Salesforce’s ‘hard pivot’ to AI agents pays off with an 11% stock surge. Now comes the hard part

Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc., during a Bloomberg Television interview. He is gesturing with his hands and mid-speech. He wears a professional jacket and shirt. (Credit: David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images)

In September, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Fortune that his company was making a “hard pivot” to its new AI agent platform Agentforce. Thousands of customers would attend workshops at the business software maker's annual conference to learn how to use the technology, which lets users quickly build AI-powered agents that can make decisions and act on information including automating customer service tasks. And he set a goal of tens of thousands of customers using the product in their operations by January 2025. 

That may seem like a tall order, but at least for now, Salesforce's investors have faith. After the company reported its quarterly earnings yesterday (which included 80 mentions of Agentforce during a call with Wall Street analysts) its shares climbed 11% to a record high.