Deloitte and Salesforce have strengthened their decades-long partnership, striving to deliver scalable agentic AI solutions across multiple industries.
As part of the announcement, Deloitte presented its new marketing agent, powered by Salesforce’s Agentforce.
The “master” agent supports marketing teams with many use cases for optimizing customer journeys, from generating briefs to pinpointing customer journey improvement opportunities.
Yet, the partnership is not only about delivering this offering across the marketing space; it’s much broader.
Indeed, Deloitte and Salesforce are teaming up to create a burgeoning suite of industry-specific agents and accelerators that cross various enterprise functions and verticals.
Regarding the latter, the partnership targets financial services, government and public services, life sciences, and healthcare.
By applying Deloitte’s professional services and Salesforce’s platform – which also features Data Cloud and its Customer 360 Apps – businesses can “achieve significant efficiency gains and competitive advantages.”
Speaking on the enhanced collaboration, Brian Millham, President & COO of Salesforce, explained: “AI agents are a massive opportunity for organizations to unlock an unlimited digital workforce that collaborates with humans to increase productivity, reduce costs, and streamline operations.
With the expanded alliance globally, Salesforce and Deloitte are well-positioned to help customers achieve success and empower them to “agentify” every process, workload, and application across their organizations.
Agentic AI Hype Is Accelerating, So What’s the Hold Up for End Users?
While GenAI was the talk of the town last year, agentic AI is for sure one of the hottest topics across the CX landscape.
Yet, considerable levels of hype seem to be coming from the vendor’s side over end users.
As the landscape of Agentic AI continues to evolve, enterprises are at various readiness levels.
Indeed, some have concerns with how they track and manage their data. After all, if they have misconfigured permission settings, the AI agent may accidentally surface confidential financial information.
Meanwhile, others worry about onboarding the necessary technical skills and how AI agents may change employee roles.
Nonetheless, there are companies matching this hype set by the vendors.
Speaking of the unique benefits for law firms, Lindsay Marty, Founder and CEO of Above the Bar Marketing, told CX Today: “A lot of our pain points are around missed opportunities—leads that come in after hours or responses that fall through the cracks. AI can plug that gap.
What matters to me is that Agentic AI isn’t just robotic. It has to stay on-brand, and in the legal world, tone really matters.
While optimistic about the future of AI, Marty explored key considerations needed to bring employees on the AI journey.
She told CX Today: “If we’re going to fully leverage it, my team would need more than just onboarding—they’d need to know how to train the AI, audit its suggestions, and extract insights from it. It’s not just plug-and-play.”
Trust is another barrier to the full rollout of agentic AI. Jeff Kaiden, CEO of Capacity, cautioned: “I’m not entirely about handing the reins over, though. I see Agentic AI as a helper, not the pilot.
We’d let it run tasks where there’s a low margin for error and keep oversight where nuance or judgment is needed—say, with escalations or anything tied to exceptions in shipping or warehouse delays.
Let End Users Dictate Hype; Vendors Should Focus on Delivery
While enterprises continue to debate the application of AI agents, Max Ball, Principal Industry Analyst at Forrester, exclaimed that vendors should focus on AI that offers true solutions rather than hype.
In a recent interview, he told CX Today: “If you’re going to be agentic, it needs to be able to correct itself and connect to other things autonomously”
Due to the hype train, “There’s a lot of people laying claim to agentic AI solutions that are actually far off.”
Adobe stressed this point during a recent summit, clearly defining the standards to which all its AI agents must adhere.
Like Adobe, Salesforce can also put forward agents that are able to reason, adaptive, and capable of taking action. They’re not rule-based or RPA bots.
By strengthening relationships with the likes of Deloitte, Salesforce can ensure its customers leverage Agentforce across the enterprise, not repackaged workflow automation as AI agents.
In doing so, the CRM leader can avoid confusion from end-users as to agentic AI’s full potential.
