December 04, 2025
Salesforce Says AI Agents Are Already Running Customer Experience
Salesforce opened its Q3 2026 earnings call by stating that AI agents are actively running customer experience inside some of the world’s largest organisations.
Speaking alongside engineering, sales and finance executives, CEO Marc Benioff described a shift from isolated automation pilots to what the company calls the “agentic enterprise,” an environment where AI agents, humans and data operate side-by-side across service, sales, operations and support. Addressing where businesses now stand on AI adoption, he said during the call:
“… Everyone knows that they want to get to the next level in their business to bring AI in, become more productive, become more efficient, become elevated. But they all know now that they’ve got to become these agentic enterprises.”
Signs of that transition are already showing up in deployment figures. Salesforce’s Agentforce and Data 360 platforms have reached nearly $1.4bn in annual recurring revenue, growing 114% year-on-year, while Agentforce alone sits at $540m ARR, up 330%. Customers seem to love it as their use of agents in live production environments increased 70% quarter-over-quarter.
AI Across Sectors
As Salesforce notes, retail adoption is moving beyond pilot projects into everyday operations. At Williams-Sonoma, a kitchenware store, the Agentforce-powered “sous-chef” assistant Olive now handles around 60% of all customer chat interactions, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff pointing to the quality of responses rather than simple deflection as the biggest win.
Olive maintains a consistent brand tone, provides accurate answers and escalates to human agents when needed. Voice support is already planned as the next phase, extending the assistant beyond chat and into contact-centre environments.
Regarding public sector implementations, Salesforce reported that the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel has automated 98% of manual case-handling work, reducing the time to open a tax court case from 10 days to 30 minutes, while another division saves an estimated 500,000 minutes per year through workflow automation and platform consolidation. At the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 120 applications now run on Salesforce, aiming to improve access and responsiveness for veterans.
In the U.K., police forces are piloting “Bobby,” an AI assistant handling non-emergency enquiries across more than 90 topics, contributing to a 20% drop in non-emergency call volumes and easing pressure on frontline teams.
Data-Backed, AI-Driven CX
Much of Salesforce’s CX push is underpinned by Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), which ingested 32 trillion records last quarter, including both structured customer data and unstructured content such as product manuals and knowledge articles. The goal is to provide agents with a full, real-time customer profile that supports accurate responses and personalised journeys. Salesforce argues that unified data integrated across sales, service and marketing workflows is what prevents AI hallucinations and keeps automated interactions consistent.
The company is also using its technology internally as proof of scalability. Agentforce has already handled more than 2 million conversations on help.salesforce.com, doubling volume in half the time it took to reach the first million interactions. An internal AI-powered sales development agent has processed hundreds of thousands of leads, generating tens of millions of dollars in pipeline by shortening follow-up times.
