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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled Agentforce 2.0, positioning it as a transformative digital labor platform.
"This platform has the scale to serve as a digital labor force for enterprises, turning their data into actionable insights and measurable business outcomes," Benioff told a press gathering. What remains to be seen is whether it will lead to labor augmentation or labor arbitrage.
Regardless, Benioff emphasized that Agentforce 2.0 is a leap forward, boasting enhanced capabilities driven by real-world feedback and Salesforce’s internal implementation success.
He highlighted how the journey to 2.0 was shaped — over merely 3 months — by customer collaboration and the impact particularly within Salesforce’s customer service operations. "We've seen firsthand Agentforce move beyond automation to deliver true personalization and drive business results.”
As organizations grapple with leveraging their vast data troves, Agentforce 2.0 promises to unlock their full potential, blending AI and business processes for scalable, human-like engagement.
Salesforce Eats Their Own Dog Food
Before the session began, I spoke with Jim Roth, who leads customer service for Salesforce and has been at the forefront of applying Agentforce. Tasked with "eating the dog food" or "drinking the champagne," whatever phrase you prefer, Roth shared how Salesforce leadership pushed to make Agentforce integral to Salesforce's internal workflows.
“We wanted this to look and feel fundamentally different from first-generation bots,” Roth said, noting how those early attempts were clunky and disconnected from the human agents who could solve problems. Honestly, they often frustrate customers by slowing down getting a fix to problems.
To set Agentforce apart, Roth said they made Agentforce resemble ChatGPT more than the opaque, frustrating chatbots of the past. “It’s interesting,” he added, “because now people are asking the system questions they would not typically ask a human — like, ‘who’s my sales representative?’”
By bridging the gap between automation and human-like interactions, Agentforce is fostering a new kind of dialogue, one that shifts how customers engage with support teams and creates unexpected opportunities for connection.
So, what are the results of the internal consumption of Agentforce? Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s customer service handles 32,000 customer interactions weekly, which he described as "critical to our success." With Agentforce, the company achieved an impressive 83% reduction in service requests requiring human intervention.
While previous technologies have already reduced workloads, Agentforce has further streamlined operations, cutting the number of human-managed interactions from 1,000 to just 500. With this change, “Jim Roth is now managing both people and digital agents,” Benioff noted. By offloading routine queries to Agentforce, Salesforce’s team can focus on higher-value, complex issues, demonstrating the business impact of integrating digital labor at scale.
Related Article: Will Your Next Hire Be an AI Agent?
Redefining the Salesforce Market
With these insights, Benioff shifted the conversation to the scale of opportunity in front of Salesforce.
“The CRM market is worth a couple hundred billion dollars,” he said. “We think the market for agents — digital labor — is much bigger, in the trillions of dollars.” According to Benioff, this is a meaningful change — it makes Salesforce not just as a CRM provider but as the ultimate digital labor manager for the enterprise. Adding to this, voice technology powered by Agentforce represents a game changer.
“We’re building the bridge to digital labor right now,” Benioff said, emphasizing the seamless integration of voice as part of the Agentforce experience.” As businesses race to automate and personalize at scale, Salesforce seems intent on leading the charge, blurring the lines between human and digital workforces.
Transforming Customer Experience With Bots
When it comes to customer experience, Marc Benioff shared a bold idea: make all website data customer accessible.
"This will transform everything," he said, explaining that it enables seamless follow-ups like, “we noticed you were looking for this.” Whether customers are browsing on their own or speaking with an agent, the system now has the intelligence to provide deeply personalized interactions.
Agents, powered by Agentforce, will have complete context — what products a customer owns, their browsing history, registered issues and more. “It’s not just a conversation; it’s a connection,” Benioff emphasized.
By leveraging data to anticipate needs and personalized responses, Salesforce aims to create a frictionless customer journey that feels intuitive and deeply aligned with individual needs.
An Entrance Into the Robotics Business
Looking ahead, Benioff teased the audience with an ambitious vision: robots as the physical embodiment of Agentforce. If they’re becoming the US Robotics from Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” is unclear. Should we expect robotics company acquisitions?
Nevertheless, Benioff hinted at a future where Agentforce does not just power conversations but interacts with the physical world. This expansion underscores Salesforce’s goal to redefine not just how businesses manage customer interactions but how they think of labor itself.
As this author shared in my review of “Fusion Strategy,” AI is powering new physical product offerings like John Deere’s See and Spray. With a shift from predictions to agents and robots, expanding their role beyond manufacturing is possible.
While robotics today is largely industrial, leaders like Marc Benioff see immense potential in their broader industrialization. This highlights how robots could transform sectors far beyond the factory floor.
Applying Agents to Slack and Tableau
A significant leap forward is integrating agents into Slack, where they can interrogate data, act and respond to questions by connecting Salesforce, Slack and agents seamlessly — all within guardrails for governance.
Benioff and his team demonstrated how agents gain and accumulate skills to perform tasks, showing the practicality and power of this approach.
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His team displayed how to build agents, associate them with skills and do so without coding. One scenario illustrated an employee returning from vacation and preparing a critical client presentation. The agent discovered relevant emails, analyzed requirements and guided the user through the process of preparing a presentation. Another example featured a streamlined hiring process, further emphasizing agents' versatility.
Benioff, meanwhile, announced a shift in self-service BI, stating that Tableau’s data will now be accessible through natural language queries. This signals Salesforce’s ambitions far beyond CRM, aiming for an enterprise-wide impact. To realize this, the company is building a semantic layer, data governance guardrails, APIs and agents, setting its sights on competitors like SAP and ServiceNow.
Related Article: 10 Top AI Robotics Companies
Benioff Challenges the Marketplace
Marc Benioff challenged competitors’ claims about their AI capabilities, asking why they are not truly applying these solutions to themselves like Salesforce. He urged skeptics to examine their websites.
Salesforce, he said, has 1,000 contracts for its AgentForce platform, with one hundred customers already actively deploying agents.
Benioff envisions a future where leaders will manage teams of specialized agents, each powered by structured and unstructured data. These intelligent agents learn and adapt, creating new skills as project demands evolve.
Salesforce’s foundational technologies — Data Cloud, a 360-degree customer view, generative AI and agents — enable this vision, positioning it as a leader in the next generation of enterprise solutions.
The Race to Digital Labor Is On
In unveiling Agentforce 2.0, Benioff painted a bold vision of the future, where digital agents evolve from tools of efficiency to strategic partners in business transformation. By integrating advanced AI with personalized, human-like interactions, Salesforce aims to redefine the boundaries of digital labor, turning data into actionable outcomes.
Whether Agentforce 2.0 heralds a new era of labor augmentation or a shift toward labor arbitrage remains uncertain, but its potential to streamline operations, personalize customer experiences and reshape enterprise workflows is undeniable.
As Salesforce itself embraces its own technology, the company sets a compelling benchmark for digital labor’s impact. From revolutionizing customer service to extending capabilities into Slack, Tableau and even the physical realm of robotics, Agentforce 2.0 signals a market change. In Benioff’s words, the race to digital labor has begun — and Salesforce appears determined to lead the pack.
