The CRM giant Salesforce recorded an important milestone in the field of artificial intelligence: As CEO Marc Benioff announced at a company event in San Francisco, more than 1,000 paying customer contracts have already been concluded for the AI-powered “Agentforce” platform.
Agentforce is an AI platform from Salesforce that makes it possible to create and customize automated agents for CRM processes. These agents can be configured using Salesforce development tools Flows, Apex, and templates, accessing CRM data and external sources. They either work in a supportive manner with people or completely autonomously for routine tasks. In contrast to conventional chatbots, they do not require predefined conversation processes, but rather use AI models to understand customer queries and respond to them appropriately. Integration into the Slack communications service is also planned. Salesforce itself is already using the technology intensively: According to Benioff, the company was able to reduce the number of employees for simple customer inquiries by half. Nevertheless, the group plans to increase its sales team by at least 10 percent.
AI as a growth engine
Benioff has high hopes for the concept of the “digital workforce.” The Salesforce boss sees this as an important building block for future economic growth.
What is particularly interesting is the prospect of a planned “Robot Force Partner Program”, which is intended to establish the connection between physical robots and virtual assistants. Benioff cited the hotel industry as an example: While digital assistants could take on back and front office tasks, robots would do the room cleaning. At the same time, the company introduced a new and expanded version of its digital work platform, Agentforce 2.0, which offers new reasoning, integration and customization functions.
The development shows that the use of AI-supported systems in companies is increasingly becoming a reality. It's not just about experimentation and pilot projects, but rather about concrete business applications with measurable benefits.
