With 50,000 attendees descending on Salesforce Dreamforce conference This week, the enterprise software giant is making its boldest bet yet on AI customers, positioning itself as an antidote to what it calls industry-wide AI. "Pilot disinfectant" where 95% of enterprise AI projects never reach production.
The company launched on Monday Agent Force 360a comprehensive reimagining of its entire product suite designed to transform businesses into what they call it "Agent companies" — Organizations where AI agents work alongside humans to handle up to 40% of the work across sales, service, marketing and operations.
"We’re really in the era of agentic AI, and I think it’s probably the biggest revolution, the biggest shift in technology that I’ve ever seen in my career," Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and chief technology officer, said during a recent press conference. "In the future, 40% of the work in the Fortune 1000 will likely be done by AI, and humans and AI will already be working together."
The announcement comes at a pivotal moment for Salesforce, which has deployed more than 12,000 AI agent applications over the past year while building what Harris called… "$7 billion business" About its AI platform. However, the launch also comes amid extraordinary turmoil, as CEO Marc Benioff is facing backlash For recent comments Supporting President Trump Proposing that National Guard troops patrol the streets of San Francisco.
Why are 95% of enterprise AI projects never launched?
The risks are huge. While companies were quick to experiment with AI after ChatGPT emerged two years ago, most enterprise deployments were halted before reaching production, according to Recent MIT research Which was widely cited by Salesforce executives.
"Customers have invested a lot in AI, but they are not getting value;" said Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce president and chief engineering and customer success officer. "95% of enterprise AI pilots fail before production. Not because of lack of intention. People want to do this. Everyone understands the power of technology. But why is it so difficult?"
The answer, according to Tallabragada, is that AI tools remain separate from an organization’s workflow, data, and management systems. "You’re writing prompts, prompts, and you’re frustrated because the context isn’t there," He said, describing what he called A "Rapid death ring."
The Salesforce solution is a highly integrated platform that connects what it calls four components: the Agentforce 360 agent platform, Data 360 for unified access to data, Customer 360 apps that contain the business logic, and Slack as the solution "Conversational interface" Where humans and agents collaborate.
Slack becomes the front door to Salesforce
Perhaps the most important strategic shift is upside Slack – Acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for $27.7 billion – As the primary interface to Salesforce itself. The company is actively reimagining its traditional Lightning interface around Slack channels, where sales deals, service cases, and data insights will appear conversationally rather than through forms and dashboards.
"Imagine maybe you’re not logged into Salesforce, you don’t see Salesforce, but it’s there. It comes to you in Slack, because that’s where you get your work done," Harris explained.
The strategy includes integrating Salesforce’s Agentforce agents for sales, IT services, HR service, and analytics directly into Slack, along with a completely rebuilt Slackbot that serves as a personal AI companion. The company also launches "Channel expert," An always-on agent provides instant answers from channel conversations.
To enable third-party AI tools to access Slack conversation data, Salesforce releases a Real-time search API and Model context protocol server. Partners including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Writer, Dropbox, Notion, and Cursor are building agents that will live natively in Slack.
"The best way to see the power of the platform is through the AI applications and agents that have already been created," Salesforce CEO Rob Seaman said during a press conference, citing examples of startups "Achieving tens of thousands of customers who installed it in 120 days or less."
Voice and IT services target new markets
In addition to the Slack integration, Salesforce announced major expansions into voice interactions and employee service. Agent’s voicenow generally available, turns traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems into natural conversations that can update CRM records, trigger workflows, and easily hand off to human agents.
The IT service offering is the most direct challenge Salesforce faces Service nowthe market leader. Mudhu Sudhakar, who joined Salesforce two months ago as senior vice president of IT and HR Services, positioned the product as a fundamental reimagining of employee support.
"Legacy IT service management is largely focused on portals, forms, tickets, and manual processes." Sudhakar said. "We had some core principles: conversation first and agent first, really focused on having a conversational experience for people asking for support and for people providing support."
