In September they called it “what AI was meant to be.”
And in October they said it had arrived.
“They” is Salesforce (CRM) and “it” is Agentforce, the software giant’s customer relationship management platform, designed to “enable companies to create, customize and deploy AI agents to independently perform tasks.”
Related: Analyst Revises Salesforce Price Target After Annual Conference
On October 29, Salesforce announced the general availability of Agentforce, which the company says “goes beyond chatbots and copilots to use advanced reasoning skills to make decisions and take action, such as resolving customer cases, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns.”
According to the San Francisco company, Saks, OpenTable and Wiley are among the organizations using Agentforce.
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“Agentforce doesn’t rely on human involvement to get work done,” Salesforce said in a statement. “These agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, pre-built automations, or signals via (application programming interface) calls from other systems.”
Saleforce had also announced a partnership with AI chip titan Nvidia (NVDA) to develop Agentforce.
Marc Benioff, an early champion of software-as-a-service technology, has been running Salesforce for more than a quarter century.
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Marc Benioff, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, said Agentforce “redefined what’s possible in business and beyond” and “ushered in a new era of AI abundance and limitless workforces.”
Benioff’s company is reportedly facing a challenge from Shopify (SHOP) which, according to Bloomberg, would have lured hundreds of Salesforce customers.
Related: Analysts Reboot Salesforce Stock Price Targets After Earnings Reports
The e-commerce platform said it was encouraging other companies to join the ‘mass migration’, citing lower costs for its services as a key selling point.
“Everything is cheaper if you narrow the use case down to one thing and say, ‘Oh, we’re cheaper for this one thing,’” Luke Ball, Salesforce’s senior vice president of product management, told Bloomberg.
Salesforce said it had attracted hundreds of Shopify customers, a claim the Ottawa company has denied.
Benioff recently received some media attention when CNBC reported that he was in talks with Greek media company Antenna Group to sell Time, which he acquired from Meredith Corp. in 2018. bought for $190 million.
A spokesperson for Time told CNBC that there was no agreement to sell the media outlet.
