Salesforce’s AI suite Agentforce has arguably become the focal point for most of the cloud giant’s efforts in 2025. Since its official announcement at Dreamforce 2024, the product has seen two major updates – namely Agentforce ‘2.0’ and Agentforce ‘2dx’ – before even turning six months old, emphasizing just how much work the mothership is pouring into their artificial intelligence package.
It’s clear from the keynote at TrailblazerDX 2025 that Salesforce hopes Agentforce is going to have a transformative effect on the world, providing the ‘digital labor’ necessary to solve an alleged global labor shortage. How exactly AI might shape the future is quite well-trodden territory, so here, Salesforce Ben examines how Agentforce, in particula,r might transform Salesforce’s own business in 2025.
1. A New Pricing Model
Salesforce was arguably the biggest pioneer in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry, effectively defining the model and refining it over its 26-year history.
Its products typically came as part of a subscription, with customers paying a rate per the number of ‘seats’ bought.
But there has been a break with tradition with Agentforce, which is instead charged on a consumption basis rather than per seat.
Perhaps this is simply an exception to the rule, with Salesforce looking to have customers pay more to get more value out of their AI suite. But, it could also represent a change in Salesforce’s business philosophy generally.
The company may have been inspired by the success of Data Cloud, which also has a usage-based/credit offering.
Marc Benioff said on the Salesforce Q4 2025 earnings call that the company had “phenomenal growth” with Data Cloud.
He said: “Data Cloud surpassed 50 trillion – that’s trillion with a T – records, doubling year over year as customers increase their consumption and investment in our data platform. That is only just becoming a critical and essential part of our solution.”
With Agentforce quickly becoming front-and-center of everything Salesforce, featuring in just about every update, advertisement and partnership announcement, it may not be unreasonable to speculate that this product’s pricing model was somewhat based off of the success of Data Cloud.
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2. ‘Global Labor Shortage’
Salesforce is claiming the world faces a ‘global labor shortage’ which it says is ‘slowing growth’. It offers its own AI product, Agentforce, and ‘digital labor’ generally as a handy solution to this supposed crisis.
It’s worth noting that shovel sellers may well be the first to spread rumors of “gold in them hills”, so to speak. While they obviously have an interest in you believing that, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is no gold to be had.
Taking Salesforce’s claim at face value for now, if it really is the case that there will not be enough people to fill all the jobs out there in the near future, then Agentforce – or at least, a product like Agentforce – could be just the solution humanity needs to maintain productivity levels.
While Agentforce is certainly at the heart of much of Salesforce’s marketing at the moment, it is not yet a major contributor to the company’s overall revenue, according to reports from when the Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 results were released.
President and Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver spoke about guidance for the 2026 Fiscal Year, with the company expecting a revenue of between $40.5B and $40.9B, according to a transcript of the call posted on The Motley Fool.
Amy said: “On Agentforce, we are incredibly excited about the customer momentum we are seeing. However, the adoption cycle is still early as we focus on deployment with our customers.
“As a result, we are assuming a modest contribution to revenue in fiscal ’26. We expect the momentum to build throughout the year, driving a more meaningful contribution in fiscal ’27.”
It is worth noting that Agentforce was made generally available on October 25, 2024, meaning it is not even half a year old, so a “modest” contribution to revenue is perhaps to be expected.
But, if Salesforce’s predictions of a ‘global labor shortage’ are true, it may well be the case that Agentforce becomes a far greater contributor to the company’s income.
3. Bigger Sales Teams, Smaller Dev Teams?
In December 2024, Salesforce Ben reported on comments made by the cloud giant’s CEO Marc Benioff about how they would not be hiring any more software engineers in 2025 amid productivity boosts from AI.
Marc told the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast that Agentforce was the “only thing that really matters today”.
He said: “We’re not adding any more software engineers [in 2025] because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% – to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering.”
But it wasn’t bad news for every role at Salesforce. Marc added that the company would have fewer support engineers because of their “agentic layer”, but there would be another “1,000 to 2,000 salespeople” who would “explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI”.
Salesforce Ben has done quite a lot of reporting on the topic of how entry-level Salesforce professionals might be affected by productivity boosts from artificial intelligence in the tech sector.
But, if we read into the CEO’s statements a bit, it may be the case that developer teams at Salesforce (and elsewhere) become smaller, with experienced devs overseeing and quality checking the work of AI tools.
Assuming this frees up labor costs for these companies, these funds could well be reinvested into more salespeople in the hopes of expanding revenue even further.
In terms of the big picture, this might mean that sales teams become a larger percentage of Silicon Valley companies, which could have some second-order consequences for the tech industry at large – including Salesforce, of course.
4. Partnership with Google and AWS
Earlier this year, Salesforce Ben reported how Salesforce and Google were collaborating on AI products in a bid to “bring Gemini to Agentforce”.
The agreement means that Salesforce customers are able to build Agentforce agents using Google’s Gemini AI and deploy Salesforce on Google Cloud. Agentforce will be able to use Google’s Gemini models, letting agents work with images, audio, and video.
This came after we wrote about Salesforce’s ‘Hyperforce’ project, including a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Tech giants are competing to have the best products, but it’s worth noting that collaboration between them has been known to happen.
With Salesforce teaming up with both Google and Amazon in recent years, it may not be far-fetched to imagine even closer relationships emerging between Silicon Valley competitors generally.
There’s an argument to be made that competition benefits the consumer, who is empowered to choose between a range of similar products when there are several iterations available, so it may be worth considering how not just the tech sector, but the world generally, will be affected by ever closer union between powerful technology corporations.
5. Transformation of Existing Salesforce Roles
Agentforce is not just a customer service chatbot. There are a wide range of use cases for AI, including internally, within businesses, to boost productivity.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Joe Rogan Experience that his company would have an AI that could “be a mid-level engineer and write code”.
The implications for developers generally seem to be clear – if AI can in just a few moments produce code that would take a human hours or days, then your skills may well be seen as less valuable than they were before the emergence of these tools.
Salesforce admins are arguably not exempt either. Tools like OpenAI’s Operator, which can take control of your browser and perform basic tasks after being given prompts in natural language, could feasibly perform some very basic admin tasks, scaling in difficulty as the technology becomes more advanced.
While it might not be the case – yet – that AI has made these positions completely redundant, it seems inevitable at this point that admins, devs, and many other Salesforce professionals will see their roles change drastically as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced. It is the nature of the technology industry to innovate, create solutions, and improve efficiency in previously untested ways.
How exactly people within the industry, and at Salesforce specifically, will be affected remains to be seen, but one thing seems certain right now: They will be affected in one way or another.
But the upshot of this could be that implementation costs go down, with people receiving more value with the addition of AI.
Final Thoughts
To quote Marc Benioff: “Everything needs to become about Agentforce at Salesforce – this is the only thing that really matters today.”
Strong words – and they may in fact not be as big an exaggeration as some critics might say.
If Salesforce believes there is a kind of “gold rush” to be had amid a supposed global labor shortage, then it’s arguable that they really do have the best shovels in town on offer – in the form of Agentforce.
But whether this product really is set to change the world or not, what seems apparent is that AI generally will have a significant impact on the lives of just about everyone working in and around the technology industry.
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