We talk with Laura GuzmanArea Vice President Cloud Sales en Salesforceat a time when many organizations have assumed that Agentic AI It will be as transformative as the Internet was, but they are still trapped in an uncomfortable fact: the average company uses 897 applications and only 29% are connected, according to the MuleSoft 2025 Connectivity Benchmark.
In this context, Laura Guzmán places the true brake on the agentic company not in the willingness to adopt, but in the lack of a unified technological base that allows agents to access reliable, governed and secure data. From that premise, explain how Salesforce is articulating Agentforce 360 on a stack that combines Customer 360, Data Cloud, Slack and Trust Layer to turn CRM into a conversational and contextual layer that crosses marketing, sales, commerce and service.
Laura Guzmán also brings the conversation down to the field of ROI with concrete figures: clients who reduce costs by 20% and obtain an ROI five times faster than those who approach AI in a fragmented way; agents who handle 77% of inquiries on help.salesforce.com saving millions of dollars annually; 800,000 leads generated by sales agents, or 500,000 hours returned to teams thanks to Agentforce in Slack.
It also addresses the path for a CIO without a unified data strategy: start by identifying critical data, consolidate it in the Data Cloud (including unstructured sources such as PDFs, emails or audio) and, from there, bring agents to the channels where the teams already work, especially Slack.
Looking to the next 2-3 years, Laura Guzmán anticipates a CRM market dominated by agentic companies. His thesis is that we will see hybrid templates where AI agents assume a large part of the operational interaction, while Salesforce repeats the role it had with the cloud: offering a secure and unified platform to scale this new digital work model.
(MCPRO) From your experience talking with CMOs, CIOs, CTOs and CEOs of companies from various sectors, what is the main obstacle that these organizations perceive today to adopt an agentic company model with Agentforce 360?
(Laura Guzman) The main challenge is no longer the will to adopt AI, but rather having the appropriate technological base to do so with guarantees. Companies understand that agentic AI is a disruption comparable to the arrival of the Internet; 84% of CIOs believe that it will be as transformative as the network was at the time. For this reason, at Salesforce we believe that we are at the beginning of the era of the agentic company.
But the real obstacle is that companies continue to operate with fragmented data. According to MuleSoft’s Connectivity Benchmark study (January 2025), the average company uses 897 applications and only 29% are connected, meaning that agents cannot access the context necessary to reason and act.
This is where the commitment to a deeply unified platform (Customer 360, Data Cloud, Slack and Trust Layer) becomes the decisive factor. It is not possible to scale agents without reliable data, governance and security, and that is precisely the differential of Agentforce 360.
(MCPRO) At Dreamforce 2025 it was mentioned that Agentforce allows professionals to free themselves from routine tasks that represent more than 41% of their work. What is the real impact that your clients are seeing in terms of productivity, staff turnover and team satisfaction after deploying these agents?
(Laura Guzman) The impact is already being felt in all types of companies and sectors and, in fact, clients that use Agentforce register a 20% reduction in costs and an ROI five times faster than companies that implement this technology independently, according to data from Futurum Group.
As a “zero customer”, we ourselves are the first to implement these solutions and are constantly testing and learning with the implementation of internal agents. Among the results that we are already observing, we can highlight the following:
– Our agents already manage 77% of queries on help.salesforce.com, generating annual savings of 100 million dollars.
– In sales, agents have generated 800,000 new leads and contacts in fiscal year 2025, which has saved our salespeople 50,000 hours per year.
– Agentforce on Slack has given our teams back 500,000 hours this year by taking care of routine tasks, with 88% of support requests resolved without human intervention.
– On our website, Agentforce now directs visitors to answers 40% faster, driving more than 100,000 conversations that move potential customers along the purchasing process.
In Spain, more than 150 clients are already deploying agents in banking, retail, food, travel, real estate and the public sector, with a common denominator: employees are dedicated to more strategic activities instead of low-value tasks.
(MCPRO) Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and Commerce Cloud are three key pillars of your responsibility. How are companies integrating these three clouds into a cohesive Agentforce model to optimize the entire customer experience, from the first point of contact to post-sales support?
(Laura Guzman) The goal is for companies to stop seeing these clouds as isolated solutions and conceive them as a unified customer experience system. Agentforce 360 achieves this integration, fundamentally, with Data 360, which ensures access to all customer data in different channels, and Customer 360, which allows the integration of all apps such as Marketing, Service and Commerce, while ensuring consistency in communications and allowing workflows to be intelligently automated.
