Salesforce at Morgan Stanley Conference: AI Innovations and Strategic Shifts

On Tuesday, 04 March 2025, Salesforce Inc. (NYSE: CRM) unveiled its latest AI advancements at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The company highlighted its strategic shift towards a versatile AI platform, Agent Force, and discussed both the opportunities and challenges it presents. While the platform promises to transform business operations, questions about pricing durability and market adaptation remain.

Key Takeaways

• Salesforce’s AI platform, Agent Force, extends beyond customer service to include internal operations and proactive data analysis.
• A shift from a per-conversation pricing model to a universal credit system aims to enhance customer flexibility.
• Early adoption of Agent Force is strong, with 5,000 deals in Q4, including 3,000 paid contracts.
• Agent Force shows a 50% resolution rate in some sectors, with significant deflection rates.
• Integration with Salesforce’s data cloud and Slack enhances agent capabilities and business impact.

Financial Results

• Salesforce secured 5,000 Agent Force deals in Q4, with 3,000 being paid.
• The average cost of a contact center touch ranges from $7 to $9, with higher costs in specific industries like insurance.
• Agent Force achieves a 50% resolution rate in some sectors, with Salesforce’s help experiencing an 84% deflection rate.
• Only 2% to 3% of customer interactions escalate to human involvement when Agent Force is used.

Operational Updates

• Agent Force is utilized internally by Salesforce for handling approximately 40,000 weekly conversations.
• The platform supports pre and post-meeting preparations, particularly for sales and field service.
• Salesforce’s zero-copy alliance with data cloud allows seamless data integration from various sources.
• New features enable agents to act proactively, triggered by data events, enhancing precision and recall by 50%.

Future Outlook

• Salesforce plans to transition to a universal credit system for Agent Force pricing.
• The roadmap focuses on rapid customer implementation to solve problems and drive consumption.
• Future developments aim to streamline the agent development lifecycle, with emphasis on testing, automation, and reporting.

Q&A Highlights

• Agent Force is 16 times faster to market compared to building solutions independently.
• The universal credit system encourages experimentation and learning for new applications.
• Salesforce is integrating multimodal capabilities, including image understanding, to expand Agent Force’s functionality.

In conclusion, Salesforce’s presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference showcased its commitment to evolving AI capabilities and strategic pricing models. For a deeper dive into the full discussion, refer to the complete transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: I was hoping to start a little bit with your background. So you came on board to Salesforce vis a vis the acquisition of Airkit, which you cofounded back in 2017. And now Airkit has been integrated into the service cloud. So maybe for people who are less familiar with the story, you could tell us a little bit about AirKit, why Salesforce was a good home for AirKit, just so we get a little bit of an introduction to you.

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Thanks, Keith. First time at TMT, it’s great to be here. And just to kind of personally introduce myself a little bit. So Airkit was my company that Salesforce acquired in 2017. However, my store with Salesforce goes back a little longer.

Mark would call me a boomerang. It’s my second time. My first time with a company called RouletteIQ that was acquired in 2014. The reason I bring it up is that RouletteIQ was all about using AI, back when we call it data science machine learning, really to automate sales, to help sellers capture what they’re doing with email calendar and solve like data entry problems. This became some of the Einstein kind of IQ type stuff that we had a decade ago, 2014 plus Airkit, I left started Airkit.

Related to it was about sales. Airkit was all about service. So this is instead saying, hey, let’s take AI now and think about long tail customer service applications, specifically self-service, and thinking about helping customers to serve their customers 20 fourseven using technology to do that. And so we joined in late twenty twenty three back into the Salesforce family here. And then as far as how the I think you had mentioned how the technology, the product and things have actually been kind of brought in, What you’re seeing as Agent Force is a mixture of a lot of the IP that came from Airkit plus homegrown.

It’s really important to us that we don’t, including my own company or things that we’re looking at, have technology that’s brought in. That is what we’re launching. It needs to be very deeply integrated to our platform. Otherwise, it’s not it is not really going to have the effect that we want. So a lot of the IP from Airkit and new tech that we’ve built is kind of the culmination of that as Agent Force.

