The competition in the enterprise AI market is intensifying. Customer relationship management giant Salesforce announced the launch of its latest AI agent platform on Monday, aiming to attract enterprise customers to its AI software in an increasingly crowded market.
Salesforce unveiled this new platform ahead of its annual Dreamforce customer conference on October 14, branded as Agentforce 360. The new version includes new ways to guide AI agents through text, a new platform for building and deploying agents, and new infrastructure for the messaging app Slack.
The most impressive feature of Agentforce 360 is a new AI agent prompt tool called Agent Script, which will be released in a beta version in November. Agent Script allows users to program AI agents to be more flexible and better respond to hypothetical situations. This makes AI agents programmable to be more predictable in less strict scenarios such as customer questions.
Users can access reasoning models that claim to think before responding, rather than directly responding based on patterns. These reasoning agents are supported by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini.
Salesforce also announced the release of a new agent-building tool called Agentforce Builder, which allows users to build, test, and deploy AI agents from a single location. This tool will be available in a beta version in November and includes the enterprise application atmosphere coding tool Agentforce Vibes, which Salesforce announced earlier this month.
The company also announced broader integration between Agentforce and Slack. Salesforce stated that core applications including Agentforce sales, IT, and human resources will start appearing directly in Slack this month and will continue to expand through early 2026.
Slack is piloting a new version of the Slackbot chatbot, designed to become a more personalized AI agent that understands users and provides insights and recommendations. Salesforce also hopes that Slack can serve as an enterprise search tool in the future and plans to launch connectors with platforms such as Gmail, Outlook, and Dropbox by early 2026.
This update from Salesforce comes at a critical moment in the enterprise AI market. The company continues to release AI features for enterprise customers, but enterprises find it difficult to see the return on investment from these tools.
Last week, Google announced the launch of Gemini Enterprise, a set of tools for building enterprise-level AI agents, with early clients including Figma, Klarna, and Virgin Voyages. Anthropic's enterprise product Claude Enterprise is also showing growing momentum. The company announced a deal with consulting giant Deloitte to deploy the Claude chatbot to 500,000 Deloitte employees globally, which is its largest enterprise transaction to date. The next day, Anthropic also announced a strategic partnership with IBM.
According to an Agentforce press release, Salesforce claims to have 12,000 customers, far exceeding any competitor. Early pilot customers for the Agentforce 360 upgrade include Lennar, Adecco, and Pearson.
However, all of this faces a serious reality check. A recent study by MIT found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail before being put into production, as companies still struggle to justify the spending on these AI tools.
