Pulse News

**Why AI Isn’t Giving Salesforce a Boost**

By Kevin McLaughlin

Mar 13, 2025, 9:31am PDT

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last month declared 2025 as the “absolute year of Agentforce," a product the software company launched last fall to help customers automate customer service and other business functions.

"We've never seen products grow at these levels, especially Agentforce," he said, citing customers such as gym owner Equinox and reservation site OpenTable.

**The Takeaway**

- Salesforce said its big new AI product won't boost sales growth this year

- Salesforce executives privately discussed adjusting Agentforce prices to spur demand

- The company is using aggressive sales tactics to convince some customers to use it

A few minutes later, Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver gave a more sober view: Weaver said that she expects "modest" sales of Agentforce over the next year and that the company's overall sales would rise 7% to 8%, its slowest ever growth rate.

Agentforce seems to be a tough sell. Salesforce is pitching the artificial intelligence product as "digital labor" that can essentially replace humans for tasks such as developing sales leads and creating marketing campaigns. But many customers aren't ready to commit to using the software, a Salesforce sales manager said.

Some early Agentforce customers, like staffing agency Adecco, have touted the software's ability to automate certain customer support responses and sort through millions of résumés so it can refer job candidates to recruiters.

Others say they have received incorrect answers—AI hallucinations—while testing how the software handles customer service inquiries, according to a person who does business with Salesforce. Some customers aren't in a good position to use Agentforce because they need to connect the product to databases stored outside Salesforce to work properly.

Salesforce said last month that it had closed 5,000 Agentforce deals since it began selling the software in late October, and that more than 3,000 of those customers were paying for it. That could include customers who pay for a bundle of Salesforce services, including Agentforce, whether they use it or not, said Adam Mansfield, a practice leader at UpperEdge, which helps customers negotiate deals with Salesforce and other software providers. The other 2,000 or so customers are testing the technology without paying for it, a spokesperson said.

Salesforce's travails are a bellwether for how generative AI is affecting the software sector. Salesforce has an opportunity to infuse its core products with AI to strengthen its hold over millions of customers, but its earlier AI-powered features, which helped salespeople identify which prospective customers were most likely to make purchases, haven't stopped the deceleration of its sales growth.

**Downright Pricey**

In mid-2023, after ChatGPT sparked a boom in conversational AI, Salesforce announced AI Cloud, a bundle of software that enabled customers to automatically generate emails, marketing materials, and customer support messages, pricing it at $360,000 per year per customer, plus additional fees based on how much customers used applications in the bundle. The OpenAI-powered software, part of which didn't become available until the second quarter of 2024, didn't seem to take off with customers. (Salesforce spokespeople didn't respond to questions about whether the company still offers the bundle.)

Agentforce, which is also partly powered by OpenAI, is more ambitious than those earlier features. It aims to take actions on customers' behalf and essentially replace human staff for certain types of roles in human resources, marketing, IT support, and financial analysis.

But the early version is still unproven, and it can be downright pricey. Some Salesforce customers privately say they are concerned about the cost associated with Agentforce, as Salesforce recommends they purchase a cloud database product called Data Cloud to best utilize it. Without Data Cloud, customers have to develop customized code to connect their data with Agentforce, which can be expensive and time-consuming.

Salesforce also charges $2 for every customer service conversation its AI handles, while rivals like Intercom charge half as much. As the cost of running AI continues to fall across the industry, that could pressure Salesforce to drop prices for Agentforce.

**Making Concessions**

Behind the scenes, Salesforce executives recently discussed adjusting Agentforce prices to make the product more appealing, said a person who recently spoke to them. Customer service questions that require simple responses may soon cost less than $2, the executives said, while more complex ones could cost more.

In another move to spur Agentforce usage and address cost concerns, Salesforce is discussing letting customers transfer unused software licenses for its other products to Agentforce, said the person who spoke to the executives. (A spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the discussions.)

It's nothing new for Benioff to be steering Salesforce and its 75,000 employees to embrace an emerging technology, just as he did previously with cloud software as well as business collaboration (by buying Slack in 2020). Yet current and former Salesforce employees say there is a heightened urgency about the current campaign around Agentforce that they haven't previously seen at the 26-year-old firm.

