I spent final week on a reporting project in San Francisco. Whereas there, I dropped by Salesforce’s large Dreamforce convention. Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff made plenty of headlines—however most likely not for the rationale he wished.
En path to the convention, Benioff had given an interview to the New York Occasions by which he’d been complimentary of President Trump and stated he would welcome the Nationwide Guard being deployed to San Francisco. By the tip of the week, Benioff had apologized for that stance—saying he had spoken out of an abundance of concern in regards to the security of these attending his convention—after being sharply criticized by famed Silicon Valley investor and advisor Ron Conway, who resigned from the board of Benioff’s charitable basis in protest, in addition to Lauren Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow and president of the Emerson Collective, who lambasted Benioff’s place in an op-ed within the Wall Avenue Journal.
All of this was a distraction from what was really going down at Dreamforce, the place Salesforce introduced a slew of latest instruments to make it simpler for its clients to construct and deploy AI brokers. Few tech firm CEOs have staked as a lot on the promise of “agentic AI” as Benioff. How is that guess going? Properly, to evaluate from Dreamforce, the reply is—like a lot that’s occurring in AI proper now—one thing of a combined image.
On the one hand, Salesforce says that its “Agentforce” options have seen the quickest adoption of any product the corporate has ever launched. However, alternatively, not counting brokers in Slack—which I’ll cowl additional in a second—the corporate has solely about 12,500 clients (or simply over 8% of its buyer base) having adopted Agentforce prior to now 12 months, and solely 6,000 of these are paid engagements. (Salesforce permits clients to experiment with Agentforce at no cost, up till a sure utilization threshold.) These comparatively low numbers—which helped clarify Salesforce’s moderately tepid latest income progress—had been weighing on Salesforce’s inventory.
However on the convention, Salesforce additionally issued improved steering for its future revenues, saying that, because of Agentforce, natural gross sales progress would speed up to above 10% 12 months over 12 months in 2026 and proceed that method. The corporate now forecasts $60 billion in annual gross sales by 2030, forward of analysts’ consensus view. That projection despatched Salesforce’s fill up 5% on the day, and shares have continued to climb over the previous week. So what’s actually occurring right here?
Innovation out-stripping adoption
In his keynote at Dreamforce Benioff, acknowledged that there was at the moment a “bifurcation” between speedy client adoption of AI chatbots, akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and comparatively slower enterprise adoption of AI. And through a press convention afterwards, he went additional, saying, “This is the moment where this technology innovation [is] out-stripping customer adoption. Our job is to get those customers into adoption mode. The way to do it is by showing them customers who are front-runners in this, so when you look at these customers, they are making it happen.” Salesforce can also be doing this by creating extra “forward-deployed engineers” to work straight with its clients, serving to them construct AI brokers. The corporate appears to have realized prior to now 12 months that enterprises will want Salesforce to carry their hand greater than was true with its conventional SaaS merchandise.
I toured a piece of the conference corridor branded “Agentforce City” to take a look at a few of these early adopters and their AI brokers. A number of, like Williams & Sonoma’s AI agent that provides clients recipe recommendation—and by the best way, additionally suggests cookware they may have to make that roast or pie—appeared a bit gimmicky. That recipe agent would possibly give the corporate extra touchpoints with a buyer, however it wasn’t clear it might straight translate into larger gross sales. Extra attention-grabbing was PepsiCo’s AI agent that permits it to offer higher customer support to the various small Mother-and-Pop shopkeepers and bodega homeowners who inventory Pepsi merchandise however who don’t essentially get a variety of consideration and recommendation from Pepsi’s gross sales reps. Extra promising nonetheless is Dell’s use of Salesforce’s AI brokers to automate components of its provide chain, together with onboarding new suppliers, which has reduce its common onboarding time from months to days.
However Salesforce executives universally acknowledged that it might take time for extra corporations to observe the lead of Dell or PepsiCo. Adam Evans, Salesforce’s government vice chairman and normal supervisor of Salesforce AI, instructed me that he has spent a lot of the previous 12 months attempting to point out clients the right way to transfer past experimentation with AI brokers. “What’s hard is to create agents that scale, that do things consistently, that you can work into an enterprise process to create value,” he stated.
Slack because the interface to all of Salesforce’s software program
To assist clients with that, Salesforce unveiled a number of new Agentforce options at Dreamforce. There’s an Agent Builder that permits a consumer to easily describe what it desires an agent to do; the system then robotically units it up, with a lot much less guide tinkering that was wanted beforehand. There’s a brand new voice interface for AI brokers, powered partially by way of OpenAI’s voice fashions, that improves interplay with brokers. There’s an Agent Script software that lets companies set up rule-based processes for a part of a given course of and use the much less predictable, however probably highly effective, reasoning of a big language mannequin (LLM) for different components of the method. It additionally launched a brand new vibe-coding software known as Agentforce Vibes, which is aimed toward builders already expert at constructing Salesforce functions, however permits them to create these apps, together with extra refined agentic workflows, utilizing pure language.
