AI is sweeping across industries, revolutionizing work models and giving rise to startups... Embracing AI is Salesforce's survival strategy in the era of AI.

Recently, the American Cloud Computing Software giant Salesforce has shown unprecedented importance on AI agents. From Agentforce 1.0 to 2.0, in just three months, Salesforce has achieved rapid iteration and significant upgrades in the AI field.

Since the launch of the AI agent product Agentforce in September, Salesforce CEO Benioff has issued a 'death command', requiring the sales team to include the software in every Trade. The company also plans to hire 2,000 people to sell its AI Software.

According to Information's report on Thursday, while reviewing products with Salesforce executives, Benioff emphasized:

This is the most important thing for the entire company: everything must prioritize agents. We want to become a company that is completely agent-first. Every Trade we make or every product we create should be agent-first.

The ultimate goal Benioff plans to achieve is for AI agents to replace Salesforce Software, such as its sales and customer service software, and its business model of charging clients subscription fees per employee.

The urgency to go all in on AI agents stems from the threat AI poses to Salesforce's traditional Business model. For Salesforce, it's either embrace AI or face 'extinction'.

The rise of startups poses a threat.

In fact, as early as 2016, Salesforce joined the wave of AI development by launching the Einstein product, integrating AI into its sales software.

Despite having a first-mover advantage, Salesforce has not maintained its lead, and its AI products have fallen behind some newer startups. Salesforce cannot perform as many operations as the new products—especially in the customer service field.

This has led to customer churn for Salesforce, as the mattress manufacturer Casper purchased AI agent software from Sierra, a startup founded by Salesforce's former co-CEO Bret Taylor, despite Salesforce's efforts to dissuade customers, Casper made this decision.

According to insiders, Casper's executives were initially hesitant to use Sierra's platform and chose to limit it to customer support only. However, Sierra's AI agent delivered impressive results for Casper, leading the company to begin trying to use it for sales.

Zeya Yang, a partner at the VC firm IVP that invests in enterprise software companies, stated:

Startups like Attio and Day.ai are challenging Salesforce by building customer relationship management software that uses AI to gather information not included by Salesforce.

Even Salesforce's collaboration with OpenAI has not brought them any advantages.

At the beginning of 2023, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Salesforce announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate the AI company's technology with Einstein. However, this partnership did not protect Salesforce from the threats posed by AI companies, as some firms have started testing OpenAI's and other companies' LLMs to see if they can replace Salesforce Software.

All in AI Agency.

Recently, Salesforce has begun to fully focus on AI.

In September, Salesforce released a new AI agent, Agentforce (a software tool that can automate business tasks). In December, Agentforce 2.0 introduced several groundbreaking features, with its core enhancement being an improved reasoning engine.

From Agentforce 1.0 to 2.0, in just three months, Salesforce has demonstrated rapid iteration and significant upgrades in the AI field. The new version has enhanced reasoning capabilities, which enable it to provide more detailed answers to investment or recruitment questions.

In terms of product sales, Benioff stated in a recent interview:

Less than two months after Salesforce started selling the product, more than half of the 15,000 sales team members have at least one Agentforce Trade in progress.

Benioff mentioned in last month's Earnings Reports conference call that since beginning to sell Agentforce at the end of October, Salesforce has closed approximately 200 Trades to date and is negotiating thousands of Trades, although these Transactions have not yet had a significant impact on its revenue.

Salesforce's AI Director Adam Evans even compared AI Agents to new apps to highlight their importance:

AI Agents are "fundamental supporting technologies of the robotic era," and in the future will permeate various Industries. In the Medical field, AI Agents can serve as instant care assistants; in retail, they can become personal shopping advisors; in finance, they can act as on-demand consultants to provide Personal Services to clients.

"A switch is needed"

Looking ahead, achieving the ultimate goal may be more complicated in reality.

An individual with business dealings with Salesforce stated that for any new Business software product, customers typically need 12 to 18 months from trial to running in critical business systems.

Cost is another issue; to use Agentforce, Salesforce recommends customers rent Data Cloud, a service that stores the files used by Agentforce in the decision-making process. The pricing of Data Cloud is based on the amount of data stored by the customer, and even for smaller companies, the annual fee easily exceeds $0.1 million.

Salesforce charges $2 per conversation for the Agentforce customer service version, which is much higher than similar products from customer service competitors Zendesk and Intercom.