In this way, we obtain a complete view of each client. On that basis, Marketing Cloud activates journeys hyper-personalized in real time, Commerce Cloud optimizes carts and recommends products with autonomous agents and Service Cloud automates cases, resolves incidents and escalates to human agents when necessary.
The new capabilities of Agentforce 360, including hybrid reasoning and contextual indexing, allow all that journey (from marketing to purchasing and support) be a continuous conversational experience. In this way, CRM becomes conversational, contextual and fully integrated.
(MCPRO) ROI is always an uncomfortable question for any technology initiative. Depending on the projects you are deploying, what are the most relevant KPIs that companies measure to validate the success of Agentforce? What is the typical timeline to see tangible results?
(Laura Guzman) To measure the success of Agentforce, companies typically take four variables into account: productivity (time reduction per task, cases resolved per agent, or average resolution time); impact on the business (conversions, customer satisfaction level or cart abandonment rate); efficiency (cost savings, reduction of repetitive tasks or improved cost per interaction), and employee experience (turnover, AI adoption rate or time saved for more strategic tasks).
In terms of time, the great advantage of Agentforce is that the results can be seen in weeks, although it depends on each case. A large-scale business transformation, logically, can take several months to show results.
(MCPRO) Data Cloud and Slack have been positioned as the foundation of the agentic enterprise. For a CIO who today does not have a unified data strategy or Slack integrated into their operations, what is the most pragmatic implementation path you would recommend: starting with data infrastructure or starting with agent adoption?
(Laura Guzman) It is always advisable to start with the data, they are the basis for everything to work optimally later. At first, we can start by identifying the critical data for the initial use cases. Data Cloud unifies structured and unstructured data (PDF, emails, audio, Slack, legacy ERP) into a common model, providing the context agents need to act.
Once this is done, the agents that have been created can be easily and directly integrated into Slack, accessing the channels where the teams work and generating an immediate impact.
(MCPRO) We see that sectors such as retail, finance and insurance are being especially receptive to Agentforce. What are the quickest first use cases to deploy in each industry, and what factors differentiate companies that achieve maximum impact versus those that achieve more modest results?
(Laura Guzman) In retail there are several use cases in which agents can be deployed quite quickly, as long as we have a good data infrastructure, such as personalized recommendations, automatic catalog management or post-sales support. It is a particularly active sector in this sense, since 67% of Spanish retailers already consider that agents will be essential to compete, according to our Connected Shoppers study.
In banking and insurance, the most immediate use cases would be personalized attention, automation of onboarding for new employees, fraud prevention or compliance review. In fact, one of the main Spanish banks, CaixaBank, is already implementing Agentforce to respond quickly and accurately to queries made by its customers, both in its apps, in offices or in its call center. In parallel, the entity’s employees also have this support to reduce the workload of repetitive tasks and be able to dedicate themselves to more complex tasks with greater added value such as personalized advice, among other functions.
Regarding the differentiation factors of companies that achieve a greater impact, we can highlight the quality and governance of data, the integration of agents in critical processes, the commitment to internal training and the use of a unified platform, such as Agentforce 360.
(MCPRO) Finally, from your commercial and strategic perspective, how do you see the CRM and business solutions market evolving in the next 2-3 years? Will the agentic company really be the standard or will we continue to see a coexistence of models? And what role will Salesforce play in leading that transition?
(Laura Guzman) As I said at the beginning of the interview, we are entering the era of the agentic company. According to the Agentic Enterprise Index, the creation of AI agents has increased by 119% in the first half of 2025, while interactions between agents and employees grew at an average monthly rate of 65%.
Therefore, we will see a more conversational CRM with interactions using natural language, automated systems with agents capable of anticipating problems, and hybrid templates that combine the presence of workers and AI agents.
At Salesforce, we have been leading this transition for a year, when we launched the first version of Agentforce, and since then we have not stopped innovating with solutions such as Agentforce 360, Data 360, MuleSoft Agent Fabric or the commitment to Slack as a conversational work operating system.
Furthermore, we are doing it firsthand, as a “zero customer”, being the first to implement this technology. In this sense, our role will be the same as we had with the cloud and CRM: giving companies a secure, unified platform ready to scale the future of digital work.
