TDX 2025: Salesforce vaunts Agentforce 2dx as evolved agentic AI platform

Salesforce unveiled enhancements of its Agentforce agentic AI platform at its developer conference in San Francisco this week that point towards ever-increasing virtual agent autonomy. 

It also announced the launch of a marketplace, AgentExchange, to speed up AI agent deployment for what Salesforce calls “Agentblazers”. The name recalls the AppExchange the vendor launched in 2005. Salesforce has dubbed the development of the platform, launched at Dreamforce 2024, Agentforce 2dx.  

In the main keynote on the first day of the conference, Patrick Stokes, executive vice-president of product and industries marketing, said the big picture significance of the vendor’s agentic AI philosophy is a global labour shortage driven by a slowdown in world population growth. He said agentic AI will find its mission there, as a means of building a “digital labour platform”. 

The vendor said it is going beyond what it calls a “reactive, user-initiated world of chat interfaces, enabling proactive AI agents to work behind the scenes, without constant human oversight”. 

Salesforce executives are putting emphasis on what they call a “holy trinity” of data, apps and agents that they contend only their company offers in the IT market. 

AgentExchange contains a library of templates and actions, allowing Salesforce partners to list their components for sale. The vendor is launching it with more than 200 initial partners.  

Adam Evans, executive vice-president and general manager of Salesforce’s AI Platform said, in the statement announcing Agentforce2dx: “Companies today have more work than workers, and Agentforce is stepping in to fill the gap. By extending digital labour beyond CRM, we’re making it easier than ever for businesses to embed agentic AI into any workflow or application to handle routine tasks, augment employees and connect with customers.

“With deep integrations across Salesforce’s digital labour platform, CIOs, IT leaders and developers can seamlessly build agents and automate work wherever it happens, driving efficiency, fuelling innovation and unlocking new opportunities.”  

In the same statement, George Pokorny, senior vice-president of Global Customer Success at Salesforce customer OpenTable, said: “OpenTable is partnering with Salesforce’s Agentforce platform to help OpenTable’s customer service agents better serve our restaurants and diners. Three weeks in, it is handling 73% of all restaurant web queries. This is a 50% improvement from our previous tool and we expect this number to further increase once Agentforce is launched to the general audience.”  

Agentforce, according to Salesforce, includes pro-code and low-code tools to help admins and developers build, deploy, and supervise Agentforce agents. 

Its Agentforce Developer Edition, a free environment for accessing Agentforce and Salesforce’s Data Cloud to prototype use cases was also announced. 

Dion Hinchcliffe, vice-president and practice lead of CIO Insights for Futurum Group, said while endorsing Agentforce: “Some 89% of CIOs identify AI and automation as critical to their digital strategy in 2025, yet 60% of AI projects fail to deliver clear ROI. Agentforce bridges this gap with pre-built workflows that deliver measurable impact fast.

“While DIY agent-based AI projects can take up to a year to implement, Agentforce customers go live in just 4 to 6 weeks, realising value 3 to 4 times faster. As AI agents become embedded across business operations, from engineering to go-to-market, they will fundamentally reshape how teams engage with customers and partners.

“Instead of siloed interactions across CRM, support platforms and marketing tools, AI agents can coordinate responses, escalate issues, and optimise workflows in real time. Companies that harness this shift – especially in their partner ecosystems – will gain a competitive edge in both performance and market reach.”

Adecco Group, a recruitment company, said it is harnessing Data Cloud, Salesforce’s Mulesoft and Agentforce to centralise more than 40 instances of their data. 

Greg Shewmaker, senior vice-president of global operations and AI at The Adecco Group, said: “Agentforce is completely transforming our recruitment process. By automating resume screening and using AI to engage with millions of candidates, we can connect with every applicant and make sure they feel valued and informed. This not only improves the experience for candidates but also frees up our recruiters to focus on building meaningful relationships, all while boosting our efficiency and scalability.” 

In another plenary session at the first day of the conference, on Wednesday 5 March, given over to customer questions to the vendor’s senior management team, users said Salesforce was unduly focused on AI at the expense of the workaday reality of their use of its core CRM software.

Many applauded the complaint of one customer that no golden hoodie was conferred at the conference, a highly unusual omission that might bespeak a neglect of the culture of the Salesforce user community.