Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently attacked Microsoft, claiming its generative AI product, Copilot, has disappointed many customers.
Speaking to analysts during Salesforce’s quarterly earnings call, he said, “So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilot because they’re not getting the accuracy and the response that they want. Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.”
Interestingly, the criticism for Microsoft came amid discussions about Salesforce’s new generative AI product, Agentforce.
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.
Additional details about Agentforce are expected to be announced during the company’s flagship event, Dreamforce, scheduled 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.
AI will handle lead research, call preparation, and customer readiness assessments in seconds, providing sales teams with an updated list of primed buyers. Additionally, AI will generate personalised marketing materials and offer real-time tips during calls to aid in closing deals.
This is what Salesforce aims to achieve with Agentforce. However, according to the blog post, incumbents like Salesforce could find it difficult to sustain.
“While incumbents often adapt to new platform shifts, they are rarely able to completely rethink their architecture,” the blog titled, ‘Death of a Salesforce: Why AI Will Transform the Next Generation of Sales Tech’, said.
Interestingly, Salesforce’s emergence pushed many legacy systems, like Oracle’s Siebel, to the periphery. However, after nearly two decades, is Salesforce facing a similar fate as newer competitors and technologies start to make their mark?
Benioff is not worried. The company already has thousands of customers and recorded a revenue of $34.86 billion in FY2024.
While only time will tell how the industry shifts. For now, Agentforce does seem an interesting addition to bolster Salesforce’ grip on the market.
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