Enter the Agentforce Enterprise

Salesforce have been under a lot of pressure lately. Investors want faster growth, customers want a stronger focus on the core platform. Agentforce has been pitched as the solution to Salesforce's growth problem. Coming into Dreamforce, it wasn't clear if Agentforce solved the problem of many Salesforce customers.

Agentforce First

Agentforce certainly has its use cases, but we're a long way from seeing it become an integral part of every customer experience. Marc Benioff has spent the last year describing Agentforce as the centrepiece of his company, without actually delivering this in practice. Salesforce users have seen this all before with Chatter, Einstein and other hot new technologies. This year's Dreamforce is the first sign that the AI hype will influence the existing product portfolio.

While Sales Cloud still remains the core platform for users, it's clearly not central to the product roadmap. Dreamforce added several more bricks to the future Agentforce enterprise. The foundations are gradually being put in place for Agentforce to subsume the different Salesforce clouds. Benioff himself acknowledged that AI is a long term playbook for Salesforce, claiming that most businesses won't be ready until much before 2030.

Tools & Models

Much of the post Salesforce analysis focused on the surprise partnership with Open AI. This goes alongside existing partnerships with Claude and Gemini. But is otherwise following an industry wide trend towards multi-model AI. Same with the new Voice mode. For customers within the Salesforce ecosystem, the new Agentforce Builder is a much bigger deal.

Agentforce Builder breaks down the barrier between no code workflows and developer scripting, allowing admins to seamlessly switch between the two within the same agent. On top of that, the new builder has some really interesting testing capabilities. Flow already has pretty good real time simulation features, which allow admins to run any record through a flow and see the detailed steps taken. Agentforce now has an upgraded version of this feature, showing the agents reasoning at each stage of a process. That transparency makes testing and development a much easier process.

Updates such as Agentforce Builder and Agentforce Vibes give Salesforce customers the tools to deploy agents for their businesses. However, the biggest barrier to AI deployment lies elsewhere. The overarching message coming out of Dreamforce was that businesses need to sort out their data before they can take advantage of emerging technologies such as AI. It's not just Salesforce saying this, their customers are too. People have spent more than enough time experimenting with AI now. They've realised the biggest barriers to production deployment, and data quality tops the list.

A New Purpose

The same could be said of Salesforce's product strategy. A large part of the company's issues relate to Data Cloud. Originally launched as a CDP that no one really wanted, Marc Benioff has spent the subsequent years trying to find a purpose for it. It's been passed between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud several times, until Agentforce gave it a reason to exist. At Dreamforce, it formally became part of the Salesforce AI platform. To celebrate Data Cloud gets a name change to Data 360.

Data 360 is now described as the data governance layer for all data in Salesforce, not just data pulled from other tools. The new intelligent context feature helps with this, by making better use of the information stored in notes and documents. Unlocking the value within that information is a major use case for generative AI, so it's good to see a major upgrade in this area.

The changes are timely. Directly integrating Data 360 into the Agentforce platform seems minor, but is actually a fairly big deal. Salesforce have spent most of the year tinkering with Data 360 pricing. Most recently they introduced a free allowance for data already stored elsewhere in the Salesforce ecosystem. That at least gives companies a chance to get started with Data 369, while Agentforce gives them a reason to reassess a platform that people have ignoring for the best part of a decade.

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