Marc Benioff has declared the age of the “agentic enterprise” at Dreamforce 2025, despite admitting that many businesses are still struggling to keep up with AI adoption.
Speaking at the San Francisco event, the Salesforce Co-Founder and CEO announced that AI is playing its largest-ever role in the industry, while also highlighting the challenges of AI adoption for his enterprise customers.
Benioff suggested that many of his enterprise customers lacked an understanding of AI.
“Customers are getting their head around how to deploy AI,” he said.
The speed of innovation is far exceeding the speed of customer adoption.
This remark comes in the wake of Salesforce’s shares down 34% from their peak in December 2024, whilst reluctant investors are weary after the company fully commits to AI by cutting its support staff by 4,000 after their AI agent implementation.
However, when asked about the decrease in shares, Benioff reflected on Agentforce’s growth since its launch in 2024 – and how little understanding of its automation use existed
“People don’t understand that Agentforce is part and parcel of Salesforce. It is the core of every product we make now; it is the platform.”
In a response to Salesforce’s decision to move towards an AI workforce, Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, spoke against 100% AI adoption at Dreamforce, reiterating that humans are still valuable to the workforce.
“I made this prediction that, you know, in six months, 90% of code would be written by AI models,
They [human engineers] can focus on the 10% that’s editing the code or writing the 10% that’s the hardest, or supervising a group of AI models. And so what happens is, you know, you just end up being 10 times more productive
Benioff further explained how innovation is exceeding customer adoption, noting that the majority of companies, excluding William Samona and Pandora which have both successfully adopted Salesforce’s AI products, still face architectural setbacks.
“These customers have to go back and modify massive architectures they have and systems they’re running.”
This means that despite how prevalent AI tech is, for the majority of businesses, adoption is still in its early stages.
Despite this apparent disconnect, Benioff highlighted Saleforce’s desire to put forth its Agentic Enterprise vision and advance Agentforce even further as a key player in AI technology:
What we realized at Salesforce is we have to be customer zero…we have to be able to go from one, to two, to three, to four, to five and show you what we’re doing.
Benioff’s vision garnered support from Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, who pointed out that it “makes a lot of sense when you consider how much vibe coding, and AI in general, is going to further commoditize the CRM application/pricing model.”
Benioff also used the keynote to discuss Salesforce’s new updates and releases, which included its Agentforce 360 platform, renaming its Service Cloud to ‘Agentforce Service’, and launching its ITSM product.
You can find out more about the major Dreamforce announcements here.
