The future of AI will be driven by agents capable of delivering a personalized, customizable experience like never before, Salesforce CEO said.
“This is the third wave of AI agents,” Marc Benioff said in his keynote address at the company's Dreamforce 2024 event in San Francisco, championing its new Agentforce platform as the next big leap for the technology.
“This is what AI was intended to be,” he said.
Third wave of AI
This year’s Dreamforce keynote focused heavily on AI, with Agentforce taking center stage during the event.
Announced just days before the event, Agentforce is designed to improve productivity and efficiency in sales, marketing, commerce and customer service.
Benioff was keen to emphasize that this was a new era for AI, one that eliminates “DIY AI” and doesn’t require customers to do the heavy lifting when it comes to implementing AI.
“Agentforce has to be the biggest advancement we've ever had in technology, and I think it's the biggest advancement I've seen in a long time in artificial intelligence,” Benioff said.
“I don't think you can do it yourself – what you need is a single, professionally managed, secure, reliable and available platform. You want to be able to deploy this Agentforce functionality across all of these people who are so important to your business.”
Agentforce bots will be able to perform tasks independently, reducing the need for human supervision and improving overall business outcomes.
“We’re all going to be using agents, but we’re doing it all within our Salesforce platform,” Benioff said. “Salesforce is the core strategy platform and it now has the best artificial intelligence in the world,” he added, declaring this year’s event “the most important Dreamforce ever.”
“We have the data and the metadata and the workflow and the business process and the security model and the sharing model, and all these things that we love and have used and been deeply committed to for 25 years; it turns out that those things make AI more accurate.”
“It's not just about what's possible, it's about what you're going to make possible,” Benioff told the thousands of Dreamforce attendees.
“Our goal is simple: for you to empower your employees, create better experiences and deliver better business outcomes for your companies.”
