Analyst(s): Paul Nashawaty, Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: September 24, 2024
Document #: MCNPNKK202409
What Is Covered in This Article:
- Agentforce Suite: The company unveiled its new Agentforce suite, a collection of autonomous AI-powered agents.
- Agentforce’s impact on developers: New tools to streamline app development and customer experiences.
- AI Integration: Salesforce announced significant advancements in AI integration across its platform.
- Driving Agents through Partnerships: Salesforce announced a number of new partners designed to help drive adoption of Agentforce and AI agents.
The News: Salesforce kicked off its annual Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco, marking the event by making several announcements relating to the use of artificial intelligence (AI), its new Agentforce suite of autonomous AI-powered agents, and other enhancements to its core Data Cloud platform, Tableau, and Slack applications. The company also highlighted several customer case studies, and CEO Marc Benioff personally invited the attending press and analysts to speak with customers to validate Salesforce’s key messaging around having the most effective AI agent strategy.
Salesforce Goes All in on AI Agents
Analyst Take: Salesforce made a plethora of announcements leading up to and at its annual Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco. While the big announcement was Salesforce’s headfirst leap into the enhancement and re-branding of its Copilot AI technology to Agentforce, there were other adjacent announcements that further enhanced the ability of organizations to connect, activate, and drive ROI through their data.
Salesforce Goes All in on AI Agents
The key announcement coming out of Dreamforce is the shift to Agentforce Agents, which Salesforce says can analyze data, make decisions, and complete tasks such as answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. Unlike general-purpose bots, agents are designed to handle very specific tasks, and can be easily built, customized, and deployed for nearly any type of use case and within any industry.
Salesforce announced several pre-built agents that are available today, which are designed to address common tasks or jobs to be done within various roles, including Service Agent, Sales Development Representative, Merchandiser, and Agents for Commerce Cloud, which include Merchant, Buyer, and Personal Shopper agents.
In addition, Salesforce-announced Agentforce Studio is a suite of low-code AI builders that enable teams to customize existing agents or build new ones, ensuring that agents meet the specific needs of customers. This includes Agent Builder, which uses existing tools such as Flows, prompt templates, Apex, and APIs to help companies configure their agents with low code; Model Builder, which is a low-code builder and control plane for registering, testing, and activating AI models and LLMs of their choice across Salesforce; and Prompt Builder, which lets users customize out-of-the-box prompt templates with their own CRM or Data Cloud to enhance the output of the generated results.
Salesforce Research also announced new AI models, including xGen-Sales, a proprietary model trained and designed to power autonomous sales tasks with Agentforce, and xLAM, a new family of Large Action Models designed to handle complex tasks and generate actionable outputs. The focus of these models is designed to help customers quickly set up and deploy autonomous AI agents that take action. Focusing on agents taking action, rather than simply ingesting or acknowledging data, will be the key to driving Agentforce adoption at scale.
Salesforce’s Agent AI and Data Cloud have significant implications for developers. These new tools offer enhanced capabilities for building and customizing applications, automating tasks, and improving customer experiences.
Impacts on Developers
Salesforce Agent AI and Data Cloud offer developers powerful tools to streamline application development and enhance customer experiences. The platform’s low-code development capabilities enable developers to create applications with minimal coding, significantly accelerating development cycles. This empowers developers to focus on building innovative solutions rather than being bogged down by complex coding tasks.
In addition to low-code development, the platform integrates advanced AI capabilities. Developers can leverage AI to build intelligent applications that can understand and respond to customer needs in real time. Data Cloud simplifies data management by providing a unified view of customer data, making it easier to access and analyze. This enables developers to create more personalized and engaging customer experiences. Finally, the platform’s automation features allow developers to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more strategic and creative endeavors.
Specific benefits for developers:
- Increased productivity: The low-code development tools and automation capabilities can significantly improve developer productivity.
- Improved application quality: AI can help developers create more intelligent and effective applications.
- Enhanced data insights: Data Cloud provides valuable insights into customer behavior, enabling developers to make data-driven decisions.
- Greater innovation: The platform encourages innovation by providing the tools and resources needed to create new and innovative applications.
