It’s gone beyond sales, as Salesforce unveils office workflow AI agents

SAN FRANCISCO – Workers can now call on artificial intelligence (AI) agents from tech firm Salesforce to reset passwords, set up new user accounts and answer policy questions.

The San Francisco-based company is letting its customers deploy these bot helpers across workflows, automating sales and customer service to IT incident response and employee onboarding.

The firm launched Agentforce 360, its fourth and latest AI agent platform, over a rapid 12 months, as tech companies race to widen their workflow automation offerings to win the enterprise crown.

Announcing its global roll-out on Oct 14, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff said 12,000 of its 150,000 customers have signed up as paying users.

It is the fastest-growing product in the 26-year-old company’s history, he added at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference, which this year leaned heavily on customer success testimonies.

Salesforce, which now calls itself an agentic enterprise enabler, rather than a customer relations management leader, became the first user of its own platform in October 2024.

It has since handed over 70 per cent of calls to its AI agents.

Mr Benioff said: “Between 20 million and 100 million customers who contacted us in the last 26 years, we didn’t call back. We didn’t have enough people. Just this week, our SDR (Sales Development Representative agent) is calling back 50,000 customers a week.

“This is a moment to start to think about what an agentic enterprise looks like.”

On top of a pay-per-use pricing structure of 15 US cents (19 Singapore cents) per voice action, 10 US cents per action, and a separate pay tier for unlimited use, Mr Benioff talked through a list of additional enhancements, ranging from voice capability and low-code tools to deep-data integration.

Company executives also pointed to a new feature that allows human users to appraise, manage and retrain underperforming agents.

While various tech firms ranging from hyperscalers to start-ups have been pushing out AI agents at a furious pace since 2024, Salesforce’s integrated platform makes it easier for organisations to make AI work without having to build things from scratch, said Mr Ullrich Loeffler, CEO of research and advisory firm Ecosystm.

“Being fully integrated means you don’t have to do too much plumbing,” he said.

He expects businesses in this region to be slower in adoption as it usually takes time for new features to cascade down to regional subsidiaries and third-party technology partners.

Local insurer Singlife has signed on to the platform to build Singlife Buddy, its AI agent, to answer customer queries.

Mr Romil Sharma, Singlife’s group head of technology and operations, said the firm plans to include underwriting and claims processing, as well as sales and customer engagement later on.

The firm is taking a cautious approach for data integrity and security reasons, he said.

Ms Heidi Tian, CEO of edutainment play park Kiztopia, aims to hand over routine queries to these agents to free up her customer service teams for more complex requests.

“We get a lot of inquiries after business hours, when busy parents have the time to reach out to us to make bookings,” she said.

While some of Salesforce’s competitors offered niche strengths, the firm picked Salesforce eventually for its ecosystem, scalability, and integration features, she said.

Asked if the tech firm’s enhancements were incremental, CEO of tech advisory firm CapioIT Phil Hassey said Salesforce would be expected to match the pace of its customers, who would have to align their data, talent, supply chain, budgets and leadership buy-in.

He said: “As an enterprise or government agency, or even mid-sized business, you don’t want them (Salesforce) to be taking massive leaps.

“It’s all well and good to make big bangs like OpenAI, but from an enterprise point of view, you need to have that consistency. And it’s got to be incremental, because you’re not going to risk your entire organisational customer experience on a whim of Salesforce.”

Mr Hassey also urged Salesforce to pay more attention to Asia, which now contributes just over 10 per cent to the firm’s revenues, but is the fastest-growing territory at a year-over-year growth rate of over 12 per cent. Salesforce made US$10.2 billion in revenues in its

latest earnings report for the quarter ending July 31

He said: “Asia is the fastest-growing region... every single vendor should be spending much more time on understanding Asia to maximise their revenue in Asia and become more localised in those markets.”

Ecosystm’s Mr Loeffer said that for now, Agentforce targets companies that are already Salesforce users, which would already have data in Salesforce’s cloud to train the agents on.

He agrees with Mr Hassey on the opportunities in Asia.

“There are a lot of companies that don’t use Salesforce, or even don’t use any system, still working on spreadsheets or something.”

These firms would likely need two to three years to be ready. Some may never be, Mr Loeffer said.

But he added: “I interviewed one of the customers from India. They started with the Salesforce implementation a year ago, and they said, look, we have got a five-year plan to fully embrace Agentforce.”

At its South-east Asian headquarters in Singapore, Salesforce is ramping up its sales team for a stronger grip.

The firm’s market share in the Republic ranges from a single-digit percentage to around 20 per cent in various countries, said Mr Arun Kumar, its managing director leading sales for India and South-east Asia.

The plan is to go out and grab market share.

“Our view is very simple. We have to grow faster than everybody else,” he said.