Agentforce Kickoff, San Francisco

The day after the 2024 presidential election, Salesforce's co-founder Marc Benioff assembles the 500 top leaders of his 80,000-person company in a windowless basement room at the Ritz Carlton San Francisco for an emergency summit.

Security is tight: employees are required to scan their badge at every elevator and hallway; bags are checked; homework is mandated.

The election isn't mentioned. The date is a coincidence. The topic at hand is what Benioff believes is "the biggest thing to happen in any of our lifetimes" - something he's decided to call Agentforce.

It will soon be a recognizable brand: Salesforce is preparing a massive TV campaign, and there's already a billboard on Highway 101 to the SFO airport with the company's trademark cartoon animals, rebuilt as robots in Ray-Bans, attesting "I Chose Agentforce."

In a few months, there would even be a commercial during that strategic conversation between the Chiefs and the Eagles otherwise known as Super Bowl LIX. All of this AI awareness features Salesforce's brand ambassador, Matthew McConaughey, at his Texas-whimsical best, reciting lines he seems to have written himself.

The campaign's tag line morphs to "What AI Was Meant to Be."1

Now the last time you saw an ad during the Super Bowl for a CRM company was . never.i Salesforce's investment in associating its brand with AI and in making this astonishing, unsettling technology seem less frightening is unprecedented.

But this is an unprecedented era, an unanticipated chance. Almost nothing is predictable.

For one thing, when Benioff appears at the basement meeting wearing jeans and a charcoal sport jacket, he's . limping? He wears a plastic boot on his left foot.

This could be an awkward moment, but he turns to his people at the front of the room and says, "I'm wearing a boot."

They relax. All is well at the top.

So I was in French Polynesia, about 400 miles from Tahiti, he starts. And I'm on the fifth day of scuba diving and I jump out of the boat and I hit something on the way down. I walked around on it for a few days, but then I got an MRI . and turns out, I ruptured my Achilles.

And so on . about his decision to avoid surgery and try a nonsurgical technique involving large needles, meditation, and no anesthesia. One doesn't have to spend much time in Benioff's orbit to learn that absolutely everything is a story with him. He's part of a long line of maggidim, itinerant storytellers unfurling inspiring homilies with a message.ii

Later in the day, after much agent-related discussion, Benioff gets back to that message:

So I'm scheduled for a CAT scan . but is there any follow-up? It would have been nice to have somebody reach out and tell me what to do, update me on what happened, keep me informed about the process. But nothing. It would have been a perfect job for an AI agent.

And bing-bang: "Any company that's adding an agentic layer is putting an expert by their side to help deal with customers," he says.

An agentic layer. And agents. And of course Agentforce. That's the point.

Now Agentforce is a way to build, customize, test, deploy, and monitor AI agents. And AI agents are simply very malleable pieces of software that can interact with humans, automate business processes, and make plans and decisions. They're a form of digital labor, or what Agentforce version 2.0, released the following month, would call "A digital labor platform for building a limitless workforce."2

At the time of the emergency conclave, Agentforce is all of four weeks old. It emerges - as most dramatic moments in this founder-led, 25-year-old company do - directly from Benioff's late-night brainstorms.

As usual for Salesforce's top-to-top retreats, the Agentforce Kickoff is held over 12-hour days with few breaks. The hotel may have chandeliers, but they are unremarked on, and the spa is a fragrant, lifeless desert.

And there is a consciously cult-like vibe, in the positive sense of Jim Collins' classic From Good to Great, which said: "A cult-like culture can actually enhance a company's ability to pursue Big Hairy Audacious Goals, precisely because it creates that sense of being part of an elite organization that can accomplish just about anything."3

Just about anything is exactly what needs accomplishing now. It's one of those moments - a call to action, a decisive point, when ability meets opportunity and a historic advantage is won or lost - and Benioff wants to make sure his team is alive to their chance.

There is no ambiguity here. This time will not return.

"All of us have to change our minds and realize," he says, "that this is the single biggest opportunity of our lives."

And: "This is the single most important piece of technology to come along in the history of business."

Obviously, he's had an epiphany. He's seen a future. The development of so-called large-language AI models like OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini and High-Flyer's DeepSeek made software conversational and smart. Seemingly overnight, computers could look up information, summarize and organize, make plans and suggestions - do a lot of the things that people do but faster and with better grammar.

But there were still limitations. AI couldn't really do much work, not the kind you and I do when we're, well, at work. Salesforce was going to change that. It was going to put AI to work using virtual agents, AI agents that could work alongside humans, making everything easier.

They already exist. The group sits through a live demonstration of an agent that helps a family of four plan and change a trip on the fly to a theme park, asking questions, making reservations and changes, getting real-time updates on ride status - all using slangy American rat-a-tat without talking to a single human being.

And they're new. Benioff tells a suspenseful story of the build-up to Dreamforce, the company's annual mega-event that takes over downtown San Francisco, held four weeks earlier. Agents weren't originally part of his keynote until some customer meetings and an encounter with a prescient tech-startup CTO rerouted his code.

"We were doing the [customer] demo," he says, mentioning an impressive agentic AI case study of a European luxe customer that trained its customer-service agents to speak in a "luxurious" tone of voice, "and the CTO said, 'That might just be the best software ever made.'"

So he tells the team to "tear up the keynote" and "go all-in on Agentforce."

There's another story, of the time he met with Steve Jobs, years ago, and Jobs was launching the iPad. And Jobs tells Benioff a secret that wasn't really a secret: he only did one thing at a time. Just one.

Benioff decides that from now on Salesforce would only do Agentforce. This is what is called focus.

Two days; 10 in-person customers, talking about their Agentforce adventures on the ground; hands-on Agentforce training for everyone in the room, 500 highly educated, meticulously dressed achievers going back to school to learn to use a tool.

And it's unsettling how good the software already is. It can already mimic human-like call center agents and sales reps. It can already build marketing plans, write campaign briefs and emails, and create websites with personalized images and thousands of product descriptions.

It can write elegant computer code and document it without complaint. And building an agent using Agentforce is almost as easy as writing this sentence. It does not feel like computer programming but rather conversation, which is the future of software it seems.

Across the two days, there is another message as well.

A strong case is made by the head of sales, the heads of product and engineering, a rising sales star, and various customers and sales reps walking through Agentforce deal recaps and post-mortems - from everyone on stage, in fact, in a concerted show of spontaneous conviction - that for various reasons, Salesforce itself is uniquely positioned to take the market.

"Almost by accident," Benioff says at one point, "we built exactly what we needed to do Agentforce."

He is referring to the Salesforce platform itself, with its secure global infrastructure; its flexible architecture, stressing what's called metadata and a low-code user interface - above all, the fact that customers are already using it to do things agents liked to do, such as customer service, sales outreach, e-commerce, and digital marketing.

Competitors would notice, of course. Shortly after Dreamforce, which was "all-in" on Agentforce, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella took to the stage himself at Microsoft's UK sales kickoff to demonstrate an email-writing agent. Within weeks, other competitors like HubSpot and ServiceNow announced their agent-forward strategies.

Yet Salesforce undeniably had momentum. A week after the secret conclave, Salesforce's stock hit an all-time high. Formerly...