During his keynote remarks at Salesforce Inc.’s Dreamforce gathering in San Francisco today, Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff decided to put a local spin on the company’s introduction of its artificial intelligence platform Agentforce.

Making a comparison between the announcement of his company’s ambitious enterprise AI technology and the Waymo LLC autonomous cars currently rolling on the city streets outside, Benioff (pictured) called the deployment of Agentforce his company’s “Waymo moment.”

The comparison captured both the goal of the firm’s signature Dreamforce event, with a plan for attendees to build and deploy 1,200 agents during the week, and the risks associated with trusting AI to safely deliver results. Much as it takes a leap of faith to climb into a car with no human driver for a journey across the busy streets of a major U.S. city, Salesforce customers will now be launching autonomous agents to run key aspects of their business without a long track record of proven success behind it.

“What you are going to see at this show is technology like you’ve never seen it before,” Benioff said during his keynote appearance. “You’re going to have that moment when you’re saying ‘I’m going to deploy agents in my company and it’s working’… hopefully.”

Walking the AI tightrope

The “on-the-fly” nature of Salesforce’s deployment of its Agentforce initiative this week was further underscored in a meeting with the media immediately following Benioff’s keynote address. The company’s CEO revealed that although his Dreamforce presentation was finished, audience-tested and ready to go three weeks ago, he decided to rewrite the entire keynote based on customer reaction to Agentforce during his recent customer tour in late August and early September.

It also led to a decision to fly-in 4,000 Salesforce engineers to San Francisco who would help customers use the AI platform onsite for building and deploying new agents, according to Benioff.

“I hope we’re on the right side of history here,” Benioff told the assembled press. “It’s a high-wire act. We’re dealing with the most avant-garde technology.”

Salesforce unveiled its Agentforce offering last week as a platform for augmenting work across sales, service, marketing and commerce functions. Users can build customizable AI agents to analyze data, understand customer needs, render decisions, and take action. Out-of-the-box agents can be customized in low-code or no-code environments, driven by a Salesforce reasoning engine called Atlas.

In his session with the media, Benioff cited fashion brand Gucci as an example of how the integration of Agentforce has translated into results for the company. Gucci implemented agents in its call center and experienced a 30% increase in sales through improved customer service interactions, according to Benioff.

“This was an unexpected secondary gain, they did not reduce any heads” Benioff said. “They ended up with a more valuable business unit. I think this is the right direction for AI. There’s no question there will be transformational aspects.”

Breaking down the ‘DIY’ mindset

In Salesforce’s view of the world, those transformational aspects will involve a shift away from enterprises who believe that AI can best be delivered through internal development. This “do-it-yourself” approach may work fine in some areas of business, but the company made it clear this week that it will differentiate itself from vendors seeking to sell tools for building AI in-house.

“They’re selling you science projects,” Benioff said during his session with the media. “Our job is to break the DIY. We have shown them that our approach is better.”

A key element behind Salesforce’s AI agent-based strategy is its existing platform. The company has built Agentforce as an overarching rainbow across its current solutions that encompass Data Cloud and Customer 360. Its message is that this platform advantage will differentiate it in the increasingly more crowded enterprise AI marketplace.

“We’re abstracting that complexity out,” Matt DeTroia, senior vice president of alliances and channel revenue at Salesforce, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE for this story. “Your differentiation is the connection to the entire Customer 360. Now we are traversing customer enterprises well beyond the CRM.”

DeTroia offered evidence that this differentiation may translate into new market opportunities for the CRM giant. As part of his role in forging partner relationships for Salesforce, DeTroia has noticed interest in AI agents among large business consulting organizations that had previously leveraged his company’s resources differently.

“We are seeing a degree of interest that I’ve never seen before from new types of partners,” DeTroia said. “Three to five years ago they weren’t engaging with us the way they are now. That’s very encouraging for me. They are a bellwether for where customers are going.”

Maintaining a competitive advantage

Despite these positive signals, questions remain around how much impact Salesforce’s big bet on Agentforce will have on the company’s overall competitive picture. How data is used and leveraged in the context of various AI initiatives has often dictated market advantage, and this is viewed by some analysts as a key driver in the Salesforce strategy.

“I believe this is an advantage inside the Salesforce ecosystem and product set, I am less sure that this is an [external] advantage, nor do I believe it is intended to be a generic AI play,” said Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at SiliconANGLE’s sister market research firm theCUBE Research. “Salesforce needs to hold serve and keep the data on their platform. With companies like Oracle and Databricks, to name a few, offering to suck data out of Salesforce and combine it with the data in their platforms to service AI, they need to be better with AI than the competition is with the data that is domain to them.”

After launching a projected 1,200 agents during Dreamforce in San Francisco this week, the company hopes to have 1 billion users interacting with Salesforce agents by this time next year, according to Benioff. While that large number may not be as unlikely as it sounds, the uncertainty and novelty of the agentic AI journey, much like riding in a driverless car, may indeed lead Salesforce and its customers on a wild ride.

“Customers have this deep frustration and excitement around AI, and they hold both in their hands,” Benioff said. “We want the market and the technology to come together. This is a marquee moment for us.”

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE