Salesforce announces Agentforce 360 ​​as enterprise AI competition heats up

Salesforce on Monday announced the latest version of its AI agent platform as the company looks to attract companies to its AI software in an increasingly crowded market.

The CRM giant has unveiled the new platform, branded Agentforce 360, ahead of its annual Dreamforce customer conference starting on October 14. This latest version of Agentforce includes new ways to direct AI agents through text messages, a new platform for building and deploying agents, and a new infrastructure for the Slack messaging app, among other things.

One notable aspect of Agentforce 360 ​​is a new AI agent prompting tool, called Agent Script, which will be released in beta in November. Agent Script gives users the ability to program their AI agents to be more flexible and respond better to “if/then” situations. This allows AI agents to be programmed to be more predictable in less stringent situations such as customer questions.

Users can benefit from “heuristics” models, which claim to think before responding rather than responding based on patterns. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini all power these “thinking” agents.

Salesforce also announced that it will launch a new agent-building tool, Agentforce Builder, which allows users to build, test, and deploy AI agents from one place. This includes the tool, which will be released in beta in November Positive feedback from Agentforcea coding tool for enterprise-level applications that Salesforce announced earlier this month.

The company also announced broader integration between Agentforce and Slack. Salesforce said its core apps, including Agenforce Sales, IT, and HR, among others, will go live in Slack starting this month and expanding through the beginning of 2026.

Slack is piloting a new version of its Slackbot chatbot that’s meant to be more of a custom AI agent that gets to know its user and will offer insights and suggestions.

Salesforce wants Slack to serve as an enterprise search tool in the future as well and plans to launch connectors with platforms like Gmail, Outlook, and Dropbox in early 2026.

This latest update from Salesforce comes at an interesting time for the enterprise AI market. Companies continue to release AI features targeting their enterprise customers as organizations struggle to achieve a return on investment in these tools.

Google announced last week Gemini Foundationa set of tools — many of which are already available — for building enterprise-level AI agents, which counts Figma, Klarna, and Virgin Voyages among its early customers, among others.

Anthropic has also begun to show traction for its enterprise product, Claude Enterprise. The company announced that it had concluded a deal with the giant consulting company Deloitte will bring its chatbot Claude to Deloitte’s 500,000 global employees, its largest corporate deal to date. Announced Anthropist A Strategic partnership with IBM the next day.

Salesforce reports that Agentforce has 12,000 customers — far more than any of its competitors, according to its Agentforce press release. Early beta customers for Agentforce 360 ​​upgrades include Lennar, Adecco, and Pearson.

And this is all despite the latest Massachusetts Institute of Technology study It found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail before they reach production as companies still struggle to justify spending money on these AI tools.