And that’s also why customer service has been kind of one of our very first areas. I see a lot of our customers interested in building self-service agents serving their customers 20 fourseven.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Got it. Got it. So I was hoping to start talking more broadly about sort of the broader Salesforce AI platform. One of the benefits and hard parts about having Marc Benioff as your CEO, Marc is very excited about new initiatives like Agent Force. And I think the robustness of the solution took a lot of investors by surprise, right?

And I think part of the reason why those surprises people underestimate how much there is in the foundation below that, how broad the AI platform is. So like when you think about the Salesforce AI platform, which you have perspective over, talk to us about sort of the extent to which AI has been embedded into the core solutions, to which there’s a foundation, which enabled you to quickly kind of roll out Agent Force, if you will.

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Okay. So there’s a lot of dimensions to that question. Let me just kind of start getting into it here. Okay. So Agent Force and what we built is a mixture of effectively out of the box agents that mirror kind of our lines of business or clouds, right?

So service, sales, commerce, marketing, etcetera. Those are the easiest things to understand and buy. Customers typically start there. It makes sense. But it’s also a platform.

What we’re finding is agents and really as we say things like digital labor in a much kind of bigger kind of market we’re getting into. This technology isn’t just solving a singular problem. It’s really versatile. And so we think about having agents doing all kinds of like long tail type background work, analyst. We’re going to make some announcements tomorrow, by the way.

We’re doing our developer conference is happening right now at TMT as well. So we’ll make some announcements tomorrow. You’re going to see agents move in all kinds of workflows for employees, for customers, solving problems, being able to leverage data that’s in data cloud for us. Really, unstructured data is a I don’t want to say gold mine, but it’s something now that we can do so much more with all of the data transcripts that we’re having interactions with our customers, understanding click traffic, being able to apply AI to better understand customers, to do things like put them in the right segments for better marketing campaigns and more. There’s just a very, very wide kind of aperture of the application space.

So it’s not just kind of a line of business only, it is truly a platform. And the only way that we could do that is having it actually deeply integrated throughout all of kind of the stack. So I appreciate what you’re saying that it was robust and that we’re moving very quickly as we’re here. That’s the pace that we want to go. We’ve got a bunch of other exciting announcements planned for this week and also for, of course, Dreamforce, but more things to come.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Got it. And maybe we can kind of walk through kind of the evolution of the capabilities. When we were talking about AI within Salesforce eighteen months ago, the roughly eighteen months ago, the focal point was Einstein GPT, right, which was embedded into the solutions. Can you talk to us about sort of the core capabilities that come from an Einstein GPT versus the extended capabilities of what you could do with Agent Force and help us kind of compare and contrast where we’ve come.

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes. And there’s kind of like even like a third distinct moment. We had a little co pilot phase in the middle of that too. So the Einstein GPT is I think what every kind of company kind of wakes up when they realize the world has changed and they say, how do we get AI into our product? The same thing for business.

How do we get AI into our business? How do we change our operations? And the most obvious way is to look kind of like screen by screen or workflow by workflow, task by task, job by job and say, hey, how do we kind of add it in here? It’s the most immediate thing to do, put a prompt that helps me close out my case, if I’m a customer service rep, so I can move on to the next one faster in a standard way with a prompt. We see a lot of adoption of that, but it’s a simple product because it’s very kind of linear, like one kind of solution at a time.

That kind of embodies, I think, a lot of the Einstein GPD kind of suite of functionality. Then we moved into this idea of assisting employees and thinking of it that way where it’s kind of always a human in the loop. And this was eighteen months ago or so. And this was I think there’s a lot of like kind of trepidation around this idea of, can AI actually help my customers? Can I trust it?

How do I make it not hallucinate? And a lot of things have changed since then. And we also talked to our customers early on, and they were saying, hey, we really want to use this, but we’re a little scared. And that was kind of the temperature about eighteen months ago or twelve months ago. I mean, maybe still is, but what’s shifting is once we actually deploy the technology and Keith, you mentioned it’s pretty robust.

So they actually got their hands on to an early version of now what we call Agent Force. And they saw what the technology would do as far as assisting a human customer service rep with the human in the loop. And they said and they were kind of blown away and they said, wow, actually this is pretty good. And maybe we can turn this on all our customers. And so we started seeing that appetite for, hey, maybe then we can try this.