Salesforce's own salespeople have been using aggressive tactics to convince customers to sign up for Agentforce or include it in a bundle of other services, even if they have no immediate plan to use it, according to executives at a Salesforce customer, a firm that resells Salesforce products, and Mansfield from UpperEdge.

Mansfield said Salesforce representatives have raised the prospect of "meaningful" price increases for other Salesforce products—unless customers agree to use Agentforce. Salesforce managers have also indicated to customers that they can avoid fees for using more storage or software licenses than they signed up for if they purchase Agentforce, he added.

Most of Mansfield's clients still have reservations about Agentforce, including its high price, relative to competitors, he said. Salesforce has been offering to include Agentforce as part of a bundle of software products that customers were already buying. The bundling makes it hard to determine how much additional spending Agentforce is driving.

"There's no telling whether they're ever going to actually use it," Mansfield said. "But technically, now they're an Agentforce customer."

**Downplaying Threats**

Salesforce needs to get traction with AI agents. Sales growth in its two main businesses, customer management and customer service applications, has slowed significantly over the past two years due to constrained corporate technology budgets and staff layoffs by many of its customers. It also faces increasing competition from young software startups, such as Sierra, Decagon, and Distyl AI, and longtime rivals like HubSpot that try to undercut it on price.

In a meeting earlier this week with firms that resell Salesforce products, Salesforce executives downplayed the competitive threat from such AI agent startups, saying they don't have the access to data or the breadth of products it has, according to a person who attended.

Another longtime rival, Microsoft, shows how Salesforce isn't alone in struggling to perfect new AI products. Some customers of Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint said they were disappointed by the performance and cost of paid AI features that aim to automate things like writing or creating slideshows and spreadsheets.

At the same time, generative AI models developed by OpenAI and other firms potentially enable companies to develop their own versions of traditional Salesforce apps at a fraction of the cost. That's prompted questions about how much value Salesforce apps provide to customers beyond serving as a critical database for customer information.

Salesforce's sagging growth has weighed on the stock. Its shares are down 10% over the past 12 months, lagging far behind those of most software rivals, including SAP, ServiceNow, IBM, and Oracle. Those rivals have either quickly incorporated AI features into their products and charged more for them, or found other ways to boost revenue, such as helping customers develop their own AI products or renting out cloud servers to customers developing AI.

Benioff also hasn't been able to turn to his traditional playbook of acquiring companies to fuel growth. That's down to a tussle he had with activist investors two years ago, which ended after Benioff pledged to improve the company's profitability and disband its acquisitions committee—implying that he would cool his jets on making deals.

**Agent Mission**

Still, Benioff has a long track record of navigating Salesforce successfully through economic downturns and other business challenges. With Agentforce, he has embarked on what appears to be a multiyear effort to redefine his company's mission and make money from agents that automate menial or repetitive white-collar work.

Benioff is also moving the company away from traditional seat-based software licensing to a model in which customers pay based on the computing resources they consume. That might help Salesforce avoid the negative impact from business and government pullback on IT spending.

Some early adopters of Agentforce say they are seeing benefits from the software or think it will be valuable. Vivint, a longtime Salesforce customer that sells smart home security hardware and software, launched an Agentforce-powered customer service chatbot last October that customers access through Vivint's smartphone application. The chatbot incorporates real-time sensor data from customers' homes to help them get answers to questions about products, among other tasks, said Ryan Gee, senior vice president of engineering. While that might not be the most innovative type of agent, Vivint's customer satisfaction scores have improved since it launched the Agentforce-powered chatbot, Gee said.

Salesforce is offering some customers financial incentives to use Agentforce. Young Drivers of Canada, which operates a network of more than 140 driving schools, agreed to use the product to automate some customer support after Salesforce offered promotions as an incentive, said Andrew Marek, chief growth officer of the driver training organization. Young Drivers plans to launch an Agentforce-powered customer service agent this summer. The move carries risks, as chatbots have a tendency to generate inaccurate responses, but human agents aren't perfectly accurate either, and "you take the risk as a front-runner" in adopting new tech, Marek said.

Jon Victor also contributed to this article. Kevin McLaughlin has been a reporter at The Information since 2016, covering cloud computing, enterprise software, and artificial intelligence. He is based in San Francisco and you can find him on Twitter @KevKubernetes.