Salesforce told us its agents were coming, and it was still a surprise when the agents arrived.
If you’ve been conscious for the past year, you know how much news (or noise) there has been about artificial intelligence. Salesforce billed Dreamforce24 as “the largest AI event in the world.” It caught me a bit off guard when I heard Marc Benioff say it, but it probably shouldn’t have; Salesforce has invested heavily in AI for the past few years, ever since it introduced Salesforce Einstein (now Tableau CRM) in 2016. Its latest effort is Agentforce, and the company is really leaning into it.
The topic of AI erputed in 2023 once ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general populace, and it’s only fair that a business would leverage the popularity of the topic. While 2024 seemed poised to be “the Year of the Copilot,” since a number of vendors introduced AI copilot apps—digital assistants that automate routine tasks—the fanfare was to be short-lived. Today, the talk is about agents, or agentic AI—AI that acts on its own to accomplish tasks and achieve goals, reaching into the knowledge stored in linked apps as necessary.
Marc Benioff declared, “Agents are the third wave of AI.” It’s hard to argue against this. AI agents have great potential to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, and mark a leap forward in AI capabilities. Benioff stated that one of the goals of this year’s Dreamforce was to get 1,000 customers to deploy Agentforce, a goal which I believe they achieved. It’s too soon for there to be any tangible results that anybody can talk about, so we’ll have to see how the reality lines up with the potential.
The canned demos of Agentforce made AI customer service look easy, with no code required to create and modify an interaction workflow. B2C customer service examples showed how conversational AI linked to business processes and live information make for a quick and satisfying experience. I have to wonder about the parts we didn’t see, such as how it works in a B2B context, but what we did see was compelling.
Salesforce attributes the power of its agents to the Salesforce platform, providing access to the existing security, business processes, and databases a customer would already possess. Platform will be more important than ever, if that’s the case. Other vendors are no doubt following suit.
There is still a question remaining about what effect agents will have on the workforce. On the one hand, there is the assertion that agents will free up existing employees to do more valuable work, possibly allowing employers to hire more people into affected roles. On the other hand, contact centers are infamously squeezed for the last penny of cost savings, and it seems likely that any gains in efficiency will be reflected in workforce reduction. Maybe not in every case, but I do not believe this issue has been sufficiently addressed. We’ll need to keep an eye on this.