And then that’s when we just started going kind of heavy into it and said, great, if you’re going to have this be an agent, meaning it’s more autonomous, meaning it can work without a human in the loop, it can take action, it’s got some tasks and background reasoning, It needs guardrails, right? It needs to be able to follow policy. It needs to be able to do that in a consistent way, in a measurable way, because that’s the difference between like, I don’t know, consumer tech like let’s say, HachigPT or something like that versus applying this technology to actually take action with the business with an enterprise. So investing heavy there and then that’s kind of what Agent Force was launched last year. Right.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: So is it October, I believe? Yes. October was yes, the GA. Got it. So it’s still relatively early days.

I think from an investor perspective, what we focus on most is the Agent Force opportunity within Service Cloud,

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: one

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: of the first ones that has come out. Can you just talk to us about the scope of like where you guys have agents today and where that’s going to expand to over time?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes. So I think service is maybe the most obvious as you’re pointing out, kind of almost like a low hanging fruit, but it comes up a lot. Another really kind of big interest in use case is really about more on the employee side, like internally facing agents that are doing basically pre and post like meeting prep. So this is obviously like good for sales field service too. If I’m going in as a seller to a meeting or if I’m a technician showing up on-site or whatever, I might want to have a pre brief before I do that, right?

I might be able to ask some questions with it, so it’s a little bit of assistant. And then also kind of post activity capture, things like that, what are the next steps, kind of updating the CRM. That’s kind of another really large one. And you’re going to see, we’re also teeing up a handful of new features. I’m trying not to say too much about what we’re going to announce this week.

Let’s go around it. You’re going to see agents be able to do things that potentially in a more proactive way, thinking about being triggered more from like data events and as background workers and kind of basically like analysts coming in. And that is kind of an extension this idea of a pre meeting brief, right, where it knows my calendar and it’s doing a little work ahead of time. But you can imagine scaling that out for all kinds of operations within a business, not just like a meeting with a seller, but all kinds of various events that may be happening with a customer and things like that as well that’s coming through the platform. Got it.

Got it. I want

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: to drill into the Service Cloud use case. And correct me if I’m wrong, but from our perspective, we see that as you said low hanging fruit, and we kind of agree that that’s a use case that seems, I don’t want to say relatively obvious, but it seems like very ripe that we’re automation. It’s a core cost center for a lot of customers. So the ability to do that more efficiently just resonates a lot with them. What’s the capabilities in terms of Agent Force ability to actually offload call volumes, offload support requests from a customer today?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes. Well, so let me give you an example in healthcare actually. So we have coming to Pristina Health. Actually, Pristina Health is a good one. They’re actually using Agent Force also doing pre briefs where they’re going in.

They’re doing chronic disease management with as they’re meeting with providers to onboard new sellers, but also for customer service, it’s chronic disease management. So you have a lot of touches. Another customer, one-eight hundred accountants, okay? They’re doing like seasonal it’s tax season coming up, right, in The U. S.

So ramping up seasonal labor, we’re using Agent Force right now, they’re seeing a 50% resolution rate. A story that we like to tell you, probably Mark tell it, we use it internally as well, or I should say externally, but we use the product ourselves for our help. Salesforce.com. You can check it out right now. This is a high volume thing, about 40,000 conversations a week.

The last staff I saw were 84% deflection or resolution rate of agents helping. And then when an agent is engaged with a customer, I really love this stat, only 2%, it’s right around 2% or 3%, actually escalate to a human, which is important, by the way, to have and that’s what service cloud allows. So if an agent is talking, how do we bring a human in the loop? It’s important you have it, but it’s impressive that you don’t need it. So I think those are really great kind of stats.

We see this also through a lot of our other customers. They’re all looking at 30% to 50%. It varies depending on the business and how they want to kind of dial up like customer satisfaction outcomes and like how they think about handing things off. And for example, carving out some things like you’re going to talk about pricing. Maybe you want to hand that off to a human.

