‘Agentic AI’ is the next revolution declares global giant Salesforce Chief

Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco

• Speaks of “agentic divide” in which consumer is elevated but not enterprises
• Stresses AI, when built with trust, elevates people
• Describes Salesforce’s latest innovation ‘Agentforce 360’ as most complete platform for building, controlling and deploying trusted enterprise AI agents at scale

Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff recently declared that “Agentic AI” is the next revolution, where humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents drive customer success together in “Agentic Enterprises.”

This declaration was made at the world’s leading AI Customer Relations Management (CRM) solutions provider’s ‘Dreamforce 2025’ three-day event in San Francisco.

The event, which has 1,500 sessions addressed by over 100 IT leaders, drove home the point that when AI is built with trust, it will elevate people, as agents handle the busy work so that employees can focus on work that matters in an enterprise.

Benioff also spoke of what he described as the “agentic divide,” in which consumers are elevated but not enterprises.

To address this divide, Salesforce showcased its latest innovation ‘Agentforce 360,’ the world’s first platform designed to connect humans and AI agents in one trusted system — empowering every employee to achieve more, every customer-facing moment to deliver more, and every company to operate with unprecedented intelligence and speed. It was described as the most complete platform for building, controlling, and deploying trusted enterprise AI agents at scale.

“To get AI right, you have got to get your data right,” Benioff said during the keynote at Dreamforce, attended by over 50,000 including global customers, partners, and media, including the Daily FT.

“You have got to get to more integrated solutions. You have got to get the priorities right. You have to get the governance right,” he said, part in reference to a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study that showed that generative AI pilot projects tend to fail.

“The speed of adoption of technology by enterprise customers is not outpacing the speed of innovation,” he emphasised separately during a media interaction. “Our job is to get those customers into adoption mode. The way to do it is by showing them customers who are front-left runners in this. When you look at these customers, they are making it happen, and I think that their stories are so critical and compelling,” the Salesforce Chief emphasised.

Dreamforce 2025 showcased what it means to become an Agentic Enterprise featuring real customer demos from OpenAI, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., Pandora, Accenture, PepsiCo, FedEx, and Dell Technologies.

Benioff stressed that Salesforce was built on trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability. He revealed how two decades of connecting customers, data, and trust have led to the next leap in business — the rise of the Agentic Enterprise, where AI doesn’t replace people, but elevates them.

The Agentic Enterprise represents a new model for work — where AI elevates people rather than replacing them. In an Agentic Enterprise, every team operates with 24/7 intelligence: sales leads are never missed, service never sleeps, and every employee has an AI partner that helps them move faster and make smarter decisions. The result is a new era of productivity, customer connection, and growth.

Salesforce’s proven automation and analytics now power AI agents capable of turning every workflow into intelligence, every employee into a multiplier, and every customer interaction into a moment of impact.

Agentforce 360 is designed to deliver controlled, contextual, and consistent experiences across every customer and employee interaction—it gives teams the fastest path from AI prototypes to production-scale agents.

Built on learnings from more than 12,000 Agentforce implementations, the Agentforce 360 platform delivers a new Agent Script language for defining behaviour, an integrated voice-native experience layer, a reimagined Agentforce Builder for rapid, conversational development and testing, and easy, AI-powered unstructured data pipelines that turn even the most complex documents into reliable context for reasoning. The result: accurate, brand-aligned, production-ready agents built for enterprise-grade deployments.

Agent Script, a new scripting language for controlling agents, is a core component of the Agentforce 360 platform release. Agent Script combines the creativity of AI with the rigour of business workflows so that agents perform the exact way a company wants them to, every time. Agent Script allows enterprises to define agent behaviour with a human-readable expression language, which enables conditional logic, precise tool use, and guided, deterministic controls. This new level of control empowers Agentforce to tackle even the most complex tasks with confidence.

It was revealed that Agentforce 360 delivers the most advanced capabilities yet for building, deploying, and governing enterprise-grade AI agents. These innovations span the entire Salesforce ecosystem, from platform to data to customer apps to Slack, which is the Agentic OS for the Enterprise. 

Agentforce 360 also uniquely brings together the four ingredients of an Agentic Enterprise.

• Agentforce 360 Platform: The foundation for enterprise-grade AI agents, now featuring a new conversational builder, hybrid reasoning for greater control and accuracy, and voice capabilities.
• Data 360: The trusted, unified data layer that gives every agent context. With innovations like Intelligent Context and Tableau Semantics, companies can turn unstructured data and analytics into rich context and understanding for AI.

Customer 360 Apps: The business logic and institutional memory of every enterprise — capturing how it sells, serves, markets, and operates — now brought to life through AI agents that deeply understand every customer and process from the inside out.

Slack: The conversational interface for humans and agents to work together, connecting knowledge, actions, and data in real time.

This uniquely integrated approach enables businesses to deploy agents that are grounded in governed, trusted data; work across teams and workflows; collaborate with humans and other agents directly in Slack; and leverage existing processes, business logic, and data infrastructure. And with its open ecosystem, partners extend Salesforce’s technology into every industry with tailored solutions and services.

Agentforce 360 also introduces the most dependable and accessible agents yet — designed to reason, act, and collaborate alongside people.

• Agentforce Builder: A new conversational development studio that lets teams design, test, and deploy agents using natural language — no manual configuration required.
• Agentforce Voice: A native voice layer that transforms Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems into natural, real-time conversations with low-latency transcription, realistic speech synthesis, and deep Salesforce integration. Voice is compatible with leading enterprise Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) partners such as Amazon Connect, Five9, NiCE, and Vonage.
• Hybrid Reasoning and Agent Script: Combines deterministic workflows with flexible Large-Language Model (LLM) reasoning for precision and adaptability. Developers can define guardrails, tool use, and logic using Agent Script, powered by the configurable Atlas Reasoning Engine.
• Agentforce Vibes: Extends low-code development to AI, letting builders “vibe-code” apps grounded in company data and governance.
• Observability: New dashboards help teams monitor reasoning, accuracy, and compliance — improving reliability over time.

Not just a pilot but most successful solution ever

According to Salesforce, Agentforce 360 isn’t another AI pilot but it is already reshaping work inside Salesforce and across industries. Internally, Salesforce uses Agentforce 360 to handle routine tasks across sales, IT, and support, elevating employees to focus on strategy, creativity, and customer relationships.

Separately with 12,000 customers, Agentforce 360 has delivered transformative results.

Benioff said Agentforce, provisionally launched in October last year, has been the most successful product ever launched by Salesforce in its 26-year history. 

“It’s the fastest growing product in our history. There’s never been a faster growing product that we have that much already is way beyond anything we’ve been expecting,” he told journalists attending Dreamforce 2025. 

At the end of FY26 Q2, Salesforce closed over 12,500 deals since launching Agentforce and over 40% of Data Cloud and Agentforce Q2 bookings came from existing customer expansion. Its customer base is over 150,000 and employs over 76,000. In 2025, Salesforce’s annual revenue was $ 37.9 billion, up 121.63% from 2020. (NC)