Salesforce launches Agentforce: Saks, Wiley, and Wyndham spearhead AI for enterprise

Salesforce boss Marc Benioff took aim at his AI rivals and revealed how clients such as Saks, Wiley and Wyndham Hotels are using the vendor’s GenAI capabilities to create ‘next level’ problem-solving chatbots during his Dreamforce 2024 keynote.

The Salesforce founder claimed there was “a lot of noise and a lot of narrative” coming from rival software firms offering generative AI solutions, adding that there needed to be a much greater focus on customer needs.

“This is our gambit,” he later told gathered journalists during a fiery press conference. “We are taking a different approach. We have all our customer touch points and we are sitting with them to deploy the solutions they need.”

His speech came as Salesforce – the world’s biggest customer relationship management solutions provider – unveiled its new GenAI offering, called Agentforce, that integrates with existing Salesforce tools.

Over 41% of employee time is estimated to be spent on repetitive, low-impact work, and 65% of desk workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic, according to the Salesforce Trends in AI Report.

Agentforce is a suite of autonomous AI agents which Salesforce claims will “augment employees” by handling tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce.

This, the San Francisco-based vendor claims, will help improve efficiency and customer satisfaction by offering a smarter chatbot experience.

An AI agent can analyse data, make decisions, and act on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimising marketing campaigns.

Benioff, who took to the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center following a “blessing” from former Senator Daniel Akaka, told the audience “We are entering the third wave of AI” which was “advancing beyond copilots” – a clear swipe at rival Microsoft – into “a new era of highly accurate, low hallucination intelligent agents that actively drive customer success.”

He criticised other vendors who, he claimed, forced enterprises to “DIY” GenAI solutions by including long development and significant amounts of human interaction in the deployment phase.

Agentforce, claimed Benioff, will offer a “fully tailored, enterprise-ready platform designed for immediate impact and scalability.”

“We are in a DIY moment and our job is to break the DIY.”

He set out bold ambitions for the platform, saying Salesforce aims to have a billion users interacting with AI agents by next year’s event and empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025.

Saks unveils Sophie

During the keynote, he gave several examples of projects that had already been in development as pilots for Agentforce, involving enterprises that include publisher Wiley, hotels firm Wyndham Hotels, and retailer Saks, which made several appearances.

According to posters around Dreamforce, Wiley had seen a 40% improvement on its old chatbot after deploying Agentforce to deal with customer service queries.

Saks, Benioff said, had only signed up to trial Agentforce in recent weeks but already had its first AI agent live and providing real-time services to its customers ahead of the conference.

Salesforce EVP of product marketing Patrick Stokes offered a live demonstration of the new Saks AI assistant, named Sophie, during a customer call.

Sophie answered a query about a clothing order that didn’t fit but could not resolve the issue as the AI agent hadn’t been given permission to offer alternative delivery dates or collection points.

Stokes then took the audience behind the scenes into the backend of Agentforce, where using basic text prompts – and no coding – he added this capability to Sophie.

To demonstrate, he then called Sophie again, and while on the call showed how the AI engine processes queries in the background. The AI agent was now able to offer a solution.

This ability to create new solutions out of the box was a key differentiator, according to Benioff, who revealed enterprises on-site at Dreamforce could speak to any of the 4,000 Salesforce engineers on-site to set up a demo of solutions they could use in their businesses.

Catch-up

Speaking to journalists after the keynote, Benioff pulled no punches when discussing rivals – especially Microsoft.

He accused the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft of playing catch-up. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced AI agents for its Copilot 365 product. Though Agentforce has only officially launched this week, it has been in the testing and project development phase with customers for over a year.

“The question you need to ask enterprises is, after deploying their co-pilots, how much additional productivity are they seeing? We think we’ve had a huge technical breakthrough. Our computer scientists have delivered something that’s extraordinary, but it doesn’t matter, until our customers use it and start to see real value.

“It doesn’t matter what the benchmark is, or if it is a very cool science project like ChatGPT… if it can’t bring actual value to my business in a material way.

“We’re about doing it in the right way, offering AI with a trusted layer, and I think that is a better model. We are only about one thing: customer success.”

Benioff also acknowledged that GenAI was a challenging technology to get right because of its ever-evolving nature, especially given Salesforce is trying to differentiate itself from rivals by offering an out-of-the-box GenAI solution instead of collaborative, copilot approaches.

“I hope we’re on the right side of history,” he said. “It is a very high-wire act. We know we are dealing with the most avant-garde technology in history. It is one of the most exciting moments that everyone wants to talk about and try out, but how many of us really could get their hands in the soil?”