Artificial intelligence agents promise to transform the enterprise software stack, dramatically increasing productivity, and Salesforce Inc. appears to be at the forefront of this agentic AI revolution.
The company has made major advances in AI, bringing in a series of automation updates to its cloud platforms, and it will make further announcements at its annual Dreamforce event Sept. 17-19. In its second quarter, Salesforce earned $1.43 billion and anticipates a 2025 revenue of $37.7 billion to $38 billion, suggesting growth of 8% to 9%.
“Salesforce has made huge strides to make acquisitions and internal innovation to connect the dots for their customers,” says Rob Strechay, managing director at theCUBE Research. “Gone are the days of Salesforce being just a CRM company. We see Salesforce bringing forward a full-stack Customer 360. One of the underpinnings is the Data Cloud, which addresses a handful of important data management and governance for their customers. We are excited to dig into what could be in AI and agentic systems world as Salesforce innovates in the customers 360 industry.”
Dreamforce will bring together analysts, engineers and data practitioners for Salesforce’s launch of Agentforce. Strechay and theCUBE Principal Analyst Christophe Bertrand will interview a range of guests at the event as part of exclusive coverage by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, which is co-producing theCUBE’s coverage of Dreamforce with the New York Stock Exchange. (* Disclosure below.)
Agentic AI is the next sea change in automation
Salesforce recently launched Industries AI, an automation platform embedded into all 15 of Salesforce’s cloud platforms that can handle more than 100 common tasks. It provides customers with a framework to create AI agents based on their proprietary data. These industry-specific autonomous agents could streamline recruitment processes, enhance government services or auto-match eligible patients with clinical studies.
Earlier this month, the company also released an in-house family of large action models, called xLAM, that are “optimized for function calling,” Shelby Heinecke, senior AI research manager at Salesforce, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “It produces an action that needs to be taken in order to answer that question. I think that’s what at the heart of what a LAM is,” Heinecke said.
Agentic AI has the potential to harmonize what theCUBE analysts Dave Vellante and George Gilbert call “islands of automation” in their analysis of agentic AI platforms. By unifying the current application model, agent-based systems will be able to complete common business processes with 1/10th of the headcount needed today, Vellante and Gilbert predict.
“Salesforce has been doing predictive AI for almost 10 years now,” said Param Kahlon, executive vice president and general manager at Salesforce, in an interview with theCUBE. “But … for this AI to be meaningful and for companies to harness the full value of AI, you want to make sure that you’re grounding the data that’s being used to generate those predictions with some things that are relevant to the current business process.”
TheCUBE event livestream
Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of Dreamforce 2024, starting Sept. 17. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.
How to watch theCUBE interviews
We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Dreamforce 2024, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.
TheCUBE Insights podcast
SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.
SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.
Guests
During Dreamforce 2024, theCUBE Research’s analysts will talk with industry executives and experts about the developments and innovations within the enterprise AI community.
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dreamforce. Neither Salesforce Inc., the main sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)