Salesforce predicts agentic AI will bolster its market share

Salesforce has doubled down on agentic AI as it seeks to grow its hold of the market and become the number one CRM platform.

Leandro Perez is the vice president and chief marketing officer at Salesforce ANZ

Salesforce is banking on agentic AI technology to supercharge its growth, predicting the technology will outperform CRM significantly, according to its ANZ senior vice president and chief marketing officer Leandro Perez.

The global Customer Relationship Management business wants to become the world’s market leader in agentic AI, a position Mr Perez argues it already occupies across the region.

Salesforce has thrown its weight behind the tech, which refers to the creation of autonomous systems, or agents, that can act, reason and make decisions without human intervention. It’s part of a strategy to leverage AI agents as an add on to its existing suite of sales, marketing and data and expand its services for customers.

“Our goal is to be the leading agentic AI platform in the region, and globally too,” said Mr Perez. “(Agentic AI) is what’s going to propel us locally. We believe Salesforce is the number one CRM and we also want to be number one in this new space as well which we see as a bigger TAM (Total Addressable Market) than the CRM market.”

The sheer market potential of agentic drove Salesforce to spin on a dime and embrace the technology through its “Agentforce” positioning, said Mr Perez.

“We’ve been talking about AI for 10 years at Salesforce through Einstein, our predictive AI. We do over a trillion predictions every single week on the platform. But agentic is not like a co-pilot in that it’s for productivity, it actually has agency so it can take action.”

He predicts adoption will be swift and points to the appliance brand Fisher & Paykel, which has moved from using a chatbot on its website for customer service to adopting agentic AI.

“Agentforce is handling 66 per cent of the inquiries on their website,” said Mr Perez. “It also is proactively suggesting things like ‘your fridge might need an update on a filter for the water’ and this is all text-based. The next version, which is going to be coming soon, will be a fully voice-automated conversation with the agent.

“Fisher & Paykel are six months into this, so they are way ahead of any other organisation in terms of customer service experience.”

Salesforce is also walking the walk, with the business adopting AI agents within its own customer service and support platform. Salesforce AI agents resolved 84 per cent of customer queries, and escalated 2 per cent to humans. Mr Perez said this enabled the company to redeploy 2000 support roles to other sections of the business.

Examples like these were on display at Salesforce’s Agentforce experience held over three days in Sydney’s Martin Place. The event attracted more than 20,000 who engaged and interacted with the technology. It managed to draw punters off the street, which demonstrates the consumer appetite for AI tech.

Mr Perez predicts consumers will join companies as agentic AI adoption accelerates fast customer service and marketing-related divisions.

“It will be similar to when you went to websites and no one had real-time chat, and then all of a sudden every website had it. It’s going to be like that, but across all industries and all use cases. So you probably won’t notice it until it’s everywhere. It’s like if I tell you to look for red cars, and then suddenly you’ll see all the red cars.

“Consumers will have agents too and when your consumers are using agents, no matter how good your marketing is, the agent’s job will be to feed more things that the person likes to them. So, if you’re not leveraging this technology to be personalised and deliver the best experience possible, your consumer will build worlds that do not include your brand and they will not see your brand on any digital channel or their phone at all.”

Mr Perez believes this will be a significant challenge to marketers that are slow to adopt AI, both within their businesses and in their marketing.

“If a consumer has told an agent, I care about these things and I prioritise only these things, and a brand has failed to meet your expectations or values, it becomes invisible, no matter how much money you spend,” he said.

“This is why having agentic technology in your company is so important. It’s not just about ensuring you deliver the best experiences, it’s so you have permission to continue operating with them in the future.

“It’s not an attention economy anymore.

“We are entering a permission economy. Brands will need permission to exist in a consumer’s world. This is going to be an interesting space for the industry.”