Published on: May 9, 2025 / update from: May 9, 2025 - Author: Konrad Wolfenstein
Artificial intelligence: Why Salesforces Agentforce (yet) does not start - independent alternatives are better - Image: Xpert.digital
Salesforce Agentforce: Between vision and reality in the AI age
Autonomous agents in the company: Why Salesforce is fighting
Since the first performance in September 2024, Salesforce Agentforce has been one of the most promising AI platforms to create autonomous agents in the corporate environment. Despite great announcements and ambitious goals of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff-including the vision to activate one billion agents by the end of 2025-reality shows a more differentiated picture. The platform, which goes beyond conventional chatbots and is supposed to control complex business processes independently, fights with adoption hurdles. While Salesforce has some successes, sales forecasts remain behind the expectations, and the wide market penetration is long in coming.
What is Salesforce Agentforce?
Agentforce represents Salesforce's vision of a “third wave of the AI” - according to Predictive AI and Copiloten. It is a platform that enables companies to create and use autonomous AI agents who go beyond the functions of conventional chatbots and assistants. These agents make decisions independently, optimize processes and act independently, without requiring constant human surveillance.
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Core functions and architecture
The Agentforce platform is based on several key components that together form a powerful ecosystem:
- Agent Builder: A low code/no-code tool with which companies can configure their own AI agents by using Salesforce tools such as flows, prompt templates, apex and APIs.
- Atlas Reasoning Engine: acts as a “brain” from Agentforce, where users can define parameters for dialogues in natural language. The engine divides complex tasks into smaller partial steps, evaluates every step and suggests a plan for the further procedure.
- Einstein Trust Layer: Effectively protects data from Salesforce from unauthorized access by third -party providers and thus enables the safe use of different large Language models (LLMS).
- Integration with Salesforce ecosystem: Agentforce is native integrated into the entire Salesforce Customer 360, which means that agents can use the full customer context from CRM applications.
AI agents can be used in various business areas, including customer service, sales, marketing and trade. You can take on tasks such as answering customer inquiries, the qualification of sales leads and the optimization of marketing campaigns.
Challenges and adoption hurdles
Despite the great potential, Agentforce has to deal with several challenges that slow down its adoption. These can be divided into different categories:
Complexity and learning curve
One of the biggest hurdles is the complexity of the platform. Users report that the implementation and control of Agentforce requires a steep learning curve. Even after the provision of correct instructions, expenditure often contains too much unnecessary information. The configuration of an agent is described as time -consuming because too many instructions have to be given.
Performance problems
Users report slow loading times and occasionally non -reacting functions. The user interface is sometimes perceived as overwhelming, with too many functions and tabs, which can affect efficiency.
Limited adaptation options
Advanced adaptation functions are sometimes not supported, which limits the attractiveness of the platform for companies with specific requirements. The agent marketplace is described as “thin” compared to competitors, which means that teams have to create many functions from scratch.
Integration problems
Problems with third-party integrations can lead to data synchronization errors. Documentation is perceived as poor, especially in the case of complex integrations, with developers often dependent on forums to find solutions.
Costs and unpredictable pricing
The total operating costs can be prohibitive for smaller companies. Users report unpredictable bills with increasing use, with the budget being exceeded in a few months, which makes it difficult to plan the quarter.
Governance and compliance
The governance tools are described as only mediocre, especially for companies in regulated industries. Compliance teams often have to create workarounds for functions that should actually be standard.
Market performance and financial effects
The challenges in the adoption of agentforce have direct effects on the financial forecasts of Salesforce:
- In February 2025, Salesforce announced that his sales forecast for the 2026 financial year was $ 40.5 to 40.9 billion under the expectations of the analysts of $ 41.35 billion. This disappointment was mainly attributed to the slower introduction of the Agentforce platform.
- Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of the analysis company Valoir, commented on the situation with the words that after poor experiences with generative AI experiments, companies are not willing to “exhibit blank checks until Salesforce proves that agentforce actually works”. The next one or two quarters will be crucial for Salesforce.
- Parker Snook, Senior Research Analyst at M Science, noticed that the monetization of Agentforce "may have started more slowly than many expected".
Positive developments and success stories
Despite the challenges, there are also positive signals for Agentforce:
Growing customer base
Salesforce has completed 5,000 Agentforce deals by February 2025, including more than 3,000 paid deals with well-known customers such as Singapore Air, Equinox and Jacuzzi.
Successful implementations
Some companies report positive results with agentforce:
- Opentable: Within three weeks after the implementation of Agentforce, the company manages 73% of restaurant web requests, an increase of 50% compared to its previous tool.
- Goodyear: With Agentforce for the field, the tire specialist aims to shorten repair times by providing technicians from vehicle insights and automating scheduling.
- Pfizer: The MedTech company uses Agentforce to improve its customer-oriented processes and support 20,000 employees in sales and commitment.
Internal successes at Salesforce
Salesforce also uses Agentforce internally. Since the start of the platform in October, Agentforce has solved 84% out of 380,000 service inquiries, with only 2% needed human escalation. In addition, the offer cubic cycles were accelerated by over 75%.
Strategies to accelerate adoption
In order to accelerate the adoption of Agentforce, Salesforce has implemented several strategies:
Integration with existing platforms
Salesforce has integrated Agentforce with its existing platforms such as CRM, Slack, Mulesoft and Tableau to reduce the entry hurdle.
Adaptation options and flexibility
The platform offers adaptation options that enable companies to create AI agents for their specific needs.
Usage -based price model
Salesforce has introduced a usage -based price model for agentforce, in which each conversation costs $ 2. This approach is intended to encourage users to interact more often with the platform.
Continuous improvements
In December 2024, Salesforce Agentforce 2.0 announced, which offers essential innovations such as a library with turnkey skills, the integration of AI agents into slack as well as advanced recurrence skills and RAG functions.
Will Agentforce get started?
The future of Agentforce depends on how well Salesforce can master the current challenges. Experts agree that the return of Salesforce to double-digit growth rates depends on the success of the Agentforce platform.
The next one or two quarters will be crucial to show that Agentforce can actually deliver the promised advantages. If Salesforce can successfully clear the concerns about complexity, performance, integration and costs, the platform has the potential to become a game channel in the field of autonomous AI agents.
Marc Benioff's vision of activating a billion agents with agentforce by the end of 2025 remains ambitious, but not impossible if the adoption wins in the coming months.
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Autonomous AI agent: Why do you still hesitate to introduce your introduction
Salesforce Agentforce represents significant progress in the evolution of AI platforms for companies. The combination of autonomous decision skills, deep integration into the Salesforce ecosystem and low code development approach offers a convincing promise of value.
However, the slower adoption shows that the path to the widespread introduction of autonomous AI agents is paved with challenges. Companies hesitate to invest in new AI technologies without seeing clear evidence of their effectiveness and return on investment.
For Salesforce, this means that you not only have to overcome the technical hurdles, but also have to win the trust of customers by showing convincing success stories and measurable results. The coming months will show whether Agentforce can develop its full potential and lead to promised breakthrough.
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