Salesforce was one of the first major technology firms to announce their agentic AI pivot at Dreamforce in September 2024. This meant moving away from purely GPT-enabled apps to a new future where fully autonomous agents can work alongside a human workforce.
But there was one startup that announced its agent platform seven months before Salesforce – Bret Taylor’s Sierra.
The History of Bret Taylor and Salesforce
Bret Taylor joined Salesforce in 2016, after the cloud giant acquired his startup, Quip, for $750M. A serial entrepreneur through and through, Bret has held roles at Google, co-creating Google Maps, moving on to sell his startup “FriendFeed” to Facebook for $50M, and progressing to CTO, credited with the invention of the “like” button.
After rising the ranks at Salesforce, spearheading the $27.7B Slack acquisition in 2020, he was promoted to Co-CEO alongside Marc Benioff in November 2021.
Unfortunately, after only a year in the role, Salesforce announced that Taylor would be stepping down from his role and moving on to other ventures. Initial reports suggested that Taylor left on good terms, but the Wall Street Journal later revealed that tensions were brewing between the co-CEOs before Taylor’s departure.
It was widely regarded that Taylor was being courted by Benioff as part of his succession plan. Whilst there may have been issues between the co-CEOs, it does seem that Taylor really did want to return to his entrepreneurial roots.
Regardless of the reasons, losing a major player like Taylor was considered a blow to Salesforce’s executive talent. A man who is now also the Chairman of OpenAI, following Sam Altman’s dramatic firing.
The Sierra Threat
In an exposé by The Information entitled “A Marc Benioff Protégé Has Morphed Into Salesforce’s Big Worry”, new details emerge that Taylor has his sights focused on Salesforce’s market share in the agentic revolution.
In a nutshell, Sierra is focused on transforming the customer experience, providing agents to answer customer queries, solve problems, as well as take action. Sierra also offers a voice product, engaging with customers via call, functionality that Salesforce is expected to announce very soon.
In a world where companies are struggling with the use cases in which agents can be implemented, customer support and experience remain one of the most obvious solutions, and one of the most impactful for businesses in terms of ROI and cost savings.
As The Information’s article goes on to say, Taylor and Sierra are directly targeting Salesforce customers. Sonos, SiriusXM, and Casper are all flagship customers of Salesforce, but can be seen listed on the Sierra website below, having implemented the new product.
Should Salesforce Be Worried?
With any rapidly evolving technology that changes the way consumers and businesses interact with the world, it has the potential to upend the foundations of enterprise software, dislodge established market leaders, and redefine industry norms.
This happened with AWS in the cloud infrastructure revolution, Netflix in the streaming wars, as well as Salesforce itself, pioneering cloud-based CRM and ultimately winning market share from the incumbents.
Competing against a behemoth like Salesforce is no mean feat. They dominate the CRM and customer support industries and support many companies’ end-to-end customer experience process. From marketing, to sales, to support, and beyond.
However, Sierra’s threat has prompted a response from Salesforce, who has responded by sending teams of sales engineers to dissuade them from using Sierra and explaining why Agentforce is better, The Information reports.
This, coupled with the fact that Sierra is led by a man who understands Salesforce’s business inside out and has relationships with many of their customers, could pose a real threat to Agentforce’s growth. A metric that everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem, as well as Wall Street, are watching intently.
Agentforce Against the World
But of course, Sierra is not the only threat to Salesforce’s Agentforce world dominance plans. Startups and enterprises alike are all vying for a decent slice of the agentic AI market. OpenAI are also a huge threat that could upset the world order of enterprise software, especially after their announcement that ChatGPT can now connect to enterprise tools such as HubSpot, Box, SharePoint and Teams.
These recent moves could have perhaps prompted Salesforce’s decision to block rivals from using Slack data.
This is a market that is wide open for disruption, and we are only in the early innings. Coupled with the fact that AI startups in 2025 are growing much faster than their SaaS equivalents in the 2010s and early 2020s, we can expect this market to move quickly, with winners being determined in the next couple of years.
But it’s not all rosy in the world of agents. Agentforce hasn’t been immune to criticism since its announcement, and even Sierra’s product threw up incorrect answers whilst The Information was testing on OluKai’s website, a current customer of the product.
Final Thoughts
Sierra’s targeting of Salesforce’s customers is something that isn’t an existential issue to the cloud giant’s core business, but it does affect the only metric that really matters to enterprises at the moment – revenue growth from AI products.
With Agentforce running at around $100M ARR, and The Information reporting that Sierra is on pace to generate tens of millions of dollars this year, they could pose a serious threat to Agentforce’s growth.
The post Bret Taylor vs. Marc Benioff: The Agent War We Should Have Seen Coming appeared first on Salesforce Ben.