So it’s not even about this idea of a cost center and deflection, it’s almost more topical as well. So I think some of the measurements that contact centers have been using for the like years in the past as you really kind of scale up this much more kind of like a limitless supply of like labor to handle cases all the time, you’re going to start seeing kind of different measurements and people really rethinking cross sell, upsell, CSAT, what are the most important customers, how do we actually move them and maybe into my best human agents and then think of we think of it a little bit differently, but we’re seeing 50 plus percent deflection pretty consistently. Got it. I just wanted

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: to dive into like actually help have you do my job for me and answer some of the questions that I get from investors a lot. I think one of the biggest questions is understanding the buy versus build decision, right? Yes. Sure. Yes.

Companies have a lot of their data in a Snowflake or Databricks, and Snowflake and Databricks are giving you capabilities to build that agent for yourself. Why do this within Salesforce versus kind of building it on your own? How do you guys think about that buy versus build decision for the end customer?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Great question. We just had an industry analyst report, Bellower, come back and tell us they surveyed our customers, and they came back knowing that customers that were building something and then they after they had built it switched over to Agent Force or they did some kind of a bake off internally, which happens a lot, 16x faster. 16x faster to market is what they told us with our customers. I was really happy when I saw this report, but it checks out because it’s never been easier. Let me just give you a little insider.

I’m not going to engineering kind of product nerd background. Let me tell you something a little secret, which is it’s never been easier to build a cool demo. That is what this technology really unlocks. So beware, but also it’s cool to build a demo. Moving that into production is much, much different.

And that means when you go down this path that every Fortune 2,000 company had eighteen months ago or whatever kind of thing went off AI, let’s go with full let me go to 10 or 15 people, we’re going to build this internally. You saw a bunch of cool demos come out. And then when you say, great, well, how do we keep it on the rails, so it doesn’t do things that we don’t want it to do? And it’s got trust, it’s got reporting. And by the way, when we build it, do we have a whole bunch of like the whole idea of testing these agents before they go live is a whole another thing because it’s they’re probabilistic, right?

So you don’t have just a typical test where it passes or fails. You need to do a portfolio of tests, like a threshold, right? And so we built a testing center and automation and really the entire what was traditionally like a software development life cycle is what people would say. We’re calling kind of like agent development life cycle, this entire suite of effectively tooling, not to just create a cool demo, but actually field this technology in your business. Oh, and by the way, you need analytics in your reporting, like how much has this team done?

How much value is it doing? How do I know how to improve it? Like an iteration once the agent is live solving a problem and measuring the ROI. This is the depth of investment that it takes to really do this well. This is what we’re we’ve already built and we’re building and we’ve got an exciting roadmap about it, just accelerating people through this process of buying in their data and organize it, testing it, deploying it, improving it, measurement like the whole thing.

It’s like our roadmap basically. That is the difference. That’s the 16x lift. And you mentioned some other companies that are maybe more data centric. You’re going to want agents to do more than just analyze data in the background.

You’re going to want them ultimately reach out to employees. And there’s no better place to do that where employees are already having conversations. Slack is a very, very popular destination for that. You’re going to want these agents to be able to actually have business impact to talk to your customers, to send emails, to be able to change marketing campaign. I mean, where the actual business is operations hits kind of this like long tail of reality with customers.

That’s what Salesforce has always done is provide systems that do that. We’re just going completely through our stack and saying, how we bring agents or really agentic reasoning and really kind of this like beginner’s mind of thinking how to like remake these experiences, solving the original core problems and helping businesses run better, thinking about that and then thinking about the tools that you need at a platform level to do this well at an enterprise grade, not just for the developers, but also for the admins, for the business, the owners that need the KPIs and more. And it’s a lot. It’s a lot to build this and it’s not most of our customers’ core business. And so it’s the build buy, right?

The classic thing kind of happening over again.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Got it. Second big question I get is, you guys initially launched this with a per conversation price point, dollars 2 per conversation. Why is that the right way to price this type of solution?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes. So the we talked a lot about customer service as being kind of the most obvious thing. That pricing really comes from that mentality. If you the average cost of a contact center touch, some people may know this well, but others may not, is somewhere between $7 and $9 It varies wildly, by the way, $20 plus, you get into like insurance with deep policy understanding. It’s this is a cost center, right?

