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Salesforce partners alerted to AI Agent opportunities
Vendor shares details of current state of UK’s ability to use AI as it looks to shake-up the market
Salesforce is encouraging its channel to line up behind its AI Agent offering as an increasing number of customers look to evolve the tools they use beyond limited bots.
The call was made against a backdrop of sustained interest by partners and customers in artificial intelligence (AI) and the release of the vendor’s AI readiness index, which underlined that users were already reporting benefits of using AI agents.
Paul O’Sullivan, chief technology officer at Salesforce UKI, said there was a clear opportunity for its channel base to educate customers around the evolution of its AI tools and support them through the roll-out.
He said that although the concept of AI had been dominating discussions for a while, it was arming its channel with a fresh proposition to take out to users.
“AI has been in all of our lives, for a long, long time,” said O’Sullivan. “Everything from predictions to recommendations that we’ve seen that this is the first time that you move into a world where we’re going to see more augmentation in the workforce, between employees.
“Our research shows that 41% [of the tasks done] within an enterprise are repetitive tasks,” he added. “Imagine if we can unlock that 41% within businesses to help organisations do completely different things – re-engage with customers, connect with people.”
The Salesforce report highlighted the need for higher levels of small and medium-sized enterprise support if the UK is going to increase its AI adoption levels further.
More work to be done
Samantha Torrance, head of global government advisory at the Access Partnership, said the research showed there was more work to be done.
She said that on a government level, the UK was in line or ahead of most of its G7 peers, and in the private sector overall, the situation was not bad, but there were areas for improvement.
“The UK is ahead when we look at business sectors,” said Torrance. “But if we look at the absolute numbers, there is still a way to go in terms of really improving how ready business is.”
Salesforce is pursuing its Agentforce vision, with customers able to empower AI agents to make decisions and provide customers with a deeper experience than a basic chatbot.
O’Sullivan said it was evolving the proposition partners could pitch to customers, and able to offer a technology that would meet some of the use cases that eluded some rival technologies.
“While a lot of the narrative around generative AI has been quite speculative about these kinds of big risks and big challenges, I think, for a customer of one of those businesses, [they just want] something that works better,” he said.
“That gives me the answer that I was looking for more quickly,” added O’Sullivan. “You can see both why businesses will want to adopt and start to harness these kinds of technologies, but also where you start to see these real productivity growth benefits coming through. The year ahead is going to be about the kind of very practical applications that can make a real business difference.”
