Clara Shih stepped onto the stage in a room with tens of thousands of people and many more online watching. Introduced by Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff, Shih would showcase the company’s most significant product releases in years. As the head of Salesforce AI, she made the case for why organizations want to use the Agentforce platform.
Weeks later, Shih would be gone, having departed for Meta, where she’s leading its Business AI group. It’s a new department, she explains, that will make “cutting-edge AI accessible to every business…”
Despite her exit, Salesforce remains steadfast in its AI agentic future. “She was a great person. I’ve worked with her very closely,” Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Salesforce’s President and Chief Technology Officer for Agents, AI, Mulesoft, and Tableau, tells me. We spoke on the sidelines of the company’s Agentforce World Tour in Seattle, Washington, and it’s one of the first public comments made since Shih’s exit.
“As with any big company, people move. But, in the businesses we have created, I think the key thing I always look at is, have you left something behind better than when you found it? I could say the same about [Shih]. Her impact has been great, but we have a very strong business.”
He mentions that the company has a deep bench of people stepping up to “continue the mantle,” referencing Salesforce Platform President Stephen Fisher and Executive Vice President and Salesforce AI General Manager Adam Evans.
Bullish About the Agentforce Future
Although Salesforce has held roadshows in the past, this one is more significant because it represents a big bet by the company on how artificial intelligence will shape the customer experience space. It must also capture as much attention as possible amid an increasingly crowded marketplace. For example, Microsoft, Salesforce’s main competitor, has over 100,000 companies creating agents on its platform. It unveiled a raft of AI updates at its Ignite conference last week.
Microsoft is not the only one making agent moves. Google Cloud launched an AI agent ecosystem program, Amazon Web Services could soon join the fray, and Oracle has released enterprise-level agents. These are only a fraction of what’s happening in the space.
“Companies have started to adopt every single thing we’ve been saying the last six months,” Krishnaprasad says. He points out how “agents” have replaced “copilots” in everyday conversation. In addition, “Data Cloud” is now everywhere, with ServiceNow and Microsoft discussing it. However, Krishnaprasad claims the biggest difference between Salesforce’s approach and everyone else’s is that his company has established trust with its customer base at all levels of customer engagement.
It makes sense for our agents to be there, embedded to make their customer experience better. After all, for the last 25 years, we have been the customer CRM. For us, agent is the next level of engagement. We were the first to go on the web. We were the first to create a SaaS category, and I’m proud to say we are the first to create the agent category. For us, I think the opportunity is huge because this is not just about another tool.
In reality, Krishnaprasad asserts Salesforce doesn’t fret about its competitors—a statement that seems to run counter to previous comments made by Benioff and Salesforce about Microsoft. Instead, he claims his team focuses on ensuring customers’ success.
“It’s not about competition. It’s about making sure our customers succeed,” Krishnaprasad responds.
Reception of the Salesforce World Tour
Seattle was stop number 17 for Salesforce’s tour, which will conclude before the end of the year. When asked what attendees have learned from this event series, Krishnaprasad shared two things: First, customers who create an agent are surprised by the experience. “People are blown away,” he points out. “Every company bombards saying, ‘we have agents,’ and [customers] actually see that they can create an agent live in a matter of minutes. It has really changed their world perception.” The second realization is that customers better understand the agentic landscape and how different Salesforce is.
The perception of agents varies across regions. Just as businesses in the Asia-Pacific region have embraced conducting transactions on chat apps like WeChat, while their U.S. counterparts have been slower to adopt similar practices, attitudes toward agents also differ globally. When asked how those in APAC view these AI bots, Krishnaprasad highlights that customers there “are willing to kind of go on the edge a lot more.” He elaborates further that although people continue to be scared of AI due to its hallucinations, they’re willing to use it due to the high human turnover in their business. Not only that, but companies accept agents since they automate many things, enable firms to move quickly, and are easy to deploy.
“The risk appetite is definitely a lot higher to be able to go right out, see what happens, learn from it, and iterate fast,” Krishnaprasad states.
So, what will prove to him that the tour was a success? One metric Salesforce is tracking is the number of people who flow through the hands-on lab to create agents. Immediately after the keynote, I noticed a lengthy queue form as attendees eagerly awaited their turn to build their bot. Another thing Krishnaprasad is paying attention to, though not something quantifiable, is customers subscribing to Salesforce’s way of thinking about agents.
As Salesforce starts to wrap up its Agentforce World Tour, the company’s vision for AI-driven customer experiences seems to be resonating. Even with the departure of a key AI figure, with a deep bench of talent and a strong legacy of innovation, Salesforce is betting on its ability to compete and define the agentic future—one bot, one customer, and one engagement at a time.
Featured Image: Muralidhar Krishnaprasad (MK), Salesforce's President and CTO for Agents, AI, Data, Mulesoft and Tableau, speaks onstage at the company's Agentforce World Tour stop in Seattle, Washington on November 21, 2024. Photo credit: Ken Yeung
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