It’s an expensive thing for contact center. So when you think about a 50% deflection rate and as good of like CSAT results that we’re seeing our customers, when we got at 80 plus percent for us in our help, where you’re charging $2 for something that costs you $9, it’s a no brainer. Customers like it, you do it all day. So that pricing, it kind of comes from that. Now what when we launched the product, we just talked about there’s all these other use cases, right?

We have an SDR product sales development rep product that takes leads, knows your sales plan, does research on the leads and then does outbound emails to them. So like sales teams will take maybe the top 10% of their best leads, give it to their best human sellers and then the longer tail and give it over to the SDR, okay? This is something that we’ve seen kind of this expansion in non service use cases. And so we’re thinking one of the temptations was kind of just like a la carte pricing for every possible agent. And we had a big debate about this.

What we realized was, it’s we didn’t want to have, let’s call it, 10,000 excuse, right? This is way too important for companies thinking about building your agent and all these different agents that talk to each other and work. And so we made a decision to take that pricing that was kind of coming from service and apply it initially to these other use cases. So it kind of feels a little weird like $2 a conversation for an SDR, which is really a lead that it would take. That’s where our NAV, but we’re moving, if you kind of heard in our I think, Mark mentioned on our earnings call last week, but the we’re moving into the concept of a universal credit with this.

So this was our first step one to kind of combine, but really it’s not about conversations, it’s about work. And the kind of work you can deploy these agents for is like massive, like there’s lots of fragmentation here that we’re planning to help our customers like well beyond CRM use cases. And so the universal credit allows for that flexibility, and it allows for CIOs that are making decisions around budget. There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future right now. Tech is moving fast.

What do I do? How many licenses are new? What’s my team going to be next year? Am I going to buy this or that? Or what’s the business case on that?

Are we sure we’re going to do that? Or is it going to yield this? Right now, the answer is, as you can buy, you can invest into this idea of universal credit. And whether you had your model was, we’re going to deploy agents first for customer service. And then you realize that there’s another and another and another use case, which we see constantly, by the way, once you kind of get your feet wet, there’s lots of use cases.

In fact, it’s almost too many. It’s almost a problem that came focused. But as you expand, you have these credits that you can try experiments of new things and learn. And that fungibility is really critical at this moment when things are changing so quickly.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Got it. Third question, the durability of that price point in terms of we see token pricing coming down consistently, right? We hear Sam Almond, Orpstra, Tanezawa talking to us about 10x improvements in price performance. Can you guys sustain a price point at $2 per conversation if that token price continues to draw down over time?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Absolutely. I mean, one, we got to create value. Two, I think what you’re going to see even though things like the inference cost, like token price, things like that are dropping, which is the technology. And you’re looking at hardware, I mean, we’re on this like innovation curve with it. We’re seeing this layout in the market.

But what’s also happening is, you think of that agentic reasoning and for the academics, they’ll call the stuff like test time scaling or inference time scaling. What this really means is deeper reasoning when the problem is happening actually yields higher performance with the agents, okay? It’s not a one time model hit with inference, it’s multiple. So there’s all this flexibility that’s happening. One price is dropping and the reasoning and the output’s going the other way.

I think that this is still kind of early in it. We’re absolutely excited about inference prices going down, specialized hardware coming. Like there’s a lot of plans on all this stuff, it’s fantastic. But it’s ultimately about what are you using this technology to do, what kind of value does it create and can we be the easiest path for our customers to unlock that value and then we capture it.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Right. Got it. So it’s not really about sort of the comparison versus the token prices, the comparison between if you’re going to have to do this yourself, how much would it cost to drive the same amount of value as what Salesforce can provide to you sort of out of the box?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: That’s right. And as by the way, as the concept of let’s just use the word intelligence instead of tokens for a second. You can run this machine that can kind of reason and think through data to make decisions. You can apply intelligence drops to lower and lower amounts. There’s a couple of different ways you think about one, but the way I think about it is the number of use cases goes way up, right?