Overall, Salesforce Agent AI and Data Cloud offer developers a powerful set of tools for building and customizing applications, automating tasks, and improving customer experiences. These tools can help developers increase productivity, improve application quality, and drive innovation.
Salesforce is clearly banking on the increasing desire of organizations to leverage AI throughout. It is also seeking to create a point of differentiation with its agents, with CEO Marc Benioff focusing on several key elements of Salesforce’s overarching AI strategy – data, leveraging multiple AI models, and, of course, the Einstein Trust Layer, which is designed to keep AI agents from hallucinating, incorporating bias or toxicity inherent in publicly trained models, and deviating from company or organizational standards.
Indeed, Salesforce has been trying to make the case that using its platform is the safest and most efficient way for organizations to deploy AI, instead of building AI tools, workflows, or agents themselves. In addition, shifting to a purpose-built, agent-based approach to using AI is seen as the way to deliver real business benefits, instead of a general-purpose, copilot-based approach which Benioff believes simply hasn’t delivered results to most organizations.
Leveraging Partnerships to Drive Adoption of Agents
Salesforce also used Dreamforce to announce several partnerships that are designed to enable agents to work across different applications and platforms. The company announced the Agentforce Partner Network, which is an open ecosystem that enables a company’s Agentforce to complete complex tasks that require chaining together actions across Salesforce and a broad network of third-party systems and agents. These third-party extensions can be installed from Salesforce AppExchange to customize Agentforce’s out-of-the-box agents, build new agents with specific skills, or deploy partner-built agents for a specialized industry, line of business, or functional use cases. At launch, extension partners include Amazon Web Services, Box, Google Cloud, IBM, Workday, Zoom, and more.
The focus on providing an open ecosystem is imperative in today’s enterprise world. Despite a general trend of technology stack consolidation, the fact remains that most organizations will still operate in a heterogeneous stack environment, due to cost issues with migrating to a single platform, a desire for specific functionality, or to mitigate the risk of operating on technology controlled by a single vendor. Salesforce is taking the smart approach of meeting customers where they are and allowing them to deploy agents that work across the entire enterprise, rather than constraining them to the Salesforce platform.
Overall Impression and Impact of Dreamforce Announcements
Salesforce’s Marc Benioff said that this Dreamforce is the most important Dreamforce ever, and recency bias aside, he may be right. While Agentforce stole the show – and is perhaps the company’s biggest bet in recent years – the other enhancements to its various clouds, applications, and services are all aimed at making it easier to access, interact with, and activate a company’s data, from wherever a worker (or Agentforce AI agent) is deployed.
This approach is reflective of the current state of enterprise technology deployment, where applications are both more capable than ever and also more complex and harder to fully utilize unless workers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to learn the product’s ins and outs. Adding agents and AI is an efficient and elegant way of enabling enterprises to derive the maximum functionality and value from not only the data they hold, but the applications and systems that drive the business forward.
The challenge that Salesforce ultimately may face is around delivering business ROI. While Benioff mentioned that Salesforce is moving to a freemium model, where customers will be able to try out the functionality of Data Cloud and other clouds on a limited basis, the most value from AI – and the Salesforce as a whole – is going to be found by implementing multiple clouds and agents running across them, which will likely represent a significant recurring investment. In order to justify this investment, Salesforce will need to work closely with customers to set metrics and expectations that align both parties.
What to Watch
- Salesforce has fully embraced AI agents, but the real test will be how quickly its customers decide to deploy them in both pilots and in general production.
- Salesforce is also rolling out its Salesforce Foundations program, which is a freemium-based model designed to get customers using AI agents across the entire Salesforce platform. This may help drive usage of Agentforce, but this concurrent shift to consumption-based pricing (for agents) may require more customer handholding and education around the benefits of agents.
- Salesforce is embracing an open ecosystem approach to AI agents, which will help the company entice customers that utilize other applications to extend the functionality of agents across their entire technology stack.
- Other vendors are also rolling out AI agents, and Salesforce will need to demonstrate how its overall offering – not just the agents’ performance – is a better solution for enterprises seeking to modernize their organizations through AI.
You can read the press release detailing the news at Salesforce’s website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
At The Futurum Group, Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.
