by twieberneit | Dec 20, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On December 17, 2024, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 after introducing Agentforce 1.0 during the company’s Dreamforce event. With it, it repositions Agentforce as a “Digital Labor Platform” that is capable of supplying businesses with an infinite workforce. This way, they shall be able to address internal challenges like labor shortages, fixed capacity, stalled productivity, or burnout. In addition, they increase their ability to work with increasing customer demands like no patience, their wish for personalization and empathy and with a knowledgeable expert, etc. “Agentforce 2.0 is the newest version of Agentforce and the first digital labor platform for enterprises — a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This new release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy AI agents in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – enabling teams to scale their workforce with a custom Agentforce capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy.” Agentforce 2.0 comes with a library of prebuilt skills, which are jobs that digital agents can perform. These skills do not only cover Salesforce software but also cover partner software and, with the help of Mulesoft, any other system. The agent builder, that is part of Agentforce 2.0 enables the building of new agents/skills using natural language. New agents can be built using the skill library or custom logic. Agentforce 2.0 is live and will get additional capabilities throughout Q1/2025. The Bigger Picture AI has hit an inflection point. We came from rule-based...
by twieberneit | Dec 9, 2024 | Blog |
It is hard to believe but another year just flew by. It was a year that was defined by considerable hope and hype about generative technologies. It also means that another year lies ahead of us, a year that may or may not bring change. It also means that I get asked again for my outlook for CRM, CX and AI, and what are relevant industry trends to observe. As said, last year everything revolved around generative AI and I consequently looked at what’s going to happen on the front of CX and generative AI. Let’s look at how good my glass ball did work before looking at 2025. In summary, I postulated that there will be More success stories (partly right) more sophisticated use cases (partly right, although I didn’t really look at agentic AI) a flurry of more specialized models (yep) more companies starting to look at the ROI of implementations (partly right again, as there is still a lot of experimentation going on) a strong platform play going on (spot on, but this, frankly, wasn’t too hard to postulate) But what will come in 2025? What do some of the big dogs say about gen AI? As a little side note to the adoption and ROI topics, there are two interesting studies, one from the Wharton School and the Forrester Research predictions. The Wharton study basically indicates that 2024 has been a year of experimentation while 2025 will more be a year of adoption and deployment, with rather slowing growth of investment. The study authors suspect that this is a sign that companies are still looking...
by Marshall Lager | Sep 23, 2024 | Analysis, Blog, News |
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...
by twieberneit | Jun 28, 2024 | Blog, Case Study, Sponsored |
Zoho is well-known as a technology vendor for the SMB market. The company has products that support the whole range from single proprietors to larger companies. This range in itself is remarkable. For some time now, the company is diligently working on moving upmarket and to also support enterprises. This is not in the least, as with a growing customer base, more and more existing customers grow into the enterprise segment. The transition from SMB to enterprise is far from trivial. Sales models change, messaging, consulting approaches, support infrastructure, even the demand for the size and structure of the ecosystem are different in the enterprise sector. So, how does Zoho fare? To find out, I had a conversation with Parl Johnson, “Chief Nerd” at Nuvia Smiles. You can find our complete conversation on YouTube. Interview with Parl Johnson, Chief Nerd at Nuvia Smiles Nuvia Smiles is a dental implant company and currently has 1,500 Zoho seats. The company has more than 30 locations across the United States. Its specialty is to provide a 24-hour turnaround time to get permanent teeth into the patient’s mouth. This way, they do not have to wait long periods of time to get dental replacements. This requires a very rigorous process and having a lab at every location. Decision making is highly decentralized to support this fast process. The challenge with this degree of decentralization is that there are many disconnected applications and with that also very decentralized data. Nuvia Smiles identified 80 different applications with a scope of consolidation across the 30 locations. While this initially facilitates fast growth, it can become a...
by twieberneit | May 31, 2024 | Analysis, Blog, News |
The news On May 29, 2024, Salesforce reported its results for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025. Highlights are a total quarterly revenue of $9.133bn US, resembling a year-over-year growth of 11 percent a current remaining performance obligation of $26.4bn US a remaining performance obligation of $53.9B US an operating margin of 18.7 percent. Diluted earnings per share of $1.56 The company reported a revenue guidance of $9.2bn – $9.25bn US for the next quarter and a full year guidance of $37.7bn – $38.0bn US, resembling growth rates of 7 – 8 percent and 8 – 9 percent, respectively. With these numbers, Salesforce ended up at the lower end of last quarter’s guidance on the revenue growth side while exceeding the earnings per share projection and slightly lowered the guidance for the fiscal year 2025. The result: The company’s share price dropped from $272 to bottom out at $212. The bigger picture Salesforce is the big gorilla in the CRM and CX industry. The company has surpassed SAP as the biggest business software vendor in the last 18 months. This is largely thanks to the extraordinary growth that Salesforce showed in the past years and secondly because of SAP’s still ongoing transition from an on-premises vendor to become a cloud vendor. All three, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP report a higher cloud application growth. But then, the big games in town are generative AI and infrastructure. All of these companies, including Salesforce, are investing heavily in their own artificial intelligence capabilities in a race to provide superior business applications. Plus, several other ones, including Google and, specialist vendors....
