Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick, Nick Patience
Publication Date: October 22, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- Salesforce debuts Agentforce 360 as a fully agentic platform, enabling organizations to design, deploy, and manage AI agents across sales, service, marketing, and IT workflows, with key innovations like Agentforce Builder, Voice, and Agent Script powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine.
- Slack evolves into the “agentic OS” for collaboration between humans and agents, providing a unified workspace where Agentforce apps, enterprise search, and third-party AI integrations (via Anthropic, Dropbox, OpenAI, etc.) operate seamlessly through the Model Context Protocol.
- Strategically, Salesforce’s pivot reframes AI as a core revenue driver, using the Agentforce and Data 360 rebranding to counter AI-first challengers like OpenAI, showcase flexibility in pricing models (consumption or outcome-based), and position Salesforce as the leading enterprise platform for scalable, trustworthy agentic AI adoption.
- Salesforce enters the ITSM market with Agentforce IT Service, based on best practices from its ServiceCloud product.
The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: Bringing together 50,000 of its customers, partners, and stakeholders, Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event was marked by the company’s full pivot to embracing agentic AI across its entire platform. Salesforce announced the general availability of Agentforce 360, which is designed to enable companies to deploy AI agents in concert with human employees, data, and workflows.
Agentforce 360, the latest version of its agentic platform, incorporates several new or enhanced features designed to support the use of agents as an integral element of the Salesforce platform. New components and features include:
- Agentforce Builder: A new conversational development studio that lets teams design, test, and deploy agents using natural language — no manual configuration required.
- Agentforce Voice: A native voice layer that transforms IVR systems into natural, real-time conversations with low-latency transcription, realistic speech synthesis, and deep Salesforce integration. Voice is compatible with leading enterprise CCaaS partners such as Amazon Connect, Five9, NiCE, and Vonage.
- Hybrid Reasoning & Agent Script: Combines deterministic workflows with flexible LLM reasoning for precision and adaptability. Developers can define guardrails, tool use, and logic using Agent Script, powered by the configurable Atlas Reasoning Engine.
- Agentforce Vibes: Extends low-code development to AI, letting builders “vibe-code” apps grounded in company data and governance.
- Observability: New dashboards built into Agentforce 360 are designed to help teams monitor reasoning, accuracy, and compliance — improving reliability over time.
In addition, Salesforce announced Data 360, the new name for its venerable Data Cloud product, which serves as a unified data layer enabling agents to draw on structured and unstructured context to power agents and workflows. Data 360 also provides Tableau Semantics, which translates data into business language and ensures consistent metrics across clouds through the Customer 360 Semantic Data Model (SDM). With partners Databricks, dbt Labs, and Snowflake, Salesforce enables standardized semantics across platforms.
Slack is being positioned as the agentic OS, serving as the interface through which humans and agents will collaborate to get work done. Agentforce Sales, IT Service, HR Service, and Tableau Next now surface insights and complete actions without leaving Slack, while an enterprise search feature enables natural language answers across Google Drive, GitHub, Jira, and other third-party systems. Slack also features a context-aware assistant for writing help, message summaries, and huddle notes, and supports model context protocol (MCP), which integrates third-party AI technology from Anthropic, Dropbox, and OpenAI through new APIs for real-time knowledge and automation.
Salesforce also announced the embedding of agents into specific workflows, including sales, service, marketing, field service, IT, revenue management, and commerce, so that agents can act within the business logic of Salesforce apps. Pre-built industry-specific Agentforce solutions for life sciences, public sector, and manufacturing were also announced, with the goal of helping organizations in these industries quickly design and launch agents, improving time-to-value.
Salesforce took an unexpected turn towards the IT end user domain with the announcement of Agentforce IT Service, an agentic conversational IT support product suite. By going after the IT Service Management (ITSM) opportunity, Salesforce is wading securely into the market occupied by rival ServiceNow, which in turn has made numerous remarks about entering the CRM space dominated by Salesforce. Agentforce IT Service, which is based on best practices from its ServiceCloud product, features a configuration management database (CMDB) and supports end to end ITIL processes.
Dreamforce Highlights Agentic Enterprise Messaging and Strategy for Salesforce
Analyst Take: Salesforce has positioned Agentforce as a comprehensive platform transformation that integrates AI agents across all its applications, including sales, service, marketing, commerce, and industry-specific solutions. The new Agentforce 360 and 360 branding is clearly designed to reinforce the notion that Salesforce apps and services feature agentic AI as a core component, rather than an add-on, though it may have over-rotated on the value of the Agentforce nomenclature (after all, it was only about 2 years ago that the company was all-in with the Einstein GPT branding.
Nevertheless, the push to highlight agentic AI as a core element of the Salesforce platform does two things. First, it helps ward off challenges from AI-first vendors, such as OpenAI, which appear to be making at least a cursory push into the enterprise software space by highlighting their AI-native functionality. Salesforce’s AI-centric messaging clearly appears to be trying to counterbalance this type of activity from challengers.
Secondly, Salesforce, like many other vendors, has been under pressure to demonstrate that its AI technology is actively driving new revenue. By characterizing AI as an integral part of the entire platform, Salesforce can make the case that AI is actively contributing to revenue, whether priced within a specific SKU, as an add-on feature priced on a consumption basis, or, as some Salesforce executives noted, through another method, such as outcome-based pricing. The key message, from CEO Marc Benioff on down, was that Salesforce is determined to entice customers to use Agentforce and would be flexible around pricing and usage models.
In addition, the unveiling of Agent Script appears to be a game-changer, enabling Salesforce to address two key issues hindering adoption. First, companies have struggled to get AI agents to accurately and consistently handle tasks that have specific steps or processes that must be followed. Creating a way for agents to follow a pre-determined script eliminates the need to “overprompt” an agent to get it to follow a specific set of steps, which wastes time and compute resources. This, in turn, eliminates the fear of “overpaying” for agentic AI to handle basic tasks, ensuring that generative and agentic AI are only deployed in situations where its non-deterministic approach to solving problems makes sense, such as trying to understand a customer’s intent, and then providing next-best-action recommendations, or simply taking actions based on a reasoning of the situation.
The key question that remains is whether Salesforce can effectively communicate how these new agentic features and messaging will result in top-line revenue increases and bottom-line improvements in profitability. The market is awash with examples of individual task metric improvements, but few real bottom-line demonstrations of company-wide value due to agentic AI have surfaced. If Salesforce can demonstrate this organization-wide value through Agentforce, they should be able to position themselves as the premier agentic platform to beat in the market.
What to Watch:
- Other SaaS vendors should watch whether Salesforce can deliver credible, organization-wide ROI metrics from agentic AI, not just task-level gains—proof that will influence enterprise buying decisions across the SaaS market.
- Salesforce’s flexible approach to AI monetization—ranging from consumption to potentially outcome-based pricing—may set expectations for how customers evaluate and purchase AI-driven capabilities, pressuring competitors to rethink their own pricing strategies.
- The introduction of Agent Script and hybrid reasoning within Agentforce 360 highlights the growing importance of controllable, auditable AI. Vendors should monitor how well Salesforce balances autonomy with governance, as it could establish a benchmark for enterprise-grade agentic reliability.
You can read the full press release on the key announcements at Salesforce’s website.
Disclosure: Futurum 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 Futurum as a whole.
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Image Credit: Salesforce
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. 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.
Nick Patience is VP and Practice Lead for AI Platforms at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on AI development, deployment, and adoption - an area he has researched for 25 years. Before Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, responsible for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security, and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm that Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
