In September Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Fortune that his company is making a “hard pivot” to its new AI agent platform Agentforce. Thousands of customers will attend workshops at the business software maker’s annual conference to learn how to use technology that allows users to quickly create artificial intelligence-based agents that can make decisions and act on information, including automating customer service tasks. And he set a goal to have tens of thousands of customers using the product in their operations by January 2025.
That may seem like a tall order, but at least for now Salesforce investors have faith. After the company posted its quarterly earnings yesterday (including 80 mentions of Agentforce during a call with Wall Street analysts), its stock rose 11% to a record high.
The company’s fiscal third-quarter revenue rose 8% year over year to $9.44 billion. Its net income was $1.5 billion, up 25% from $1.2 billion a year ago.
Investor enthusiasm will only last so long, however, and Wall Street will want evidence that Salesforce’s big spending on its AI efforts (the company didn’t disclose a specific amount) will pay off in the long run. That means Salesforce has to scramble to really sell Agentforce to meet its goals.
This is a critical test for the company as it tries to compete in what has become a very important market for artificial intelligence products. Every major software company, from the big tech giants Microsoft and Google big players like SAP and ServiceNowracing to capitalize on what is expected to be a huge future payout.
On a call with analysts, Benioff said Salesforce has already “closed 200 deals” on Agentforce, which went public on Oct. 24, adding that “our pipeline is incredible for future transactions.” He also confirmed that the company is hiring 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople to help spread the Agentforce gospel. “Over the past couple of years, we’ve not only increased the performance of the current Salesforce, but we just need to grow and expand to reflect this incredible deployment opportunity,” he said.
But how Agentforce will work with customers remains to be seen. Salesforce is optimistic about demand for the product, but Benioff acknowledged that Agentforce did not make a “significant contribution” to so-called cRPO in the quarter that just ended. The metric is a key indicator of customer absorption, reflecting future contract revenue that has not yet been recognized. Agentforce’s overwhelming influence is expected to remain unchanged in the current quarter. That’s because the technology still lags Salesforce’s other products, which generate $37 billion in annual revenue. “We’re still at the very beginning of this journey,” Benioff said.
However, Benioff was already touting the next phase of the journey during an earnings call on Tuesday, with the planned launch of what he called Agentforce 2.0 on December 17. Apparently, all these new sellers will work.