I mean, I told you we saw that long tail. There are things like workflows that agents are going to be doing that we don’t have necessarily jobs right now for, but there’s a lot of talk about just that, but there’s a huge amount of value that’s completely untapped because quite frankly, we can’t even fathom it to hire the people to analyze and then again analyzing every customer conversation to create something like maybe specific promotions or something that or deeper insights or analyze your business about having recommendations back to executives about how you might be able to have changes that are literally the AI is recommending for you to then research and then hit click on and deploy back in a flywheel. Things like this are going to get unlocked as you see continuous inference price drop and intelligence get effectively more abundant. And then all the systems to do this as more regulations come out, by the way, you have more agents talking to each other across boundaries with interop and all this where we’re going to get into. These are the reasons why this is part of the value add of Salesforce back to that DIY type thing.

So inference cost is important use cases and we’re going to have a healthy margin with that, but also we’re putting so much value being able to take this technology and actually deploy it to useful things for our business and measure it. That is a

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: lot of value right there. Got it. So it’s kind of almost a derivation of the Jevons paradox. You’re going to bring the cost down. It’s going to expand up the use cases of what you’re going to be able to do with this.

100%. I think we’re on number four. Number four, big question that I get. There’s a netting equation that comes from this. Service cloud today is sold on a seat basis.

You’re looking to digitize labor, which is going to mean extensively the savings is going to come from, you’re not going to need as many call center reps to kind of push this out. Does it net positive for sales force? Are you going to be able to make up on the consumptive side of the equation what you potentially lose on the seat side of the equation?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes, absolutely. We’re seeing it. We haven’t put any numbers about this. We’re seeing it today. It’s also early moments.

One of the things we’re also doing is having, we call flex agreement. So you can kind of move between perhaps like unused seats or seats that you’re unsure of what you’re going to next year with. You can start moving that into this universal credit and start understanding this kind of dynamic at a customer basis. But look, what we see is it’s not it’s just because you’re saying, here’s what we do today, can I the most like low hanging fruit, the Einstein GPG moment of the most simple way to bring this into your company is here’s what I’m doing today, can I do it with AI and automate and say, like that’s very clear math? And does it work and these things?

As soon as people do this, they go, well, what else can we do? And there’s more and there’s more and there’s more. And so this is what we see almost like universally. And also so there’s a lot more use cases that arise from it just from necessarily doing that. I’ll give you an example.

Customer service. If I call in or email in and I’m talking about, let’s say, a product that I need that didn’t show up at my door. This is a classic thing is where is my order or Wizzmo in retail. And they say, hey, look, it’s been two days and it might be missing, your neighbor might have gotten it, you should wait two days before we can file a case or do a refund or something to that effect. The idea of from a contact center perspective, the cost center mentality is that you want to close that ticket or that case that you’re measuring on with this little average handling time as possible and then to say, the call is going to be there.

But the customer experience would be better if two days from then, there’s like a proactive notification and saying, Hey, Keith, just wanted to check out if that package actually arrives. Just want to make sure that you got our new shoes. And actually, do you mind letting me know how you like them? And would you mind go ahead and putting on social media, if so, about how great this experience was? That entire concept, but I think any consumer would say, that’s a better experience.

The current mentality with labor and these costs, the cost and mentality is that’s going to throw our KPIs off, right? That’s not what we want. But as soon as you start realizing that you can put agents into all these additional workflows, you start rethinking your business like a lot I mean, this is what we see. So this is an early moment. The very obvious thing is A to B, like one to one like, oh, I can do this and automate it.

But then the next thing is, is wait a second, I have to comply this to doing things that were never possible before.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Right. Got it. Right. So this last one is where I sound like a jerk. But remember, I’m just the messenger here.

These are just glorified chatbots, right? Voice capabilities is relatively limited today. The functionality doesn’t go well beyond what you could do with the chatbot. Can you talk to us about kind of where we are with voice capabilities? But more broadly, maybe some examples of where this goes significantly beyond what you would get from a chatbot a year ago, three years ago?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: So let’s talk about multimodality. We like voice in particular. One, we’re adding in like image type stuff as well for multimodality understanding, but voice is something that we’re very, very interested in doing. We kind of give some sneak previews of this, but you can imagine that there’s some announcements coming out about that. So you can talk to these agents.

