Agentic orchestration: Salesforce’s new company roadmap – News

Agentic orchestration is emerging as the connective tissue of the modern enterprise — where intelligent agents, data and workflows converge to power adaptive, self-optimizing systems. As organizations shift from static automation to dynamic collaboration between artificial intelligence-driven agents, the foundation of how businesses operate and innovate is being fundamentally rewritten.

In this new era of distributed intelligence, Salesforce Inc. is positioning itself at the center of that transformation. Its latest vision goes beyond customer relationship management to create a platform capable of orchestrating agents, data and workflows in concert. The goal is not just to manage customer experiences, but to intelligently shape them — anticipating needs, coordinating outcomes and driving value at unprecedented scale, according to Holger Mueller (pictured, left), vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc.

“We all know agentic AI is only as good as the APIs in the background,” Mueller said. “Pretty much all the vendors are acting like it’s all about AI and we don’t have to upgrade the background business processes … that was a big miss from my perspective.”

Mueller and Raphaelle d’Ornano (right), founder and chief executive officer of Decoding Discontinuity, spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen at Dreamforce, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Salesforce’s new focus on AI and agentic orchestration and what it means for the enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

The shift from CRM to an agentic orchestration platform

Salesforce’s decision to expand its product purview only underscores long-underway internal changes, according to d’Ornano. Having overgrown its restrictive identity in CRM ages ago, such a directional shift cements the company’s maturity and ability to pivot toward expansion.

“My first take was that they should change their ticker,” she said. “It makes no sense that Salesforce is CRM anymore because that’s just not what they are at all. I think, when you come out of this keynote, you say to yourself, ‘Salesforce has perfectly understood that agentic AI is a new paradigm and that’s been clear from day one.’ Today, Salesforce is, for me, an agentic AI orchestration platform, able to go not just in the CRM space, but to the broader enterprise orchestration landscape and the names that we have all over here of the agentic enterprise, that’s a very good qualification term for Salesforce.”

The broader signal is Salesforce positioning itself to redefine software categories altogether, d’Ornano noted. Traditional boundaries between infrastructure, horizontal applications and business platforms no longer apply. The company’s strength lies in orchestrating data, workflows and context — positioning itself as the central nervous system of the agentic enterprise.

“Enterprise AI adoption and agentic AI adoption is something that is an architectural redefinition of a business,” d’Ornano said. “You’re changing the architecture, your tech architecture, you’re changing your business model architecture. By doing that, you’re changing the business model of your clients’ architecture. This is not as quick as the adoption of ChatGPT. I would also add that they’re actually in a very good position in the sense that they’ve mastered customer data … they’re actually super well-positioned to build that orchestration platform.”

Execution will be crucial at such a critical juncture for Salesforce, both panelists agreed. The company’s control of customer data — a rich and underexploited asset — gives it an advantage in building agentic orchestration platforms. The question now is whether it can turn that data mastery into differentiated agentic outcomes at scale.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dreamforce:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dreamforce. Neither Salesforce, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

Photo: News