Salesforce's Agentforce Hits 30,000 Users at Dreamforce

Salesforce's Dreamforce stage was the setting for a reality check on AI agents. CEO Marc Benioff wants agents to take on a lot more work that humans do, but the adoption numbers he cited — roughly 30,000 of about 150,000 customers on Agentforce, a feature launched in 2024 — show how far that vision still has to travel. The brands on the conference floor gave a more cautious version of it.

Two contrasting approaches stood out. AT&T is using AI to cut the time employees spend upgrading a customer's phone from about 30 minutes to roughly 10 minutes, yet it stops short of letting agents handle cancellations, wanting humans to understand why a customer is leaving. Southwest Airlines uses chatbots for servicing tasks like flight changes while reserving human employees for 'right here, right now' problems, where empathy and assurance matter. Crocs, which runs a consumer-facing chat and voice bot called Rivet and internal agents for promotions and product categorization, still keeps human hands on the tiller, as SVP Feliz Papich put it, because the capabilities and complexities of automation are still being learned.

The through-line is a tension Papich named: the rush to build sophisticated interfaces with AI vendors can bury the harder problem of making the data underneath good enough. What the next phase hinges on is whether vendors can communicate that data complexity and whether brands keep drawing the line at the tasks where human judgment pays off.