Salesforce's AI-Powered "Agentforce" Reaches 1,000 Deals

By Jeffrey Dastin

(Reuters) – Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) has closed more than 1,000 paid deals for "Agentforce," its platform for creating virtual representatives powered by artificial intelligence, its CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday.

At a company event in San Francisco, Salesforce previewed improvements for how businesses could build bots for recruiting, customer service, and other specific tasks on its platform and in its messaging app Slack.

Salesforce has done as much for its own operations, said Benioff. He stated that the company now requires half the number of humans to resolve simple customer queries but still aims to increase the company's headcount in sales by 10% or more.

Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, many companies have piloted AI without yet deriving major savings or revenue from it.

For Benioff, who has recently focused his cloud company on agents, "digital labor" is set to augment humans and expand the economy. In the future, Salesforce will initiate a "robot force partner program" that connects real-world machines with virtual ones, he stated to reporters.

He cited hotel chains as an example, noting they could manage back- and front-office work with numerous digital assistants while robots could handle cleaning guests' rooms.

The Salesforce co-founder and Time magazine owner expressed hope that President-elect Donald Trump's administration would engage CEOs on digital labor. Trump was recently featured on a Time cover as the magazine's "Person of the Year."

When asked about donating to Trump's inaugural fund, Benioff replied: "I think we just donated the photo. He can use the Time cover at no charge."