Old News For Nerds, Non-Nerds: “Huh?”

You can't avoid talk of AI agents. The idea is incredibly promising: offload a bunch of your tasks to an AI that can reliably handle them without too much input from you. It feels like every enterprise software vendor in the world sees a path to agentic something-or-other.

So why not have an agent help me gather information about agents? I've used Deep Research tools from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity, and found that at the moment OpenAI's feels the best. So I focused Deep Research on Agentforce to try to find stories of real people using it. When I read what ChatGPT came back with, I was initially disappointed. I followed the links, and it seemed like nobody was talking about using Agentforce for actual work. It was either Salesforce-created case studies (which are appreciated but also, like any vendor made case studies, give you the sense of papering over the real story) or techies complaining on forums about general-purpose AI problems.

I thought ChatGPT just wasn't finding stuff. Agentforce has been around for forever! I mean, hello: October 2024 was the GA announcement. I went straight to Google and found the same. Beautiful Salesforce videos, and vague techie complaints not anchored to a real use case. And it hit me: October 2024 is the Stone Age in terms of AI tools for AI dorks like me, but if you just want to get stuff done for your business…you might not even have heard of Agentforce.

The velocity of AI tools and announcements greatly exceeds businesses' ability to exploit them. I can't tell you if any of the enterprise agent tools work well - adoption just isn't there yet. What feels like old news to us largely hasn't even broken through to the non-nerds. PM