AI’s killer app could be the limitless digital workforce

If Don Draper from “Mad Men” was quintessentially, at his deepest self, an ad man, then Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is likewise a sales guy. Lately he’s been selling, or more like singing the gospel, about Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, their role in helping companies create “limitless workforces,” and Salesforce’s recently released agent-maker platform Agentforce.

It’s true that Benioff famously gets hyped about all of Salesforce’s latest offerings, but on Tuesday, as part of the company’s latest quarterly results, he also released numbers to back up why he’s so excited. Benioff said that Salesforce closed 200 deals for Agentforce in just one quarter and that it plans to hire 1,400 salespeople to help it close the many more deals it is working on.

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Agentforce “firstbecame available on October 24th, and we’re already seeing this incredible velocity, more than 200 Agentforce deals just in Q3,” Benioff told analysts on the quarterly conference call. “The pipeline is in the thousands for potential transactions that are coming up in future quarters.” He named FedEx, Adecco, Accenture, ACE Hardware, IBM, and RBC Wealth Management as Agentforce customers.

The company said it now expects to bring in more revenue for its fiscal year than it previously projected, too, $37.8 to $38 billion, which will be up 8% to 9% over its previous year, largely on the strength of its AI products.

Benioff recently told reporters that he expects Salesforce customers to deploy over a billion AI agents within the next year and that AI agents will allow companies to have an unlimited workforce, which is something I’ve been talking about for over a decade.

“These agents are not tools. They are becoming collaborators. They’re working 24/7 to analyze data, make decisions, take action,” he said on the conference call. “Salesforce has become, right out of the gate here, the largest supplier of digital labor, and this is just the beginning.”

How much of this vision turns into reality we’ll have to wait and see. LLM-based tech is still working to solve its hallucination problem, an issue baked into a technology that is quintessentially at its core about imitating creativity. Benioff said on the call that because Agentforce can train on the up to 300 petabytes of actual company data Salesforce manages, “you’re going to see remarkably low hallucinogenic performance.”

Other startups are working on other LLM issues necessary to turn AI agents into actual digital collaborators, like memory and state.

But as 2025 also becomes the year of AI, it’s becoming clear that enterprises have found a direction for their AI investments. After spending much of 2024 throwing around experimental budgets to answer the board-level question “what are we doing with AI?” the answer is apparently: AI agents for sales and customer service.

It is interesting, and not without irony, that Salesforce will be hiring humans to help them sell this tech. Maybe that means that AI will create jobs, not just replace them. Maybe it means that even a company touting the rise of the digital workforce isn’t ready to turn over the reins entirely to software just yet. But it will also be equipping its sales humans with AI sales development representatives.

As Salesforce COO Brian Millham explained on the call, “To capture this increased demand for Agentforce, we’re hiring 1,400 AEs globally in our fourth quarter and we’re also using new sales SDR agent and sales coaching agent to augment every seller.”

Salesforce isn’t alone in chasing this killer enterprise AI app. Startups offering SDR technology have boomed in 2024, attracting lots of VC investment and a lot of initial revenue, the object of many an exploratory enterprise AI budget. But it’s an area where the incumbents that hold the customer data to train the bots have the advantage like Salesforce, HubSpot, and ZoomInfo. Ditto for customer service bots.