In his keynote at Dreamforce Benioff, acknowledged that there was currently a “bifurcation” between rapid consumer adoption of AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and relatively slower enterprise adoption of AI. And during a press conference afterwards, he went further, 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 is also doing this by creating more “forward-deployed engineers” to work directly with its customers, helping them build AI agents. The company seems to have realized in the past year that enterprises will need Salesforce to hold their hand more than was true with its traditional SaaS products.
To help customers with that, Salesforce unveiled several new Agentforce features at Dreamforce. There’s an Agent Builder that allows a user to simply describe what it wants an agent to do; the system then automatically sets it up, with much less manual tinkering that was needed previously. There’s a new voice interface for AI agents, powered in part through OpenAI’s voice models, that improves interaction with agents. There’s an Agent Script tool that lets businesses establish rule-based processes for part of a given process and use the less predictable, but potentially powerful, reasoning of a large language model (LLM) for other parts of the process. It also introduced a new vibe-coding tool called Agentforce Vibes, which is aimed at developers already skilled at building Salesforce applications, but allows them to create these apps, including more sophisticated agentic workflows, using natural language.
Perhaps the biggest news is that Salesforce is hoping to position Slack—which Salesforce bought in 2020 for $27.7 billion—as the main “conversational gateway” to all of Salesforce’s software, including its Agentforce offerings. Denise Dresser, Slack’s CEO, told me that the idea is that instead of having to learn to configure and run processes in Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud or its Service Cloud, a Slack user could simply message an AI agent within Slack that will run these processes for them using Salesforce’s software in the background.
Slack has also created “knowledge agents” that can surface information from a particular Slack channel and perform certain actions—helping them onboard a new hire for, instance, or install software on a new laptop, directly from Slack. Dresser also told me that she thinks Slack is the ideal interface because it can incorporate both person-to-person and team interactions on the same channel in which you can have individuals and teams interacting with AI agents, whereas some AI companies are only optimizing their products for human-to-AI collaboration.
Dresser certainly may have a point about chat as the new interface to software. It’s a vision that AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are also pursuing. And some of these AI companies are projecting the idea even further, envisioning a future where AI agents use their coding abilities spin up bespoke software on the fly to handle many of the tasks that now require enterprise software, like, um, Salesforce. But whether that vision will come to fruition or whether traditional SaaS products will continue to exist, just with AI front-ends, remains to be seen. One thing that is clear from Salesforce’s experience in the past year since it started rolling out AI agents is that enterprise adoption will probably run behind over-hyped market expectations.
With that, here’s more AI news.
