Tech giant betting big on proposal but will companies pay for it?

At Dreamforce, executives made their most aggressive push yet for the enterprise, where AI agents can autonomously manage complex workflows. Customer showcases highlighted early wins: PepsiCo said it would be “reps first” by 2026, while American homewares brand Williams-Sonoma deployed reps to personalize recipes and product recommendations.

“I’m surprised more people haven’t adopted these,” said Williams-Sonoma CEO Laura Alber.

OneNZ, New Zealand’s largest telecommunications company, said it deployed nearly 100 representatives in sales, service and network operations and achieved a five-fold return on its artificial intelligence investment within months.​

“Clients are four times more likely to engage in the agency journey of plan changes than they were in the legacy journey,” OneNZ CEO Jason Paris told reporters. He said the telecommunications company achieved 60 percent faster marketing campaign creation and 20 percent cost savings in mobile network energy consumption.

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There were also difficulties. OneNZ has allocated 25 per cent of its AI budget to employee training and admitted some staff were going “crazy” as AI consumed 50 per cent of their roles.

“AI is coming for your role, not your role,” Paris said, but acknowledged that the company was still working out exactly how the workforce structure should change.​

Paris said it took eight hours to build OneNZ’s first agent, but deployment took two weeks: “Because our data wasn’t perfect and we had to integrate it into our existing IT infrastructure. It wasn’t the Agentforce tool that wasn’t ready; it was the organisation’s ability to consume it.”

Robin Washington, Salesforce’s chief operating and financial officer, who joined six months ago, acknowledged that the technology’s innovation is “outpacing adoption.”

“We see our customers in the early stages with the flywheel moving downward,” Washington said. He pointed out that Salesforce uses Agentforce for customer support; Ajanforce currently responds to 1.8 million queries per month with a resolution rate of 77 percent.​

Pricing complexity didn’t help. Salesforce initially charged $2 per conversation but introduced multiple models this year: a $0.10 per transaction credit system, $125 per user monthly subscriptions for standard editions, and $150 for premium industry solutions. The company also offers pay-as-you-go, pre-commitment and pre-purchase options.

Jayesh Govindarajan, Salesforce’s vice president of artificial intelligence, said Agentforce adoption is “unprecedented in any enterprise software,” noting that the 12,000 customer figure represents deep enterprise applications, not superficial deployments.

“If you had asked me a year ago where we would be, I wouldn’t have said we would have 12,000 customers,” he said.

Still, Jefferies’ research found that 70 percent of customers have turned down Salesforce’s recent 6 percent price increases, and many question whether AI add-ons justify the extra spend. The firm also noted that Salesforce’s core Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products are growing at just 8 percent annually, well below new offerings but still accounting for the majority of revenue.​

To boost confidence, Salesforce announced it will buy back US$7 billion in shares over the next six months and invest US$15 billion in San Francisco over five years. The company also expanded its partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic to embed advanced AI models into Agentforce and announced a strong forecast of over $60 billion in revenue by 2030; That would require a re-acceleration of growth to more than 10 percent annually after months of slow single-digit growth.

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Fierce competition is on the horizon. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and AI-specific startups are all competing for the same enterprise AI budgets.

“This is the fastest-growing product in our history. We’ve never had a product grow this fast before,” Benioff said.

“This is a moment where technology innovation is outpacing customer adoption. Our job is to get those customers into adoption mode.”

David Swan went to San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.