Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, “So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilot because they are not getting the accuracy and the response that they want,” in a speech to analysts during Salesforce’s quarterly earnings call. Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.”

It is interesting that conversations concerning Salesforce’s new generative AI product, Agentforce, coincided with Microsoft’s criticism.

Industry experts have long said that AI agents will be the next big iteration of generative AI. Earlier this year, Salesforce India CEO and chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya told AIM about the company’s desire to add AI agents to its wide range of generative AI offerings.

Salesforce Agentforce

Agentforce is a low-code/no-code platform for building autonomous AI agents. It enables users to swiftly create and deploy autonomous AI-driven agents, which are well capable of making decisions on human’s behalf. It integrates seamlessly with Salesforce’s existing applications to automate customer service tasks.

These AI agents can autonomously handle tasks like customer service, sales, and data management. According to Benioff, Salesforce customers already have roughly 200 million AI agents in trials. The number of AI agents could hit the one billion mark in just two years.

It is anticipated that more information regarding Agentforce will be disclosed at the company’s premier event, Dreamforce, which takes place later this month.

(Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2023)

However, earlier this month, Salesforce Research announced two new models — xLAM and xGen-Sales — to help businesses automate sales functions.

Salesforce’s xLAM (large action models) are designed to enhance AI functionality across different business functions. These models can execute tasks that trigger actions within other software systems.

The xGen-Sales model, on the other hand, is designed to automate complex sales tasks with high accuracy and speed.

They are customised for specific industry needs, enabling them to provide more accurate responses, generate customer insights, enhance contact lists, summarise calls, and monitor sales pipelines—all autonomously.

Both xLAM and xGen-Sales could be part of the architecture powering Agentforce. Interestingly, it wouldn’t be right to say that Salesforce is jumping on the AI agent bandwagon because the software giant acquired Airkit.ai, a startup building AI agents, almost a year ago.

Agentforce Pricing Could Set an Industry Trend 

While Agentforce will be an interesting addition to Salesforce’s offerings, what caught our attention is the pricing strategy suggested by Benioff.

“When we look at pricing, it will be on a consumption basis — it’s about $2 per conversation,” Benioff said. The company may also sell consumption credits as it does with Data Cloud.

Interestingly, this is an approach we have seen a few other companies take to build AI agents. Last month, Sarvam AI, a startup based in India, announced Sarvam Agents, which can be leveraged at just Re1/minute.

These agents can be integrated into contact centres and various applications across multiple industries, including insurance, food and grocery delivery, e-commerce, ride-hailing services, and even banking and payment apps.

The fact that AI agents are available at a relatively low cost to enterprises could really help AI adoption scale. Benioff further stressed that enterprises do not need to develop their own AI capabilities in-house, but can instead leverage an AI agent at a relatively competitive price.

Benioff adds that he has been relatively disappointed at customers’ efforts in trying to build their own AI capabilities and unnecessarily wasting good resources.

“They’re not going to do it better than we’re going to do it. We’re a professional enterprise software company – this is what we do and we do it with the trust and scale that they need,” he said.

AI is Changing Sales 

In a recent blog post, investment firm a16z said AI could fundamentally change how enterprise sees sales, dealing a significant blow to popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies like Salesforce and Hubspot.

Sales teams will have access to an updated list of qualified buyers in seconds thanks to AI’s ability to handle lead research, call preparation, and customer readiness assessments. To help close deals, AI will also create customized marketing materials and provide in-the-moment advice during calls.

Salesforce wants to accomplish this with Agentforce. But the blog post says it might be hard for established players like Salesforce to continue.

The blog post entitled ‘Death of a Salesforce: Why AI Will Transform the Next Generation of Sales Tech’ stated that although incumbents can readily adjust to new platform changes, they are seldom able to rethink their architecture from the ground up.

Interestingly, Salesforce’s emergence pushed many legacy systems, like Oracle’s Siebel, to the periphery. Still, as more recent rivals and technologies begin to make an impact, is Salesforce destined for a similar fate after almost 20 years?

Benioff is unconcerned. The company has thousands of customers already, and in FY2024, it brought in $34.86 billion in revenue.

But how the industry changes will only become apparent with time. As of right now, Agentforce does appear to be a worthwhile addition to strengthen Salesforce’s position in the market.