It’s great. They can email, they can chat, they can talk. You build them launch a test and testing center, you launch them. They can do all the things. But let me give you a different example about something that I’ve seen with reasoning that it’s kind of like kind of it was a wake up moment for me, a little shocking, which was it happens to be a service example.

But we saw a phone call come in, it’s a retail situation, a phone call come in from it was like a I don’t remember if it was UPS or it actually doesn’t matter FedEx, UPS, where a delivery person was basically calling the company because it’s on the box and saying, I can’t deliver a package to this address because the address doesn’t exist. And there’s a voicemail, okay. Coming in into the contact center, you see the call, the phone number it’s calling from, voicemail transcription and basically said, here’s the document number on the box and blah, blah, blah. And the document ID on the box, the reference ID or whatever it was, these aren’t terms that the business uses for a track an order ID or any chart like internal system. This was a call from a non customer trying to deliver a package, reading off things that are printed on the box with no clue what to do.

And the agent then listened to the call, understood what was going on, looked up the tried the document ID and the numbers across a couple of permutations. It tried, is this an order ID? Is this the thing? Is this an internal ID? What is this thing?

Because there was no instructions about it. Found a match that it was, pulled the order up, confirmed that the address that they had said in their voicemail was the order and that it wasn’t and then proposed a plan to communicate out to that customer, letting them know that they needed to call the number that was left on the voicemail for I think it was UPS to basically keep the package moving on time and this all happened in under sixty seconds. And seeing that kind of a navigation of reasoning and even though there was a conversation over voice, in this case, voicemail is coming inbound and an outbound kind of email draft for a plan, I was just like this is not chatbot. As you think about so that’s reasoning and like crazy capabilities, also again multimodality and more. But this is yes, it’s much bigger than that.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Got it. That’s a great example. I want to talk a little bit about data cloud. That was your hard question,

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: by the way. That was not hard. Okay.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: I didn’t say it was hard. I was just saying I was being a jerk. The why is data cloud so important to sort of this overall initiative? Why is this such a critical foundation for what you guys want to do in Agent Force?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes. So data and AI go hand in hand. I mean, AI can reason, but reason over what, right? So you need to kind of connect in data. I think that’s a story we all understand.

But, Keisha, earlier, you’re talking about the DIY thing and you mentioned Databricks, Snowflake, these things are like, why I’m investing here or how about there? So the zero copy alliance that we have with data cloud, what makes data cloud pretty unique is that our like our enterprise customers can come in and say, we’ve been doing all these strategies or we’ve acquired companies that have different data lakes. And we want to build agents and do great stuff to modernize our businesses. Do we need to put all that stuff and rebuild it in these huge multimillion dollar initiatives and over years of work. And the answer is, is actually can bring a lot of that data and data cloud really quickly from these disparate places, like break the silos down or whatever you want to call it.

So that’s really important strategically because that allows us to deploy to bring data together faster for our customers without having to have to do these massive investments from an IT perspective. And then that data is connected very deeply to Agent Force. So that as it queries through all the unstructured data, we’ve got vector database and RAG techniques. This is what kind of people call it. The ability for the AI to find and understand and structure information, that’s what that really means.

We have techniques that show basically a 50% lift in precision and recall on this stuff that we do. This is like what we call Atlas reasoning engine as part of that IP. So as soon as that data can get from everywhere into data cloud, we’ve got this great tech and this really nice coupling with agents to be able to do that. And when it accesses this information, you’re going to have a lineage of exactly what data that agent touched for that customer for all of the things that you’re going to need to understand in the future, not only to tune it, but also to be able to say what happened when you need to have a report on some of these things. And so it’s a very, very connected, both from a product perspective, from a strategy, for a speed and productivity perspective about deploying solutions.

It’s, yes, I don’t know, like peanut butter jelly, whatever you want

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: to say, it’s really close. Got it. So Service Cloud is one of the core starting points, but the portfolio is much broader than that. And maybe you could walk us through kind of some of the early customer journeys you’ve seen. How is Agent Force going to kind of pervade across an enterprise?

What pulls it across? And who is doing it? Is it Salesforce helping to pull that across? Are you bringing in systems integrators? Are the customers able to do this themselves?

