Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been touting the company’s latest AI agent-maker platform, Agentforce, as a game-changer for sales and customer service. In Salesforce’s latest quarterly results, Benioff revealed that the platform has already generated over 200 deals in just one quarter, with plans to hire 1,400 salespeople to support its growth.
Benioff says that Agentforce is not just a tool, but a collaborator that can analyze data, make decisions, and take action. He expects Salesforce customers to deploy one billion AI agents within the next year, allowing companies to have an unlimited workforce. The platform’s ability to train on up to 300 petabytes of company data is expected to help mitigate the hallucination problem associated with large language models.
While other startups are working on addressing issues like memory and state, Salesforce’s advantage lies in its access to customer data to train the bots. The company expects to bring in more revenue than previously projected, with $37.8 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, a 8-9% increase over the previous year.
However, it remains to be seen how much of Benioff’s vision will become a reality. As AI agents continue to evolve, companies must address issues like hallucination and memory. For now, Salesforce is equipping its sales humans with AI-powered sales development representatives, potentially creating new job opportunities rather than replacing existing ones.
Other major players, such as HubSpot, ZoomInfo, and Accenture, are also investing in SDR technology, but their advantage lies in having customer data to train the bots. As the enterprise AI market continues to grow, it’s clear that companies have found a direction for their AI investments – and that direction is towards AI agents for sales and customer service.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/04/llms-may-have-a-killer-enterprise-app-digital-labor-at-least-if-salesforce-agentforce-is-any-indicator