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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company was “all in on Agentforce” when it launched in 2024, but so far only 34% of customers have adopted it. As a result, the company lost more than $200 billion in market value and analysts say Agentforce is not ready for prime time.
So, are businesses not interested in agentic AI, or are they just not ready? And what does this mean for marketers?
When Salesforce introduced Agentforce, the platform was pitched as a way for businesses to create and deploy autonomous AI agents to handle customer service, sales, and marketing tasks.
Benioff said agents are the next big evolution in enterprise software and will transform the way businesses interact with customers and automate routine work. Initial customer response, however, has been mixed, with many users reporting they spent as much time preparing and organizing data as they did using AI.
The debate intensified this month after KeyBanc Capital Markets downgraded Salesforce, citing slow adoption of Agentforce and warning that only about 23,000 of the company’s 150,000 customers use the platform. Bernstein released his own downgrade the same day, an unusual convergence for a company the size of Salesforce.
Customers are not ready for autonomous AI
KeyBanc’s research highlights two reasons why Agentforce adoption has been slower than Salesforce expected.
The first is data preparation. AI agents depend on clean, structured, connected data to make decisions and complete tasks, but many businesses still struggle with fragmented CRM records, disconnected systems, and inconsistent customer information.
The second is the maturity of the product. Based on conversations with Salesforce partners and customers, analysts concluded that Agentforce was still in the early stages of adoption, with many deployments still limited to proof-of-concept projects rather than enterprise-wide deployments. Their CIO survey also found that more organizations expect to reduce their Salesforce spending over the next year rather than increase it.
“The partners we speak with are just beginning to convert Agentforce proofs of concept into live contracts, and more CIOs in our survey expect to deprioritize Salesforce in their IT budget than vice versa over the next 12 months,” KeyBanc analysts led by Jackson Ader wrote in their report.
This suggests that the challenge is not to convince companies of the potential of agentic AI. This gives them the data and operational foundation needed to deploy it successfully.
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Wall Street questions Salesforce’s AI strategy
Analysts’ concerns have had financial consequences. Salesforce shares have fallen more than 50% from their December 2024 peak, wiping out more than $200 billion in market value as investors question whether Agentforce can become the company’s next major growth engine.
KeyBanc summed up its concerns bluntly: “Customer data is not necessary to do meaningful AI work” and “Agentforce, as a product, just isn’t there.”
Salesforce rejects this assessment. Benioff publicly dismissed the KeyBanc report as a “bad choice” and pointed to internal metrics showing that Agentforce is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history.
“People think our backs are against the wall when in reality the opportunities have never been greater,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Not all analysts share KeyBanc’s view. Andreessen Horowitz recently reported that companies investing heavily in AI increased their median Salesforce spend by 3% over the previous three months. Guggenheim upgraded the stock to Buy, and Monness, Crespi and Hardt also raised its rating, arguing that Salesforce shares have significant upside potential despite current concerns.
Salesforce is also investing to address issues that slow adoption. The company added technology that automatically extracts customer data from external sources and expanded its data management capabilities through acquisitions, including Informatica, to improve data integration and governance before customers deploy AI agents.
The takeaway for marketers
The Agentforce debate is less about Salesforce and more about the state of enterprise AI.
For marketers, this changes the priority. Organizations hoping to automate campaign execution, lead qualification, customer service, and personalization will likely see better results from improving data quality, integration, and governance than from deploying more AI agents before their CRM data is ready.
Agentforce adoption rate is a measure of enterprise AI readiness. The companies that move the fastest won’t necessarily be the ones that buy the latest AI software. They will be the ones who have already built the database these systems need to produce meaningful results.
The position Salesforce woes highlight marketing’s agentic AI woes appeared first on MarTech.
