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If Mad Men’s Don Draper is an advertising man at heart, then Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is also a salesman. Lately, he’s been selling — or more like singing gospel — about AI agents and Salesforce’s recently launched agent maker platform, AgentForce.
It’s true that Benioff has gotten excited about all the latest Salesforce demos, but on Tuesday, as part of… The company’s latest quarterly resultsHe also released numbers to back up the reason for his extreme enthusiasm. Benioff said Salesforce closed 200 deals for AgentForce in just one quarter, and that it plans to hire 1,400 salespeople to help it close many more deals it’s working on.
AgentForce “just went live on October 24, and we’re already seeing this incredible speed, over 200 Agentforce deals in just the third quarter,” Benioff told analysts. Quarterly conference call. “The pipeline is in the thousands for potential transactions to come in future quarters.” He named FedEx, Adecco, Accenture, ACE Hardware, IBM and RBC Wealth Management as AgentForce clients.
The company said it now expects to generate more revenue for the fiscal year than it previously expected, also at $37.8 billion to $38 billion, which would be 8% to 9% higher than the previous year, largely due to the strength of its AI products.
Benioff recently told Techcrunch that he expects Salesforce customers to deploy 1 billion AI agents over the next year and that AI agents will allow companies to have an unlimited workforce.
“These agents are not tools. They have become collaborators. They work 24/7 to analyze data, make decisions and take action,” he said on the conference call. “Salesforce, from the beginning, has become the largest supplier of digital workers, and this is just the beginning.”
To what extent this vision becomes a reality, we will have to wait and see. LLM-based technology is still working to solve the problem of hallucinations – a problem built into technology that is essentially intrinsic in terms of imitating creativity. Benioff said on the call that because AgentForce can train on up to 300 petabytes of real company data managed by Salesforce, “you’ll see significantly lower hallucinogenic performance.”
Other startups are working on other LLM issues necessary to turn AI agents into actual digital collaborators, such as memory and state.
But as the year of AI comes to an end, it has become clear that companies have found a direction for their AI investments. After spending most of 2023 rolling out experimental budgets to answer the board-level question of “What do we do with AI?” The answer seems to be: AI agents for sales and customer service.
Interestingly, and not without irony, Salesforce will be hiring humans to help them sell this technology. Perhaps this means that AI will create jobs, not just replace them. Perhaps that means that even a company touting the rise of the digital workforce isn’t ready to hand over the reins entirely to software just yet. But it will also staff its sales staff with AI sales development representatives.
As Salesforce COO Brian Milham explained on the call, “To capture this increased demand for Agentforce, we are hiring 1,400 certified employees globally in our fourth quarter and are also utilizing a new SDR sales agent and sales training agent to augment each seller.”
Salesforce isn’t alone in going after this killer AI app. Startups offering SDR technology have boomed in 2024, attracting a lot of venture capital investment and a lot of seed revenue – the subject of many enterprise AI exploratory budgets. But it’s an area where established companies that hold customer data to train bots like Salesforce, HubSpot and ZoomInfo have an advantage. Ditto for customer service robots.
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