Salesforce has closed more than 1,000 paid contracts for “Agentforce,” its artificial intelligence-powered virtual representative creation platform, CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday.
At an event in San Francisco, Salesforce previewed enhancements that allow businesses to create bots for recruiting, customer service and other specific tasks on its platform and in its messaging app Slack.
Salesforce has done as much for its own operations, Benioff said. He said his company now needs half as many human staff to respond to simple customer requests, although he still wants to increase the company’s headcount in sales by 10 percent or more.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, many companies have tested AI without realizing significant savings or revenue.
For Mr. Benioff, who in recent months has focused his cloud computing company on agents, “digital work” is poised to increase the human workforce and grow the economy. Longer term, Salesforce will launch a “robotic force partner program” that can connect real machines with virtual machines, he told reporters.
Mr. Benioff cited the example of hotel chains. They could handle back- and front-office work with an army of specialized digital assistants, while robots could clean guest rooms, he said.
The Salesforce co-founder and Time magazine owner said he hopes President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will engage CEOs on the topic of digital work. Trump appeared on a recent cover of Time as the magazine’s “person of the year.”
Asked if he planned to donate to Mr. Trump’s inauguration fund, as others have done, Mr. Benioff said: “I think we just donated to the inauguration fund: “I think we just donated the photo. He can use the Time cover for free.”
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