Just three months ago at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Salesforce’s Co-Founder and CEO Marc Benioff launched a third wave of AI: agents.

For Salesforce, this is “what AI was meant to be” – agents moves beyond reactive copilots, and towards proactive agents that are integrated into every part of the business.

“AI cannot be a bolt on”, instead it needs to be part of our teams and our workplaces.

The potential impact of agents is so profound that Benioff joked he was, in fact, tempted to rename the whole company as ‘Agentforce’.

Now, as 2024 comes to a close, Salesforce has launched the second wave of agents – so called Agentforce 2.0.

This is a digital labor platform for enterprises, which aims to create a truly limitless world of work.

UNLEASH attended a press conference announcing the launch – during a keynote session, Benioff took the stage and shared that “now is the time for us to take a step and to walk into the future together”.

Even at Dreamforce in September, Benioff didn’t use the term “digital labor”, but he is now.

While the tech giant has been at the forefront of other tech disruptions and revolutions, this agent-powered one is different.

Benioff stated: “All of a sudden, as a CEO, I’m not just managing human beings, but I’m also managing agents” – it’s not a fantasy of the future, “it is what is happening right now”.

“We’ve already crossed this bridge” – and the bridge is to “this new world of digital labor” where humans and agents are working together to solve problems.

For Benioff, the total addressable market (TAM) potential of agents and digital labor won’t be in the millions or billions of dollars, it’s in the trillions.

“It’s the biggest market, the most exciting market, we’ve ever been in,” stated Benioff.

“I’ve never been more excited about anything in my career” – it’s time for Salesforce to become a digital labor provider.

“For 25 years, we have been helping companies to manage and share their information [and] store their data.

“Now here we are delivering digital labor – digital labor is the new horizon for business.

“Business will never be the same, how we architect our businesses, run our businesses, staff our businesses and think about our business will never be the same”

Salesforce becomes a digital labor provider

During the press conference, Benioff shared that what makes Salesforce different from the competition because it is acting as “customer zero”.

“If we aren’t eating our own dog food”, then how can the company say to customers “this is a great product, you should use this”?

Benioff shared one example of how it is using agents internally to drive real success – for instance, on help.salesforce.com, there are 32,000 conversations a week, and only 5,000 now need to be escalated to a human agent.

That’s down from 10,000, and that means that 83% of customer challenges are being resolved by the agentic layer.

“It’s actually happening within Salesforce right now – humans with agents driving customer success together,” shared Benioff.

During the conference, the Salesforce team also shared some customer success stories.

All of Salesforce’s 135,000 customers have access to Agentforce 2.0 – to date, 1,000 customers have started building their agentic layer and hundreds have gone live with agents. Examples include FedEx, Sakes Fifth Avenue, Adecco, and Accenture.

What makes Agentforce 2.0 standout from the first iteration is that agents are now available in the flow of work by being integrating into Slack, the work management tool that Salesforce acquired in 2021.

Taking to the stage, Slack’s CEO Denise Dresser shared that this Agentforce 2.0 in Slack means that “every company can bring digital labor to every employee and every team”.

It allows agents to tap not just into structured CRM data, but also unstructured data, conversations, meaning that the agents have “more context, more relevancy, more accuracy”. Plus, they can support your employees “right where you’re already working”.

While Salesforce sees Agentforce 2.0 as a huge leap forward for AI, the cloud giant, of course, still has an eye on the future.

Benioff sees agentic AI as “the fundamental enabling technology for the robotic layer”. Will there actually be real robots on stage at Dreamforce 2025?

Voice and avatars are also future user interfaces that are on Salesforce’s radar for the future of work.

That’s the beginning of Agentforce 3.0 – for now, Benioff and the Salesforce team are so excited about the incredible opportunity of Agentforce 2.0, and to lead the way and show customers what is possible with agents and digital labor.