As soon as 50,000 attendees descended upon Salesforce dreamforce conference This week, the enterprise software giant is making its most aggressive bet yet on artificial intelligence agents, pitching itself as an antidote to industry-wide. "Pilot Purgatory" Where? 95% of enterprise AI projects never reach production,
The company launched on Monday agentforce 360A comprehensive reimagining of its entire product portfolio designed to transform the businesses its namesake "agentive enterprise" – Organizations where AI agents work alongside humans to handle up to 40% of the work in sales, service, marketing and operations.
"We’re really in the agentic AI era, and I think it’s probably the biggest revolution, the biggest change in technology that I’ve ever experienced in my career," Parker Harris, co-founder and chief technology officer of Salesforce, said during a recent press conference. "In the future, 40% of the work in the Fortune 1000 will probably be done by AI, and this will actually be humans and AI working together."
The announcement comes at a critical moment for Salesforce, which has deployed more than 12,000 AI agent implementations in the past year, Harris said. "7 billion dollar business" around its AI platform. Yet the launch comes amid unusual turmoil as CEO Marc Benioff faces terrible reaction For recent comments Support for President Trump and suggested that National Guard troops should patrol the streets of San Francisco.
Why 95% of enterprise AI projects never launch?
The stakes are huge. Although companies have rushed to experiment with AI since the emergence of ChatGPIT two years ago, most enterprise deployments have stalled before reaching production. Recent MIT Research Salesforce executives cited it extensively.
"Customers have invested a lot in AI, but they are not getting value," said Srini Tallapragada, president and chief engineering and customer success officer at Salesforce. "95% of enterprise AI pilots fail before production. This is not due to lack of intention. People want to do this. Everyone understands the power of technology. But why is it so difficult?"
According to Tallapragada, the answer is that AI tools remain separate from enterprise workflow, data, and governance systems. "You’re writing hints, hints, you’re getting frustrated because the context isn’t there," He said, describing what he said "Speedy Doom Loop."
Salesforce’s solution is a deeply integrated platform that connects four ingredients: AgentForce 360 agent platform, Data 360 for unified data access, Customer 360 apps with business logic, and Slack. "conversational interface" Where humans and agents cooperate.
Slack becomes the gateway to Salesforce
Perhaps the most important strategic change is the upgrade Loose – acquired by salesforce in 2019 $27.7 billion – As the primary interface to Salesforce. The company is effectively re-imagining its traditional Lightning interface around Slack channels, where sales deals, service cases and data insights will unfold through conversations rather than forms and dashboards.
"Imagine you maybe don’t log into Salesforce, you don’t see Salesforce, but it’s there. This is coming to you in Slack, because that’s where you get your work done," Harris explained.
The strategy includes embedding Salesforce’s AgentForce agents for sales, IT service, HR service, and analytics directly into Slack, as well as a completely redesigned Slackbot that acts as a personal AI companion. The company is also launching "channel specialist," An always-on agent that provides instant replies from channel conversations.
To enable third-party AI tools to access Slack’s conversation data, Salesforce is issuing a Real-Time Search API And Model Reference Protocol ServerPartners including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Writer, Dropbox, Notion, and Cursor are building agents that will live natively in Slack.
"The best way to see the power of the platform is through the AI apps and agents already being built," Salesforce executive Rob Seaman said during a technology briefing, citing examples from startups "Getting thousands of customers installing it in 120 days or less."
Voice and IT services target new markets
Beyond the Slack integration, Salesforce announced major expansions into voice-based interactions and employee service. agentforce voiceNow generally available, it transforms traditional IVR systems into natural conversations that can update CRM records, trigger workflows, and hand off to human agents seamlessly.
IT service offerings represent Salesforce’s most direct challenge service nowMarket leader. Mudhu Sudhakar, who joined Salesforce two months ago as senior vice president of IT and HR services, pitched the product as a fundamental reimagining of employee support.
"Legacy IT service management is a very portal, form, ticket centric, manual process." Sudhakar said. "We had a few key principles: conversation first and agent first, really focused on getting the conversation experience right for people requesting support and people providing support."
