Salesforce AI: How much Agentforce will cost small businesses and startups
Here’s what we know so far, based on conversations with senior Salesforce personnel and businesses already toying around with Agentforce technology.
Salesforce showcased its new Agentforce platform in San Francisco this week, promising businesses a new kind of autonomous business assistant.
The company says AI agents could revolutionise the way some of the world’s biggest enterprises operate.
But over the past few days, SmartCompany has investigated how smaller businesses can plug into the new AI system.
Here’s what we know so far, based on conversations with senior Salesforce personnel and businesses already toying around with Agentforce technology.
What are Salesforce agents?
Agents are digital assistants, capable of automatically receiving and interpreting data, conducting pre-set actions, and executing those tasks in accordance with safety guidelines.
Examples include customer-facing tasks, like handling item return queries, and internal tasks, like providing advice to salespeople based on a client’s prior purchasing history.
They can be created with very little or no code, including through Slack inputs or audio snippets.
Agents can be custom-built or cobbled together from prompts, functions, and models suggested by Salesforce itself.
Salesforce says unlike existing AI bots and copilot systems, its agents are trained on a business’ existing data and workflows.
The customer relationship management giant says embedding its agents with the Salesforce platform makes them more effective for business processes than consumer-level LLMs and AI models.
The Agentforce system utilises Atlas, Salesforce’s new AI reasoning system, and Data Cloud, its main data platform.
What is the most affordable way to access Agentforce?
For now, the most affordable options are the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Enterprise plans.
Foundations, a new, free Salesforce upgrade, adds agent-building capabilities (along with extra marketing, commerce, and Data Cloud features) to those plans. According to the company, it is an “entry-level plan that will give customers access to Agentforce Service Agent and SDR with low limits” with 1,000 conversations, 1,000 leads, and one sales coach.
At the time of writing, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Enterprise plans begin at $231 per user, per month.
Salesforce also says each conversation conducted by an agent will cost US$2 ($2.95), subject to volume discounts.
But cheaper access to Salesforce agents is on the way.
The most affordable entry points to the basic Salesforce platform are the Starter and Pro suites, starting at $35 per user/month, and $140 per user/month, respectively.
Jodi Innerfield, Salesforce’s senior director of product marketing launch strategy and emerging products, says those plans will gain new AI tools some time next year.
“We will be building the AI capability into Starter and Pro, it just will come later,” Innerfield tells SmartCompany.
The way Starter and Pro users access AI agents may differ from customers on pricier plans.
“The goal is to give companies the ability to get started, to try it… You’ll get something specific with Starter and Pro around agents, and there will be a way to add more if you need it,” says Innerfield.
Are Salesforce agents cost-effective?
This will vary from user to user.
Let’s imagine a boutique consultancy with well-compensated staff.
If that consultancy uses agents to handle time-consuming administrative tasks, staff could have more leeway to pursue lucrative deals, maximising the return on their labour.
On the other end of the spectrum, a small business with relatively simple operations may find cheaper ways to automate its internal processes.
When does it arrive?
Agentforce will become generally available for Sales and Service users from October 25, 2024.
What about security and hallucinations?
Salesforce posits that keeping business data in one holistic system, instead of feeding a spreadsheet for analysis by an external consumer-grade LLM, reduces the chance of data leaks.
Agentforce also connects to countless external sources of data; Salesforce says the use of zero-copy data retrieval is a way to keep those external data sources secure.
Of course, the Microsofts, OpenAIs, and Anthropics of the world all have their own security claims, too.
After all, every AI service provider risks enormous financial and reputational damage if they are found to mishandle data.
As far as hallucinations go, Salesforce says agents can be built with strict guardrails in place, including instructions to only use real data held by the customer.
Can I try it out in person?
Businesses in Sydney and Melbourne can get a hands-on test from October.
Will it live up to the hype?
While Salesforce is presenting Agentforce as a major development, CEO Marc Benioff himself is frank about the potential for things to go wrong as Agentforce rolls out.
As per a briefing with reporters after his keynote speech:
I’m sure that there’s going to be good stories and bad stories. I’m sure that some of this is going to work and some of it is going to go horribly wrong. I hope the horribly wrong stories are not as bad as I have them in my mind, but they could be, because they could be horrible. But they also could be magical, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen. This is kind of a moment in my career where we are rolling the white dice a little bit… but we believe that we have to do this.
The author travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.
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