Salesforce has been working on AI-enabled tools for around a decade and, as such, was able to announce EinsteinGPT in March ‘23 – only a few months after ChatGPT was released to the masses.
However, one drawback was the paywall blocking Salesforce’s army of Trailblazer evangelists from experimenting with new use cases for this cutting-edge technology, which could then potentially be implemented in live environments. But Salesforce’s AI pricing is about to be flipped on its head…
Salesforce AI Freemium Pricing
Over the past couple of months, there has been a huge amount of Salesforce news, the Own and Tenyx acquisition, Agentforce, and the AI Specialist certification. However, a piece of news you might have missed was Salesforce Foundations becoming freely available to all Enterprise customers and above.
In a nutshell, Foundations contains several new and upgraded features that appear in the relatively new Starter and Pro Suite product set. This includes commerce payment links, email marketing, and Data Cloud functionality.
But at Dreamforce ‘24, it was announced that Agentforce would become part of Foundations, meaning that the entire Salesforce AI suite will soon be coming to an org near you.
Below, you can see the full extent of the Salesforce Foundations features, including Agentforce features, which consist of turnkey agents for Sales and Service, Agent Builder, and the previously announced Prompt Builder, Model Builder, and Data Cloud. These tools were previously only available via expensive licenses, such as the Sales Cloud Einstein license, which costs $50 per user per month as an add-on to your existing subscription, or the $500 per user per month Einstein 1 Sales license.
The Missed Opportunity
This is a smart move by Salesforce, but it has been a missed opportunity that they could have capitalized on over the last year or so. Vernon Keenan of SalesforceDevops covered this in an article published the week of Dreamforce ‘24, “Why Salesforce Trailblazers Don’t Care About AI”, and he has a point…
Typically, many new core Salesforce features are released directly into Salesforce orgs with each release. Think about Salesforce Lightning, the App Builder, and Flow, for example.
But over the past few years, Salesforce has been bundling new products and features into higher license tiers, such as Einstein Conversation Insights and Sales Engagement within the Unlimited $330 per user per month edition. This is what ultimately happened with Salesforce’s GenAI features, which all required you to pay quite a considerable uplift in license cost.
But can you imagine a world where Flow was a paid add-on? Or where Salesforce Lightning requires you to upgrade to an unlimited license? Would you do it? Maybe after extensive testing to ensure you got ROI, but I doubt you would upgrade all the licenses in your org to this new technology without first trialing and implementing a proof of concept. In addition, Salesforce would miss out on their loyal evangelists in the form of Trailblazers creating content, videos, and writing about their experiences on LinkedIn.
This is exactly what has happened with Salesforce’s GenAI, and over the coming months, user-generated content will be critical to evangelizing and kicking off AI adoption across the Salesforce ecosystem.
This technology is so new and transformative that companies aren’t ready to adopt it without performing extensive testing, fleshing out use cases, and performing experiments with small groups of users.
This decision by Salesforce is very much in line with previous tactics. When Salesforce originally announced Einstein in 2016, paid tools such as Einstein Opportunity Scoring were slowly made available to those on Enterprise licenses and above.
Summary: The Future of Salesforce AI
There is renewed optimism in the Salesforce ecosystem after this year’s Dreamforce. Agentforce is a more tangible platform for many to understand the true impact of the AI revolution. Whilst Prompt Builder and GenAI can do anything, Salesforce has created two initial turnkey use cases for Agents, Sales, and Service, with many more agents expected in the future, including Ops, Finance, Analytics, and HR, to help customers and partners get started with building high-value agents quickly.
Salesforce has not provided details on how AI has impacted their quarterly revenue growth, but it’s clear they need a boost as growth hovers near an all-time low.
However, it’s clear that Salesforce AI hasn’t achieved widespread adoption yet. As I discussed in my recent article, Salesforce’s own statistics from the Dreamforce ‘24 keynote reveal only 122,000 prompts running per week compared to 82 billion flows – this amounts to less than one prompt per Salesforce customer each week.
But Salesforce is doing everything right.
They have revamped their messaging with Agentforce, released agents and a new Agent Builder, and have made the foundational tools within Agentforce Freemium.
I have no doubt that this will create a renewed buzz around GenAI in the Salesforce ecosystem. You would expect nearly all Salesforce professionals to be experimenting with this technology, as well as creating content online and at events to talk about their experiences.
We’ve been told for two years now that if we don’t start working with GenAI then we may get left behind. Although this hasn’t happened yet, the turning point may be coming very soon…
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