How Salesforce Transformed Agentforce Missteps into Enterprise Success
Salesforce News & Insights
News and insights from Salesforce. For media inquiries contact pr@salesforce.com.
The scoop: One year since deploying Agentforce, Salesforce’s service agent has handled 1.5+ million conversations on the company help site, resolving the majority of cases without humans. The sales development rep (SDR) agent has worked on over 43,000 leads and generated $1.7 million in new pipeline from dormant ones. Agentforce in Slack gave teams 500,000 hours back this year by handling routine tasks.
But behind these metrics lies a story of challenges, experiments, missteps, and continuous refinement.
Over the past year, Salesforce leaders learned critical lessons in areas like agent testing, data, and finding the right human-AI balance.
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The Big Story
What Salesforce Learned From the First Year Using Agentforce
Despite the success of Agentforce, early iterations of it were humbling.
When Agentforce for Sales was first launched one of the agents deployed was the Sales Development Rep (SDR), which can prospect, conduct outreach, and qualify leads autonomously.
Salesforce envisioned an army of these agents acting as entry-level sales coordinators, working around the clock at a scale no human could ever approach. But in those early months, the agent responded "I don't know" 30% of the time when asked for details on a lead.
Through painstaking data cleanup and iterative training, Salesforce reduced that number to under 10%.
“As Customer Zero, we do the work, find the bugs, and make the mistakes before our customers ever have to,” said Joe Inzerillo, EVP & Chief Digital Officer, Salesforce. “We see it as our responsibility to experiment and iterate ruthlessly and blaze the trail to agentic transformation. We're building our experience into Agentforce to deliver measurable ROI and make deployment as easy as possible to ensure we build business value, not just cool technology.”
Dive Deeper
New Agentic Enterprise Index Shows 119% Agent Growth in First Half of 2025
Powered by Agentforce and other Salesforce products, Salesforce analyzed and aggregated usage data to uncover the true story of agents in the workforce.
Salesforce’s new Agentic Enterprise Index found that agent creation among first-mover companies surged 119% between January and June and the average number of customer service conversations led by an agent grew 22x in the first half of 2025.
The report also points to growing adoption among workers. Employee interactions with AI agents grew at an average monthly rate of 65% in the first half of 2025. And employees are engaging in more sustained conversations with AI agents; indeed, agent actions stemming from employee conversations grew at an average rate of 76% per month over the first half of 2025.
The index provides a first look at the trends shaping the Agentic Enterprise — and how companies are implementing AI agents to drive customer success and reinvent their businesses.
Deploying Agentforce in Slack: Salesforce’s Journey to Saving over 500K Employee Hours Annually
Agentforce in Slack lets employees @ mention an autonomous agent with questions or actions to take. Early on, adoption varied greatly across departments. But as employees began to explore the new capabilities, usage steadily grew.
Slack isn’t just where employees spend their day. It’s where the conversations, decisions, and knowledge of an organization live.
By bringing AI-powered agents into Slack, Salesforce ensures employees can take action in the flow of work and draw on that rich conversational context. This makes agents not only easier to access, but also smarter, more accurate, and more impactful.
“Being Customer Zero means learning in real time. Our rollout of Agentforce in Slack revealed the real-world dynamics of AI adoption and the value of building solutions that work for teams, not just systems. The result: tens of thousands of hours reclaimed for higher-impact work,” said Andy White, SVP of Technology, Salesforce.
More Insights
With $1.25T in Holiday Sales Up for Grabs, LLMs Emerge as New Frontier for Search
New Salesforce data is forecasting a robust holiday season for global retail, with digital sales expected to reach an unprecedented $1.25 trillion, marking a 4% year-over-year increase.
Salesforce estimates that a significant portion of the growth this upcoming holiday season is attributed to the rise in AI and agent-referred traffic. AI and agents are projected to drive 21% of all holiday orders globally, accounting for $263 billion in sales.
This marks a notable increase from the previous year, highlighting how quickly consumers are integrating AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini into their shopping journeys.
Growing Worker Demand for AI Skills Creates Opportunity for Institutions
There’s a critical gap in AI workplace readiness.
Workers across markets are eager to learn new AI skills, but many believe employers and governments are not moving fast enough, according to new data from Salesforce and Morning Consult.
A survey of 14,000 adults across 13 countries found workers want skills that help them keep up with the pace of innovation.
Nearly two-thirds of adults said they’d likely take AI-related training if governments offered discounts or financial support, showing widespread motivation to upskill.
Agentic AI in Life Sciences
Watch: How Data and AI are Redefining MedTech with Boston Scientific
The use of data and AI in life sciences isn't new. Both have played a critical role in products, services, and quality of therapy. But the introduction of agentic AI presents even more opportunities for the industry.
With a mission of advancing science for life, Boston Scientific has already embedded agentic AI into many workflows, freeing up reps so they can focus on the human part of healthcare.
Ben Amel, VP of Commercial Digital Enablement at Boston Scientific joined Jeff Amann, Salesforce's EVP and GM of Industries, to discuss the impact of agentic AI on the life sciences industry.
How a Small BioTech Firm is Using Agentic AI to Take on Industry Giants
As CEO of a small startup in an increasingly crowded biotech market, Veenu Aishwarya knows something about rising above the noise.
Over the last 10 years, AUM BioTech has provided its gene silencing platform to biomedical researchers and scientists in 38 countries across five continents.
In a typical year, AUM might participate in five to six scientific conferences and meet with as many as 10,000 leads. But with minimal staff, the company wanted an efficient way to automate the process that included filtering those leads, identifying the most promising ones, and reaching out to them.
That’s why Aishwarya began his agentic journey with Salesforce.
“In the past, you might have needed ten people to reach out to a thousand potential customers, or a hundred people to reach out to 100,000,” Aishwarya said. “Now one agent, or a team of agents, can do that, and it can make those emails extremely customized. The more personalized we can make that email, the more we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”
Reaching More Patients: How AI and Data Drive Better Representations
A major challenge in clinical research is the lack of diversity in clinical trial populations. This creates a critical gap in understanding how drugs and devices work for everyone.
The problem stems from historical biases, economic pressures, and disconnected data systems. Women, minority groups, and rural communities are often underrepresented in clinical trials, leading to treatments that are not optimized for them.
Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud and Agentforce can help.
These platforms unify fragmented data from various sources, making it possible to improve patient recruitment, enhance patient experience, provide personalized support, and boost operational efficiency.
By integrating disparate data sources and leveraging AI tools, Salesforce empowers pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations to overcome historical barriers to diversity, ensuring new medical treatments work for all patients.
Latest News
Salesforce Expands New York City Footprint to Fuel Agentic AI Innovation
Salesforce announced plans for a significant expansion in New York City, a move that will allow the company to fuel the growth of Agentforce, its digital labor platform, and help prepare Salesforce’s more than 3,000 local employees for the agentic AI era.
This move will also support local customers like PepsiCo, Indeed, and 1-800Accountant as they become Agentic Enterprises.
The company signed a definitive lease to expand its footprint at Salesforce Tower New York, increasing its leased square footage by over 25%.
Plans for the expansion include a new employee floor designed for collaboration, innovation, and hybrid work, a state-of-the-art training center, and a dedicated space for customer innovation.