The IT services platform includes what Salesforce describes as 25+ specialized agents and 100+ pre-built workflows and connectors that can handle everything from password resets to complex incident management.
Early customers report dramatic efficiency gains
Customer results show that the approach is gaining popularity. reddit Average support resolution time was reduced from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes – an 84% improvement – while 46% of cases were pivoted entirely to AI agents. "This efficiency has allowed us to provide on-demand support for complex tasks and increase advertiser satisfaction scores by 20%." John Thompson, Reddit’s vice president of sales strategy and operations, said in a statement.
engineOne travel management company reduced average handle time by 15%, saving over $2 million annually. open Table 70% of inquiries from restaurants and eateries were resolved autonomously. And 1-800Accountant achieved a 90% case diversion rate during the critical tax week period.
Salesforce’s own internal deployments may be most impactful. Tallapragada’s customer success organization now handles 1.8 million AI-powered conversations weekly, with metrics published help.salesforce.com This shows how many agents respond versus escalating to humans.
Even more importantly, Salesforce has deployed AI-powered sales development representatives to follow up on leads that were previously uncontactable due to cost constraints. "Now, AgentForce has an SDR that is following thousands of leads," Tallapragada explained. The company increased proactive customer outreach by 40% by shifting employees from reactive support.
Enterprises cannot ignore the trust level problem
Given enterprise concerns about AI reliability, Salesforce has invested heavily in "layer of trust" – Audit trails, compliance checks, and observation tools that let organizations monitor agent behavior at scale.
"You should think of an agent as a human being. Digital labour. You have to manage performance just like a human being. And you need these audit trails," Tallapragada explained.
The company faced this challenge directly when its own agent deployment increased. "When we started AgentForce at Salesforce, we tracked every message, which is great, up to 1,000, 3,000." Tallapragada said. "Once you’ve had a million chats, there’s no human, we can’t do that."
The platform now includes "agentforce grid" Searching through millions of conversations to identify and fix problematic patterns. The company also introduced Agent Script, a new scripting language that allows developers to define precise guardrails and deterministic controls for agent behavior.
Data infrastructure gets a major upgrade
There is significant infrastructure investment behind the agent’s capabilities. from salesforce data 360 Involved "intelligent reference," Which automatically extracts structured information from unstructured content like PDFs, diagrams and flowcharts using words specified by the company. "AI-powered unstructured data pipelines."
The company is also cooperating databricks, DBT LabsAnd snowflake But "Universal Semantic Interchange," An attempt to standardize how different platforms define business metrics. The pending $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, expected to close soon, will expand metadata management capabilities across the enterprise.
The competitive landscape is becoming intense
Salesforce’s aggressive AI agent push comes as nearly every major enterprise software vendor adopts similar tactics. Microsoft has embedded Copilot into its product line, Google offers agent capabilities through Vertex AI and Gemini, and ServiceNow has launched its own agentic offering.
When asked how Salesforce’s announcement compared Recent releases of OpenAITallapragada emphasized that customers will be using multiple AI tools simultaneously. "Most of the time I see they’re using OpenAI, they’re using Gemini, they’re using Anthropic, like Salesforce, we use all three," He said.
Officials argued that the real differentiation lies not in AI models but in integration with business processes and data. Harris framed the competition in terms familiar from the founding of Salesforce: "26 years ago, we simply said, let’s make Salesforce automation as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com. We are doing the same thing. We want to make agentic AI as easy as buying a book on Amazon."
The company’s customer success stories are impressive but this is just a small portion of its customer base. With 150,000 Salesforce customers and one million Slack customers, the 12,000 AgentForce deployments represent about 8% penetration — strong for a year-old product line, but hardly ubiquitous.
decline in company’s shares about 28% year to date with Relative strength rating only 15Suggests investors remain skeptical. This week’s Dreamforce demonstration — and months of customer deployment after — will begin to answer whether Salesforce can finally take enterprise AI from pilot to mass production, or whether "7 billion dollar business" It remains more aspiration than reality.
