Salesforce has ‘the droids you are looking for’ – CEO

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) CEO Marc Benioff said countless businesses have wasted time trying to build and train their own artificial intelligence models.

“Collectively in this industry we’ve spent $300B on AI over the last few years, and it’s hard to pull out a good story of what has been built,” Benioff said during Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology conference on Wednesday. “It’s cool to build your own model, and then retrain your model, and do it again and again. When I look at customers doing this, I think they are wasting a lot of money. These copilots have been sold into these enterprises like they are going to be their AI panacea, and they aren’t that effective.”

“To put it another way, ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,'” he added.

However, Benioff sounds certain he has the droids businesses are looking for, via Salesforce’s new product: Agentforce. It allows customers to set up and deploy autonomous AI agents that can handle complex task and generate actionable outputs.

Next week, at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco, thousands of customers can witness Agentforce in action for the first time.

A few select customers have already deployed Agentforce within their organizations. These include Wiley (WLY), a textbook company; Kaiser Permanente, a health care system; and The Walt Disney Company (DIS).

These agents can have complex conversations, drive efficiency and productivity, as well as lead to revenue gains, Benioff said. They use a data cloud where the data has been amalgamated for accuracy.

Benioff co-founded Salesforce in 1999, and in July commemorated its 20th anniversary as a public company. He said a platform like Agentforce is what it’s all been building towards.

“A lot of people have been running science experiments for the past two years, and they didn’t have to,” he said.