Marc Benioff backed startup thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem
Tools that let AI fix its own deployment problems could cut big companies' reliance on armies of consultants.
Key takeaways
- June, a new company founded by four former Salesforce staff, has emerged from stealth to help businesses deploy AI.
- It raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, with backing from Michael Dell and others.
- June's platform scans a company's systems, finds bottlenecks and builds agent-powered processes, with a step by step roadmap.
- Mortgage lender CMG says June gave its team a clear view of where to deploy agents after weeks of no progress.
Cite or link to this article
Griffin, M. (2026) 'Marc Benioff backed startup thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem', 311 Institute, 3 August. Available at: https://www.311institute.com/june-ai-deployment-startup-benioff-agents/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
It’s so hard for big businesses to get Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools working reliably that whole new organisations of forward-deployed engineers or FDEs - specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running - are springing up to help them.
“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning.
“The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people’.”
Rapoport and her three co-founders - Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat - have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.
The four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years on the tech giant’s AI initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms.
The Future of AI, Software, Work, and Leadership, a keynote by futurist Matthew Griffin
Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.”
While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms.
“Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport says. “You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.”
Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?”
June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimised, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s comms channels.
“We give you the full roadmap automatically of what needs to happen step by step for you to actually implement this agent successfully in an enterprise environment, which is often very complex,” Rapoport said. “We give you a step by step guide. ‘Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.’ And then you click on ‘build’ on each task, and June starts building it for you in the organisation.”
Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major US mortgage lender, moved his company’s software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem because he’d promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the year before that he’d return with 100 agents running, and it wasn’t looking like he’d hit that target.
Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall - meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could - without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies.
Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants, but her customers may be drawn to it for the opposite reason: it lets them avoid FDEs altogether.
When Akinmade was first considering piloting the tool at CMG, he says he told her: “If your product requires FDEs, I don’t want your product. I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.”
Evidently, June cleared the bar.
First published on Fanatical Futurist on 3 August 2026.
311 Intelligence
What this means
Analysis by the 311 Strategic Intelligence Unit
The big shift is from hiring people to deploy AI to using AI to deploy AI. June's founders say AI has paradoxically increased demand for professional services, because agents struggle with fragmented data, complex workflows and years of technical debt. June's answer is software that maps those systems and builds the agents step by step. We track AI Agent Process Redesign, processes rebuilt around AI agents, as a Prepare trend, and we rate Agentic Artificial Intelligence a Prepare technology.
What it means by sector.
- Enterprise software: agents still have to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks and Workday. The article argues no one is vibe coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company yet, so these platforms remain the ground agents must stand on.
- Consulting and professional services: customers like CMG may use tools like June to avoid forward-deployed engineers altogether. We track AI Labs Entering Consulting as a Prepare trend.
- Financial services: CMG, a major US mortgage lender, says June showed where to deploy agents safely after weeks of no progress.
What to do now.
- Map your data and workflows before you build agents: duplicate fields and fragmented data are what break them.
- Fix the basics first, such as removing duplicates and connecting data sources, then deploy agents task by task.
- Ask any AI partner whether its approach needs a permanent team of engineers or leaves you with a tool your own staff can use.
The Starburst technologies behind this story
From the 311 Technology Starburst (first product, expected wide use and readiness):
| Technology | Category | First product | Wide use | Action | TRL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agentic Artificial Intelligence | Intelligence | 2024 | 2028 | Prepare | 8 |
| AI Agent Communication Protocols | Intelligence | 2024 | 2027 | Act now | 8 |
| Generative Artificial Intelligence | Intelligence | 2021 | 2025 | Act now | 9 |
And the trends they feed, from the 311 Trends Starburst:
| Trend | Wide use | Action |
|---|---|---|
| AI Agent Process Redesign | 2030 | Prepare |
| AI Agents Replacing Seats | 2029 | Prepare |
| IT Teams Overseeing AI | 2029 | Prepare |
| AI Labs Entering Consulting | 2029 | Prepare |
How this moves the trend
The big platforms have been racing to host agents for some time. Salesforce launched an AgentForce sandbox to test AI agents in December 2024, and weeks later Microsoft's CEO weighed in on AI Agents ending SaaS. In 2025 Workday launched a platform to manage AI Agents and ServiceNow followed with an AI Agent control tower. June tackles the step those launches left open: getting agents to work with the messy data underneath.
Go deeper with 311
- The 311 Starburst Centre: every technology and trend above, with timelines and readiness.
- 311 Vantage: ask what deploying AI agents means for your organisation and get a plain English executive brief.
- The Exponential Technology Codex and the Annual Trends Codex: the technologies and trends reshaping every industry.
- Book a briefing or keynote on the future of AI and work for your board or leadership team.
FAQ
What does the startup June do?
June's platform scans a company's existing systems to understand its business processes and find bottlenecks. It then builds more optimised, agent-powered processes to replace them, gives teams a step by step roadmap such as removing duplicate data fields, and builds each task when users click build.
Why is deploying AI so hard for big businesses?
Any AI model brought into a company still has to work with platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks and Workday. Founder Efrat Rapoport says firms face fragmented data, complex workflows and years of technical debt, so agents struggle with the mess underneath.
What are forward-deployed engineers?
Forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs, are specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running. Rapoport says AI paradoxically increases demand for professional services, with the industry's answer being to hire more and more people.
Who backs June?
June raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, with additional backing from Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.
Does June replace forward-deployed engineers?
Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants. But customers like CMG's Paul Akinmade may be drawn to it because it lets them avoid FDEs altogether, giving them an easy-to-use tool instead of a black box.
About the author
Matthew Griffin Founder, 311 Institute
Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath."
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Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath." 15-time best selling author of the "Codex of the Future" series, Matthew is the Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm working with royal households, world leaders, G7, G20, and G77 governments, NGOs, and multi-national mid and mega cap firms to help them explore, shape, and lead the next 50 years of business and society.
An award-winning YouTube creator with over a million followers, with an unrivalled global reach and impact, Matthew is a highly sought-after international keynote speaker, lecturer, and mentor who collaborates with global leaders through the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to shape pivotal initiatives such as the UN’s AI for Humanity program, the United Nations Conference of the Parties (UN COP), and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As the former Global Head of Cloud, National Security, and Enterprise Sales for companies including Atos, Dell-EMC, and IBM, Matthew has a proven track record of building multi-billion dollar business units and turning failing divisions into market leaders. His ability to identify, analyse, and communicate the implications of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends is unparalleled, and his insights are trusted by many of the world’s most respected organisations, including ABB, Accenture, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi, Coca-Cola, Dentons, Deloitte, Dow Jones, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, Siemens AG and Siemens Energy, T-Mobile, UBS, VISA, Walmart, Workday, Worldpay and many others.
Regularly featured in the global media including the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Discovery, Forbes, Khaleej Times, Telegraph, TIME, ViacomCBS, WIRED, and the WSJ, Matthews mission is to help organisations create a fair and sustainable future whose benefits are shared by everyone irrespective of their ability, background, or circumstances.
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