In a development as predictable as the coming of autumn, Salesforce leadership took to the stage on a damp, misty September morning in San Francisco to open their annual Dreamforce jamboree with a marathon two-hour artificial intelligence (AI) hype session billed as “the world’s largest AI event”, and with over 1,500 more sessions to attend over two days, they may be right.
CEO Marc Benioff added colour to announcements made ahead of the show’s official opener, concerning the release of its agentic AI platform, Agentforce – which he has been gently teasing all summer long.
Agentforce is a service whereby AI agents are empowered to act on goals and decisions themselves, bidding to give users the ability to better handle a growing number of everyday operations, going beyond chatbots. Benioff believes it to be a game changer, as it goes beyond mere generative AI assistants, with AI capabilities in the software itself as opposed to add-ons.
“What we’re going to talk about at this event, and what’s really happening in our whole industry right now, and why we are more excited than ever, is because of what’s happening with AI,” he said. “Through Dreamforces for the last 10 years, we’ve been talking about the emergence of AI and how AI has been a critical part of our future.”
“As we’ve gone forward and built our own models, and added to our technology and did all these things to be a pioneer in AI, it became clear to us that this was a moment,” said Benioff. “This was a moment of change … This show is our most important Dreamforce ever. There’s no question … This is the third wave of AI. It’s agents.
“Agentforce has to be the biggest breakthrough that we have ever had on technology, and I think it’s the biggest breakthrough that I’ve seen in a long time in artificial intelligence,” he continued. “It’s about humans, with agents, driving customer success together on the Salesforce platform.
“We’re not just tossing you another model, or tossing you a hyperscaler, or tossing you an AI engineer, or tossing you something else,” said Benioff. “We’re on the same platform that you already love and use every day – right inside the configurator, right inside the system that you already know and love, you’re going to find this incredible functionality. [And] the early stories from customers are blowing our mind.”
Enhancing value
Indeed, a series of customers trailed Benioff’s talk discussing how they plan to use, or are already using, Agentforce to enable their customer-facing human agents to build more meaningful relationships where they matter, delivering better services and extracting more value using the vast datasets analysed and sifted by the Agentforce agents.
Among them were restaurant reservation service OpenTable and hotel giant Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, organisations that foresee similar use cases to enhance the experience of diners and guests, in both cases going beyond mere chatbots. OpenTable described Agentforce as something that “could be Salesforce’s most powerful support tool yet”.
Benioff, meanwhile, waxed lyrical about his Disney fandom, proposing a visitor experience where on finding his favourite ride closed for maintenance, a hypothetical Agentforce agent embedded in the theme park guide app would map his preferences and past experiences to the current status of the rest of the park to create a bespoke experience for him, accounting for similar rides or prioritising ones where the queues are not too long.
Meanwhile, high-end US department store Saks Fifth Avenue joined a series of demos in which Salesforce execs buying their new outfits for the keynotes put the service to the test by introducing increasingly complex variables and prompts to Sophie, an Agentforce AI customer service agent.
In the final demo, Salesforce showed how Sophie can guide the store’s “white glove” interactions with a high-net-worth customer who has her eye on a designer handbag, gathering the customer’s past purchase data, factoring in her lifetime spend with the store and inviting her to an exclusive in-store event with drinks and nibbles.
The hypothetical customer in this scenario wanted to go further still, asking Sophie to help her with style tips for an upcoming date. However, Salesforce’s AI guardrails actually prevent Sophie from giving fashion advice, so this is where Saks’ flesh and blood staff – actors in this instance – were called on to step in and the relationship was handed back to humans, with smiles all round.
Marc Metrick, CEO of Saks Global, the store’s parent, said: “We are thrilled to partner with a technology leader like Salesforce to accelerate our efforts to meet luxury consumers’ increasing demands for a highly personalised shopping experience. With Salesforce’s expertise in leveraging the power of data and AI, we will be better equipped to serve luxury shoppers with seamless experiences tailored to their individual preferences.
“Salesforce has been key to our success in luxury retail, particularly in e-commerce,” he said. “We look forward to all we can accomplish together as we continue to advance our relationship.”
Agentforce will be generally available from October 2024 across all of Salesforce’s various industry clouds, from banking and healthcare to public sector and retail, with over 100 industry-specific prompts already available.