If Mad Men's Don Draper is essentially an ad man, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is likewise a salesman. Lately he's been touting (or more like gospel singing) AI agents and AgentForce, Salesforce's recently released agent creation platform.
It's true that Benioff famously gushes about all of Salesforce's latest products, but on Tuesday, as part of the company's latest quarterly results, he also released numbers that back up why he's so excited. Benioff said Salesforce closed 200 deals for AgentForce in just one quarter and plans to hire 1,400 salespeople to help close more deals currently in the works. Ta.
AgentForce “only became available on October 24th, but we're already seeing this incredible speed, with over 200 Agentforce transactions in the third quarter alone,” Benioff said. told analysts on their quarterly conference call. “We have thousands of potential deals in the pipeline for future quarters,” he said, citing FedEx, Adecco, Accenture, ACE Hardware, IBM, and RBC Wealth Management as AgentForce customers. Ta.
The company said it expects to bring in $37.8 billion to $38 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, also higher than previously expected, up 8% to 9% year over year, primarily due to strong performance in AI products. He said that it is expected.
Benioff recently told Techcrunch that he expects Salesforce customers to deploy 1 billion AI agents within the next year, and that AI agents will allow companies to have an unlimited workforce.
“These agents are not tools. They are becoming collaborators. They are working 24/7 to analyze data, make decisions and take action,” he said on a conference call. Ta. “Salesforce has quickly become the largest supplier to digital labor here, and this is just the beginning.”
It remains to be seen how much of this vision becomes a reality. LLM-based technologies are still working to solve the problem of hallucinations. This problem is built into the inherently core technology of imitating creativity. Benioff said on the conference call that AgentForce can be trained on up to 300 petabytes of real-world corporate data managed by Salesforce, so “you'll see significantly poorer psychedelic performance.”
Other startups are working on other LLM problems needed to turn AI agents into real digital collaborators, such as memory and state.
But as the year of AI winds down, it's becoming clear that companies have found direction in investing in AI. After spending much of 2023 dedicating experimentation budgets to answering the board-level question “What are we doing with AI?”, the answer is clearly “AI agents for sales and customer service.” is.
It's interesting and not ironic that Salesforce plans to hire humans to help sell this technology. Perhaps that means that AI will not only replace jobs, but also create them. Perhaps that means even companies touting the rise of a digital workforce aren't ready to completely shift the reins to software just yet. But the company also plans to equip its sales force with AI sales development personnel.
As Salesforce COO Brian Millham explained on the conference call, “To capture the increased demand for Agentforce, we hired 1,400 AEs globally in the fourth quarter and also hired all of our sellers. We are hiring new sales SDR agents and sales coaching agents to augment our capabilities.”
Salesforce isn't the only company chasing this killer enterprise AI app. Startups offering SDR technology are booming in 2024, attracting a lot of VC investment and significant initial revenue, and are the target of many exploratory enterprise AI budgets. But this is an area where incumbents like Salesforce, HubSpot, and ZoomInfo, who hold customer data to train their bots, have an advantage. The same goes for customer service bots.