The IT Services Platform includes what Salesforce describes as more than 25 dedicated agents and more than 100 pre-built workflows and connectors that can handle everything from password resets to complex incident management.
Early customers reported huge efficiency gains
Customer results indicate that this approach is gaining traction. Reddit Average support resolution time was reduced from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes – an 84% improvement – with 46% of cases fully converted to AI agents. "This efficiency has allowed us to provide on-demand assistance for complex tasks and boost advertiser satisfaction scores by 20%." John Thompson, vice president of sales strategy and operations at Reddit, said in a statement.
enginea travel management company, reduced average handle time by 15%, saving more than $2 million annually. Open table Resolves 70% of restaurant and dining inquiries independently. 1-800Accountant achieved a case deviation rate of 90% during the critical tax week period.
Salesforce’s internal deployments are perhaps the most telling. Tallapragada’s customer success organization now handles 1.8 million AI-powered conversations weekly, with metrics published on help.salesforce.com Shows how many customers respond versus escalating to humans.
Most importantly, Salesforce deployed AI-powered sales development representatives to follow up on leads who had not previously been contacted due to cost constraints. "Now, Agentforce has SDRs tracking thousands of leads," Tallabragada explained. The company also increased proactive customer outreach by 40% by shifting employees from reactive support.
Companies cannot ignore the trust layer problem
Given companies’ concerns about the reliability of AI, Salesforce has invested heavily in what it calls “artificial intelligence.” "Trust layer" — Audit trails, compliance checks, and monitoring tools that allow organizations to monitor agent behavior at scale.
"You should think of the agent as a human being. Digital labor. You need to manage performance just like a human. And you need these audit trails," Tallabragada explained.
The company faced this challenge head-on as it expanded its dealer footprint. "When we started Agentforce in Salesforce, we were tracking every message, which is great up to 1,000, 3,000," Tallabragada said. "Once you have a million conversations, there’s no longer a human being, and we can’t do it."
The platform now includes "Agentforce Network" To search through millions of conversations to identify and fix problematic patterns. The company also introduced Agent Script, a new scripting language that allows developers to define fine-grained guardrails and deterministic controls on agent behavior.
Data infrastructure is getting a major upgrade
Underlying agent capabilities are significant investments in infrastructure. salesforce Data 360 Includes "smart context," Which automatically extracts structured information from unstructured content such as PDF files, graphs, and flowcharts using what the company describes as… "AI-powered unstructured data pipelines."
The company also cooperates with Data bricks, DBT Laboratoriesand Snowflake on "global semantic exchange," An attempt to standardize how different platforms define business metrics. The pending $8 billion acquisition of Informatica is expected to close soon, expanding metadata management capabilities across the enterprise.
The competitive landscape continues to intensify
Salesforce’s strong AI push comes at a time when nearly every major enterprise software vendor is pursuing similar strategies. Microsoft has included Copilot across its product line, Google is offering proxy capabilities through Vertex AI and Gemini, and ServiceNow has launched its own proxy offerings.
When asked how the Salesforce ad compares to Latest versions of OpenAITallabragada stressed that customers will be using multiple AI tools simultaneously. "Most often I see they use OpenAI, they use Gemini, they use Anthropic, just like Salesforce, we use all three," He said.
Executives say the real difference is not in the AI models, but in the integration with business processes and data. Harris framed the competition in terms familiar from Salesforce’s founding: "26 years ago, we just said, let’s make Salesforce automation as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com. We do the same thing. We want to make agentic AI as easy as buying a book on Amazon."
The company’s customer success stories are impressive but remain a small portion of its customer base. With 150,000 Salesforce customers and 1 million Slack customers, Agentforce’s 12,000 deployments represent roughly 8% penetration — solid for a one-year-old product line, but hardly ubiquitous.
The company’s stock declined About 28% since the beginning of the year together Relative strength rating is only 15indicates that investors are still skeptical. This week’s Dreamforce demos — and the months of customer deployments that follow — will begin to provide answers about whether Salesforce can finally move enterprise AI from pilots to full-scale production, or whether "$7 billion business" It remains more ambition than reality.
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