Is it intuitive enough that they’re kind of building out these new capabilities?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes. So it’s a mix across segments and industries and a little bit of the techniques, but it’s kind of like a little bit all above. Let me touch on that. So we have 5,000 Agent Force deals in Q4. About 3,000 of those were paid.

I think that’s what was publicly announced. And we also have self-service in there too. The reason I pull that out is like who’s doing the work? And we’ve got this like kind of ability for people that really understand what they’re doing. It’s not that hard, but they’ve got the right team to come in and just solve the problem.

We have large companies that have a lot of kind of stakeholders, a lot of meetings, things like that, where there’s a lot of decisions about how to apply this technology. They need advisors. That is where this system integrator and partnerships come in very well. And there’s a lot of people have a lot of questions. A lot of things are happening right now at tech.

How do we think about this? How should we apply? They need advisors. And then we also have our product lens to that, where we’re having AI literally help you set up your AI. So as it’s ingesting data, understanding your workflow, your objective, self configuring what we call our topics and actions, this is like saying, here is a job that an agent should do and here’s how it should do it.

And then once you describe those jobs, the AI literally helps you write those jobs out. And then after you’ve done that, it can write its own tests. So it says, oh, well, here’s 100 different examples of what customers could say and how I would answer them. And here’s what I think the answer should be. And then it gives you a spreadsheet of it back and it says pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, fail.

And you can read it and you go, wait a second, like this is giving you the confidence. So there’s an acceleration across all of these things, whether it’s partners, whether it’s just the product itself, it’s self serve, tends to skew a little bit lower segmentation wise. And in enterprise, a lot of our customers need those SIs to kind of

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: help out. Got So maybe just to wrap up, 5,000 transactions in Q4, ’3 thousand paid transactions, but a lot of those are still kind of proof of concepts. Help us kind of set our expectations in terms of given typical enterprise sort of adoption cycles, what are we likely to see through calendar year ’twenty five? And then how does this expand further as we go into calendar year ’twenty six and calendar ’twenty seven? Like how should we think about the roadmap for Agent Force?

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Yes. So lots in there. I’m not going to give you any specific ex quantitative expectations. Like that? Okay.

Well then, no, what I’d say is, look, the deals are great. I love staying that high level number. But just so you understand, I wake up every day and I look at the funnel of implementation, all right? I see that that’s the most important, how fast can we get these customers live to solve their problems, drive consumption, that’s what we’re doing. The roadmap is all about that.

I mentioned the agent development life cycle. This is also code for top of funnel, bottom of funnel and then understand what it can do, what it’s doing, how to improve it, actually go back for improvements and get those implemented and keep going, more use cases, etcetera, right? We’re building product along that whole way. I’ve touched on some of those things a minute ago about testing, automation, reporting, analysis, that stuff in the product side of the house. But this is where we’re going.

And to give you a sense of what’s possible, I mean, we’ve seen large companies, it’s not like a one size fits all. We’ve seen large companies like Saks Fifth Avenue actually stands out. They went live with an agent and it was under ten days. It’s on their website doing like return orders. And I thought to myself, there’s no way a big company like that can even they’re going to have like even have a meeting or two in ten days, right?

And they went live in ten days. So can the technology do it? Absolutely. What we’re really talking about is, do you have a strong CEO or top down director to do it? That kind of what made that happen, it’s facts.

But also, kind of do you have good data? Are you kind of set up? If you’re already a Salesforce customer, you’ve got all that stuff connected right there, so much easier for you to turn the switch. But even if you’ve got your data in all these other places, as we mentioned, you can pull it in as well pretty quickly. So it’s what’s technically possible is you can go really fast, but it’s really going to be a little bit of a case by case and what the use cases are.

But every single one of the customers of these like 5,000 deals and growing, we want them live. And it’s not just for our benefits, for their benefit, they want them live and we’re working to do this through all of those mechanisms we talked, SIs, products, self-service, opening it up to just be easier for developers, all kinds of things to just keep the acceleration on.

Keith, Interviewer, TMT: Got it. Fascinating times in Salesforce right now. Thank you so much for coming and talking to us about Agent Force and the opportunity ahead. Thank you, Steve.

Steve, Salesforce Employee, Salesforce: Thanks, Steve. Thank you, everybody.

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