 'DIY AI' and fumbling around with cumbersome large language models (LLMs) and irritating chatbots.

And that's the opening keynote finished. There was a lot to digest there at times, but there certainly seems to be an optimistic outlook at Salesforce for the months ahead, and AgentForce is the big focus right now.

We'll be back tomorrow with more rolling coverage from the day-two keynote, so make sure to keep tabs on this live blog for more updates and announcements.

More coverage of the conference will be rolling in throughout the week, so keep checking in!

It's safe to say yesterday saw an explosive start to Dreamforce, with Marc Benioff kicking things off in the opening keynote. We heard all about Salesforce's new sharpened focus on AgentForce, its platform which allows enterprises to create autonomous AI agents.

The company appears to be all-in on AI agents, and has grand plans to strike in a lead in what some industry figures are touting as the next evolutionary step in the generative AI race.

Salesforce isn't alone in terms of driving AI agents adoption, however. Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled plans to launch its own Copilot agents. We could have a battle brewing between these two early proponents.

You can read all about AgentForce and Benioff's explosive comments about Microsoft below.

• Salesforce CEO wants to “break the hypnosis" coming from major AI vendors

We've got another big crowd heading into the keynote theatre ahead of the afternoon session here at the Moscone Center. The atmosphere is still electric. Let's see how people feel after Dreamfest tonight though.

It's been a busy, busy day here at Dreamforce, and the early keynote gave attendees a deep dive into how AgentForce is being used by enterprises to great effect.

Adam Evans, SVP of product at Salesforce, led the charge this morning, echoing CEO Marc Benioff's comments on agents representing the 'third wave' of AI. Predictive AI had its time, generative AI had its boom, and now we're moving into the autonomous era.

Gary Brandeleer, senior director for product management at Salesforce, gave attendees a glimpse under the hood of AgentForce with a series of demos showcasing the intuitive capabilities of the service.

We're now in a live panel discussion on AI and the future of work, featuring Salesforce chief people officer, Nathalie Scardino, Slack CEO Denise Dresser, and Box chief technology officer, Ben Kus.

You can't have a conversation about AI in 2024 without the topic of job losses inevitably coming up. But will this really be the case? Scardino doesn't think this will be the case.

Take accountants, for example. With the advent of spreadsheets, scaremongering would've had many believe the end of the accountant was nigh. But this apocalypse didn't quite materialize.

They instead turned their attention to more meaningful tasks and high-level work.

AI can be a facilitator of innovation and greatly improve productivity for workers, Dressers notes. We're seeing the tangible benefits of AI helping to drive employee productivity and team synergy in Slack, for example.

AI adoption can be tricky, and scary, for workers. But this is where communication is key during the adoption journey, according to Scardino.

Dresser echoes her comments, noting that leaders at enterprises need to be supportive and clearly communicate their intentions.

"This is a leadership moment," she says. "It's really important to have a truthful conversation about using AI and really bring that out. And then also understand that we have to change the way we work in the age of AI."

"This is something that we all have to lead from the front."

Dresser notes that research from Slack's Workforce Lab showed that enterprises are keen to adopt AI in the workplace. But there are some challenges. Chief among these is trust.

A question from the audience now, and an interesting one. If we're using AI to take the 'drudgery' our of work, then what happens to individuals at enterprises who specifically tackle this 'drudgery'.

Box CTO Ben Kus notes that younger generations are going to be essentially AI native workers upon entering the workforce.

"Some of the new workers will come in and it's more intuitive to them," he says.

Scardino adds that this will require greater transparency in education. This will be about understanding how to get the workforce ready for this evolutionary period in the era of AI.

Workforce development will also be key, Scardino adds. Salesforce has its pathways scheme, for example, that is helping provide apprenticeships.

There will inevitably be new jobs, Dresser adds. We've heard a lot about this in recent months.

AI may take jobs, but it will also create new opportunities. Have we really seen this in action yet though?

We've moved onto misuse of AI tools in the workplace now. It's definitely an issue that's been growing in scale over the last few months. Rogue workers using unauthorized tools in the workplace can create security nightmares for the enterprise.

Dresser says firms need to be clear on what is acceptable to use.

We're coming to a close here. A great panel session so far and it's ending on an interesting note.

With AI expected to change how we work and impact how we measure productivity, this raises questions about enterprise KPIs on worker productivity. Prior to the age of AI, many workers looked busy and productive, but with these new tools alleviating workloads, this could throw things up in the air.

It's up to management, therefore, to also upskill to contend with these new changing trends.

That's all from us here at Dreamforce today, but we'll be back tomorrow with more rolling coverage throughout the day. Be sure to come back and keep tabs on the live blog for all the latest updates.