Salesforce celebrated its new wave of artificially intelligent ‘agents’ on Tuesday (San Francisco time), with CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff envisioning a new era of business productivity — while branding competing efforts from Microsoft as “the next Clippy”.
The American CRM giant shared its AI ‘agents’ at the San Francisco Dreamforce event, where Benioff declared the new Agentforce platform one of the most significant developments in Salesforce’s history.
Benioff said its new AI agents can automate and augment customer support processes, leveraging the data and functions already used by Salesforce clients.
In one demonstration, an AI agent built for luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue held an audio voice call with a customer, identified their order, negotiated an exchange, and organised a store pick-up.
“It knows your business. It can plan, it can reason, and take action on your behalf,” Benioff said during the keynote.
Businesses can build bespoke agents, and use more than 100 out-of-the-box prompts to help configure those agents to their specific requirements.
Salesforce says conversations performed by agents will cost US$2 to begin with, with much of the functionality available to existing users through a freemium model.
The Agentforce platform emerges in an increasingly crowded market for AI-powered business tools, including offerings like Microsoft’s Copilot system.
In its own press materials, Microsoft bills Copilot as a generative tool for use in Microsoft 365 apps, programs, and documents, allowing business users to automatically create new ideas, charts, and outreach materials.
Speaking to the press after his keynote, Benioff said it was important to “break the hypnosis” around tools like Copilot.
“I really think that Copilot is the next Clippy,” Benioff said, referring to the discontinued paperclip-styled assistant included in older versions of Microsoft Office.
The system “hasn’t really delivered for customers what they intended,” he continued.
“It’s cute, it’s fun, it does some things, and then you’re not really using it, it doesn’t have the adoption rates.”
Benioff has publicly questioned the utility of platforms like Copilot before, using a quarterly earnings call in August to say Microsoft’s AI systems have “disappointed so many customers”.
Microsoft hit back, with Jared Spataro, its corporate vice president for artificial intelligence at work, telling CRN that companies “are betting on Microsoft for their AI transformation”.
Microsoft also launched the “next wave” of its system, including “Copilot agents”, on Tuesday — just a day ahead of Benioff’s keynote.
Responding to a question about the suitability of all-in-one AI solutions, like the one Salesforce is presenting in Agentforce, Benioff had a strong take.
“We’re only about one thing, customer success, all that other shit we don’t fucking care about,” he said.
Benioff argued DIY attempts to incorporate AI systems with business data represent a “science project”.
“Why are you doing this to yourselves?” he continued.
“You’re doing a hyperscaler agreement and a database agreement, and you’re hiring an AI engineer, and now you’re doing a frontier model, and you’re hiring a separate team, and you’re doing this and this and this, and you’re hooking it all up.
“Why are you doing this, and not getting the result you want in accuracy and in hallucination rate?”
Rising with the economy’s appetite for AI integrations is the fear that new, artificially intelligent technologies could result in mass layoffs and the breakdown of traditional modes of employment.
Benioff appeared to wave off some of those concerns, telling attendees that agents could lift much of the grunt-work currently done by employees, freeing them to perform more productive tasks.
“I’m sure that there will be situations where a call centre, a customer service organisation, a sales organisation, a marketing organisation, is maybe more efficient, and the company feels like they want to reduce heads,” he said.
“I think in a lot of cases, you’re going to also see the opposite.”
The Agentforce system builds upon previous Salesforce investments in AI, including the addition of GPT functions to Salesforce-owned Slack.
Dreamforce will continue through to Thursday.
The author travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.
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Senior Business Journalist
Focused on the small business sector, David’s work covers the political, regulatory, and economic issues facing Australian entrepreneurs. Prior to joining SmartCompany, he was a reporter for Business Insider Australia. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
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