Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) is pushing hard to make AI as a service, before AI takes it out

Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE: CRM)—a leading software as a service firm whose products are used by thousands of major clients worldwide for customer relationship management—is going all-in on AI, preparing to release a billion-strong force of so-called agents that will help humans do their jobs and sell more products. It’s become an existential fight, as some think the technology could ultimately make the company obsolete.

“What is about to happen is just extraordinary,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at a Goldman Sachs investment conference, detailing the company’s new “Agentforce” product that will allow its customers to deploy autonomous AI agents that can go far beyond the capabilities of the average chatbot. He cited early trials at textbook publisher Wiley that saw the technology resolve 90% of all customer service issues on its own. 

“For each of our customers that we are starting to work with, this is a new concept. It’s completely different,” Benioff continued, saying that the future depicted in sci-fi films like “Minority Report” is starting to arrive. He gave healthcare company Kaiser Permanente as another test example that was seeing 90-95% accuracy with AI agents that could help patients interpret lab results and even schedule follow-up appointments on their own. 

Benioff has good reason to sell the new product hard, with his latest comments following an eyebrow-raising report that fintech firm Klarna was cutting out SaaS providers Salesforce and Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY) and replacing them with its own AI-developed products in a move to save money by getting rid of the middleman. Venture capital investment firm Andreessen Horowitz had previously ignited a round of worry about the future of large enterprise software providers after it said earlier this year that no incumbent was immune from the AI revolution underway that will “fundamentally reimagine the core system of record and the sales workflows.”

Salesforce shares have struggled over the past six months amid the concerns, declining 10.4% as the broader S&P 500 gained 8.9%. Workday saw its shares decline 11.7% over the same period. Despite the market’s uncertainty, Salesforce still expects its full-year revenue to rise 8-9% to $38 billion.

Benioff has himself labeled the company’s focus on AI as a “hard pivot,” and the company certainly seems to be moving full speed ahead. The new Agentforce product, for example, was mentioned 39 times during the company’s latest earnings call. Benioff has tried to address concerns that the company could be made irrelevant by saying that customers trying to make their own products with AI will not get near the accuracy that Salesforce can provide with its vast amounts of data.

“This is a moment where every customer needs to realize you don’t need to DIY your AI,” Benioff said. “You can use a platform like Salesforce to get the highest efficacy of artificial intelligence…Customers are going to get this incredible value by having one integrated system, and it scales from small companies to extremely large companies.”

With videos flooding social media of software basically writing itself, Benioff’s rush to stay at the center of the action with a sticky platform and decades of historical data about its customers is all about survival. The company’s future will be tied to its ability to shift from SaaS to AIaaS, and Salesforce is trying to prove it has what it takes. After all, an AI model is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and Salesforce is still unmatched on that front because of its decades-long headstart and existing integrations into the nerve centers of many large companies.