Representatives from some of Australia’s biggest corporations packed Salesforce’s artificial intelligence demo day in Melbourne, but the customer relationship management giant says AI tools more applicable to smaller enterprises are on the way.
Hundreds of visitors from firms like Coles, NAB, and Ansell filled the Pullman Melbourne Albert Park convention centre on Tuesday, for the local leg of Salesforce’s Agentforce world tour.
A miniature version of Salesforce’s cornerstone conference in San Francisco, the event gave attendees hands-on experience with its ‘agents’, AI-powered assistants built into a business’ existing workflow.
In a keynote address helmed by Rowena Westphalen, Salesforce’s regional senior vice president for innovation, AI, and customer advisory, visitors were told how customer service agents could handle repetitive call centre enquiries, freeing time for human staff.
Both the demonstration room and the headline speech billed AI as a game-changer for businesses facing large volumes of inbound customer service enquiries.
Those tools are currently packaged within enterprise-level Salesforce subscriptions, which start at $231 per user, per month, and AI agent pricing starts at $2 per conversation.
Yet for small and medium enterprises, without the need to handle thousands of customer complaints and queries, that kind of AI-powered technology might not be economical.
Speaking to SmartCompany, Westphalen said new kinds of agents, with different capacities, will undergo testing in the coming weeks.
“We have got some early pilots going on for sales-related Agentforce, which is going live in December,” she said.
“That’s mainly around a sales coach and a BDR [business development representative] coach,” capable of acting based on pre-existing sales data.
While those agents will initially operate under pilot model, Westphalen suggested smaller Salesforce users could eventually benefit from sales-focused AI technology.
“It’s interesting, because I feel like both sales and service are applicable to both enterprise and small and medium business customers, but it feels like the ‘bang for the buck’ for enterprise is service, because they have such big call centres,” Westphalen continued.
“It feels like ‘bang for the buck’ in SMB is in sales and BDR, because it’s how they can really grow their business.”
Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the resources to develop new deals while completing existing work, she said.
Salesforce envisions AI agents capable of “nurturing prospects and creating pipeline in parallel”, so that when SMEs complete a project, “they can go back and work out how they’re going to convert that pipe to the next thing they’re going to deliver,” said Westphalen.
Salesforce’s early AI agent success stories firmly come from the ‘M’ side of ‘SME’, but the CRM giant has confirmed AI tools — not necessarily AI agents — will be coming to its entry-level Starter and Pro subscription tiers.
“Salesforce believes very much in the democratisation of technology,” Westphalen said.
“It’s always been a guide: one of our values around equality is we really believe that every organisation of any size should be able to benefit from AI.”
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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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