Salesforce CEO: Get ready for agents - the third wave of AI

The future of AI is set to be powered by agents able to provide a customizable and personalized experience like never before, Salesforce's CEO has declared.

"This is the third wave of AI - agents," Marc Benioff said in his opening keynote at the company's Dreamforce 2024 event in San Francisco, championing its new Agentforce platform as the next major leap for the technology.

"This is what AI was meant to be," he declared.

Third wave of AI

This year's Dreamforce keynote was heavily focused towards AI, with Agentforce taking center stage during the event.

Announced a few days before the event, Agentforce is designed to improve productivity and efficiency across sales, marketing, commerce and customer service.

Benioff was keen to emphasize that this was a new era for AI - one that does away with "DIY AI" and doesn't require customers to do the heavy lifting when it comes to implementing AI.

"Agentforce has to be the biggest breakthrough we've ever had on technology, and I think it's the biggest breakthrough I've seen in a long time in artifical intelligence," Benioff declared.

"I don't think you can DIY this - you want a single, professionally managed, secure, reliable, available platform. You want the ability to deploy this Agentforce capability across all of these people that are so important for your company."

Agentforce bots will be able to carry out tasks independently, reducing the need for human supervision and improving overall business output.

“We are all going to be using agents, but we're going to do it all within our Salesforce platform,” said Benioff. “This platform is the key strategic motion of Salesforce, and now this platform has the best AI in the world," he added, declaring this year's event "the most important Dreamforce ever."

"We have the data and the metadata and the workflow and the business process and the security model and the sharing model, and all those things that we love and have used and are deeply wedded to for 25 years — it turns out those things make a more accurate AI.”

"It's not just what is possible, but what you're going to make possible," Benioff told the thousands of attendees at Dreamforce.

"Our goal is simple, for you to augment your employees, create better experiences, and deliver better business results for your companies."

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