Salesforce AI agents don’t work — but we’re charging 6% more for AI anyway
AI Summary
The video titled “Pivot to AI Enterprise Edition” by David Gerard discusses Salesforce’s enthusiastic promotion of AI integration, specifically focusing on their AI system, Agent Force. Agent Force is a chatbot integrated with Salesforce’s Slack platform designed to automate and enhance customer support and service functions. Despite high expectations, early public tests revealed that Agent Force struggled to perform reliably, prompting Salesforce to acquire UK AI startup Convergence.ai in an effort to improve the technology.
Further research mentioned includes a benchmark test called CRM Arena Pro developed by Salesforce AI researcher Steve Huang, which evaluated common large language models like OpenAI’s GPT series, Google’s Gemini, and Facebook’s Llama series. The tests showed low success rates, especially for multi-step tasks and issues with confidentiality.
Despite these performance issues, Salesforce has increased the prices of many of their services by about 6%, citing ongoing innovation and delivered customer value as reasons. The video closes with a sardonic take on the company’s pricing strategy and the unavoidable adoption of their AI solutions in the enterprise environment.