Slack has additionally created “knowledge agents” that may floor data from a selected Slack channel and carry out sure actions—serving to them onboard a brand new rent for, occasion, or set up software program on a brand new laptop computer, straight from Slack. Dresser additionally instructed me that she thinks Slack is the best interface as a result of it could possibly incorporate each person-to-person and group interactions on the identical channel in which you’ll be able to have people and groups interacting with AI brokers, whereas some AI corporations are solely optimizing their merchandise for human-to-AI collaboration.
Dresser definitely could have a degree about chat as the brand new interface to software program. It’s a imaginative and prescient that AI corporations like OpenAI and Anthropic are additionally pursuing. And a few of these AI corporations are projecting the thought even additional, envisioning a future the place AI brokers use their coding talents spin up bespoke software program on the fly to deal with lots of the duties that now require enterprise software program, like, um, Salesforce. However whether or not that imaginative and prescient will come to fruition or whether or not conventional SaaS merchandise will live on, simply with AI front-ends, stays to be seen. One factor that’s clear from Salesforce’s expertise prior to now 12 months because it began rolling out AI brokers is that enterprise adoption will most likely run behind over-hyped market expectations.
If you wish to be taught extra about how AI may also help your organization to succeed and listen to from business leaders on the place this know-how is heading, I hope you’ll contemplate becoming a member of me at Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco on December eighth and ninth. Amongst these confirmed to look up to now embrace Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Glean CEO Arvind Jain, Amazon’s Panos Panay, and plenty of extra. Apply now to register.
FORTUNE ON AI
Advertising and marketing leaders say AI is rewriting how manufacturers attain Gen Z and millennials: ‘Forget what you know; learn this’—by Jessica Coacci
Unique: Early AI darling LangChain is now a unicorn with a recent $125 million in funding—by Sharon Goldman
Sam Altman desires to ‘treat adults like adults’—however can OpenAI preserve ChatGPT protected after opening the door to erotica?—by Beatrice Nolan
Empathy is essentially the most under-hyped issue of the AI transformation period, American Specific exec says—by Sydney Lake
EYE ON AI NEWS
EYE ON AI RESEARCH
Google researchers use AI to assist spot genetic drivers of most cancers. Researchers on the tech big created DeepSomatic, a brand new open-source AI mannequin that helps scientists analyze most cancers genomes extra rapidly and precisely. The software—which relies on a convolutional neural community, an older type of AI structure that’s significantly good at analyzing visible information—is ready to distinguish between genetic mutations an individual is born with and those who develop in most cancers cells. In early assessments, it outperformed current strategies of detecting these cancer-related genetic adjustments, making it particularly helpful for learning hard-to-analyze cancers like childhood leukemia and mind tumors. Google is open-sourcing each the AI mannequin and the coaching information set it used to create it. You’ll be able to learn Google’s weblog put up on the analysis right here.
AI CALENDAR
Oct. 21-22: TedAI San Francisco
Nov. 10-13: Net Summit, Lisbon
Nov. 26-27: World AI Congress, London
Dec. 2-7: NeurIPS, San Diego
Dec. 8-9: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend right here.
BRAIN FOOD
The backlash in opposition to the AI-driven information heart growth is rising worldwide. The New York Occasions examined how native communities from Chile to Eire are more and more against information heart building of their backyards because of the unfavourable environmental impacts and power calls for these warehouses filled with pc chips convey. The comprehensively reported story is unquestionably price studying. Practically 60% of the world’s largest information facilities at the moment are situated outdoors the U.S., typically in locations the place electrical energy and water methods are already fragile, the paper reported. Residents in affected areas report worsening blackouts and water shortages, whereas governments—longing for funding and AI infrastructure—have provided tax breaks and low cost land, typically with little regulation or transparency. Tech corporations say the tasks convey jobs and funding and declare they’re minimizing environmental affect, however critics argue they’re depleting very important sources and hiding their true footprint by way of subsidiaries and nondisclosure agreements.
The information heart build-out is sparking a rising backlash, led by environmental activists. Whether or not this backlash will sluggish the information heart growth, blacken the popularity of AI corporations and their merchandise with customers, or hasten the roll-out of AI regulation globally stays to be seen. However it’s undoubtedly a pattern to look at. It’s unclear if the backlash will spur AI researchers to search out different AI strategies which are much less environmentally-costly—or if AI itself will result in clear power breakthroughs, in say fusion energy, that may compensate or negate the environmental harm the know-how is inflicting at the moment. However one can hope.
