Agentic AI is reshaping enterprise support—but amid the hype, buyers still need clear proof of value and safety. This benchmark study cuts through the noise by evaluating how leading software vendors deploy agentic help today, what “agentic” truly means in practice, and where governance and reasoning layers separate production-ready systems from basic LLM chat.
Using a transparent methodology, Futurum Research defines agentic AI interactions (independence, adaptability, action, and learning) and assesses real-world help experiences across a competitive set including Adobe, Atlassian, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Intercom, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow. We score solutions on traffic and transaction estimates, the presence and coverage of governance and reasoning layers, and analyst rankings for automation depth, task handling, integration ability, and outcomes.
Findings show agentic help is early—but accelerating—especially where vendors use a “customer-zero” approach to prove ROI on their own help sites. In our Full Agentic Ranking Model, completed in partnership with Salesforce, Agentforce on Help leads with enterprise-grade governance plus a reasoning engine and recently surpassed 1M monthly support requests handled by agents, while several peers advance with narrower stacks grounded to knowledge bases.
In this market study report, you will learn:
- The working definition of agentic AI for enterprise help—and why governance and reasoning layers matter.
- How vendors operationalize “customer-zero” to validate value, quality, and scale.
- The competitive landscape across 11 vendors and where each is investing.
- The evaluation criteria: traffic and transaction estimates, governance/reasoning coverage, and analyst outcome scores.
- Results highlights, including Salesforce’s leadership on full agentic volume with safety and accuracy controls.
Download the report to see the rankings, criteria, and what “good” looks like for safe, scalable agentic support.
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Author Information
Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.
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.
