Don’t DIY your AI!
That was Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s rallying cry at the launch of his annual Dreamforce conference this week in San Francisco.
Tagged as “the largest AI event in the world,” this year’s Dreamforce is all about Salesforce’s new suite of autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents called Agentforce. And Agentforce is everywhere at Dreamforce.
Introduced by Matthew McConaughey’s husky voice and a catchy take on the classic Secret Agent Man song, Agentforce is built to revolutionize service, sales, marketing, and commerce.
Agentforce enables companies to deploy digital AI agents to handle tasks like customer inquiries and sales lead qualification, offering seamless scalability.
While no one should be surprised the theme of this year’s conference is AI, it wasn’t the plan until Benioff had a revelation while travelling to visit customers leading up to the event.
Benioff describes it as a “Waymo moment” when he saw how early Agentforce users were transforming their businesses with Salesforce’s AI integration.
Benioff was so convinced of the Agentforce opportunity he did something he had never done before – he threw out his planned Dreamforce keynote speech that “was in the can” and started from scratch, finishing it at the eleventh hour.
“The keynote just got finished last night. I had never done it before. I hadn’t even practiced it,” Benioff told a room full of reporters.
“This has been a transformational moment for me, where over the last few weeks I realized that this is what customers have, this unbelievable deep frustration around AI and a huge load of excitement, and they hold them both in their hands.”
While Benioff admits that he’s rolling the dice on Agentforce, you certainly can’t tell that from the Dreamforce exhibit floor.
Benioff is urging conference attendees to get their “hands in the soil” with Agentforce and has enlisted 4,000 Salesforce Engineers and Customer Success experts to assist conference attendees in launching their own Agentforces at a dedicated launch zone on site.
“I’m sure that some of this is going to work, and some of it is going to go horribly wrong. I hope the horribly wrong stories are not as bad as I have them in my mind that they could be. Because they could be horrible, but they also could be magical,” Benioff shared.
At the Launch Zone, companies can experience firsthand how quickly and easily they can build autonomous agents using Agentforce. Attendees receive one-to-one guidance from the Agentforce “advance force” to develop their first Agent prototype, using an AI-powered Slack app that interfaces with a Large Language Model (LLM), facilitating the creation of an autonomous agent.
“This is a marquee moment for us. We want the market and our technology to come together. At the same time, we do want to break the hypnosis that’s coming out of not just one, but many vendors,” concluded Benioff.
Benioff’s statement, “don’t DIY your AI,” reflects his belief that businesses should avoid building their own AI systems from scratch. Instead, he encourages organizations to leverage established platforms like Salesforce.
His advice is rooted in the idea that businesses should focus on deploying AI solutions that are ready-made and tailored for productivity, rather than engaging in complex “science projects” to build AI from the ground up.
Simply put, by using platforms like Salesforce’s Agentforce, businesses can take advantage of robust, pre-built AI tools without having to manage the complexities themselves.
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