For at least a decade, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has emphasized the importance of shoshin, the Japanese word for “beginner’s mind”—including in a 2015 Fortune interview in which he said companies must “constantly be creating the future” and “always be ready to start again.”
In today’s generative AI era, Salesforce is indeed starting again to create its future, with what Benioff calls the company’s “hard pivot” to Agentforce—a new AI agent platform that will make a splashy debut at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference this month. Agentforce lets users quickly build and deploy autonomous AI-powered agents—pieces of software that can make decisions and act on information—that run on top of Salesforce’s existing apps for businesses and automate customer service tasks. Agentforce is meant to be a significant step beyond AI chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Salesforce’s own Einstein GPT, which answer questions but cannot complete tasks that require multiple steps and decision-making.
