Survey Finds Agentforce Enriching Salesforce Admins With A Catch

As Salesforce is banking its future on Agentforce, its shorthand for what Generative AI is capable of delivering, the ramifications of agentic automation on its customers and key stakeholders could be more far-reaching than previously expected, an outcome that could transform the vendor, or for that matter the enterprise applications market.

What follows are among the key findings from one of the largest surveys of its kind polling hundreds of Salesforce Administrators to determine how Generative AI will be impacting the lives of an influential group of gatekeepers:

1. Two-thirds of Salesforce Administrators agree that Agentforce will enrich their role in the future.
2. More than 45% of Salesforce Administrators agree that their role as a gatekeeper for the use of Salesforce will become more challenging with more AI agents than human users accessing Salesforce.
3. Eighty-nine percent of Salesforce Administrators agree that they must reskill in order to stay relevant in the new era of Agentforce.
4. The most requested new skills cited by Salesforce Administrators include prompt building, testing, security, integration and analytics.
5. For the No. 1 vendor in the CRM market, the silver lining is that there could be a steady increase in the number of Salesforce users in 2025.
6. While 76% of respondents cite the number of Salesforce users these Administrators manage has increased since 2020 – a period punctuated by the pandemic, 70% of respondents agree that they expect to be managing more Salesforce users in 2025.

Salesforce Agentforce Special Survey, APPS RUN THE WORLD December 2024

With 234 Salesforce Administrators responding to the latest independent survey conducted between November and December 2024, their mixed reactions about the impact of Agentforce underscore the tightrope Salesforce is walking.

Nearly each and every one of its 150,000+ customers has at least one Salesforce Administrator on hand to perform a range of tasks from issuing credentials to access Salesforce data to running reports and developing extensions.

Following the general availability of Agentforce in October 2024, Salesforce needs all the support that it can get from these Salesforce Administrators, whose livelihoods and skills may fall short or become overwhelmed when being asked to potentially manage an infinite number of digital agents. In fact, these digital agents could in fact be subsuming the task of becoming Salesforce Administrators themselves. In other words, the drone operators could be asked to run drones that may be out of their reach.

“There is not going to be a role for Salesforce Administrators (because of Agentforce)’’ is how one Salesforce Administrator working for a large India-based system integrator likes to put it.

Others are wary about the impact of Agentforce. One survey respondent working for a 300-person marketing agency in New York, opined in the questionnaire with this comment: “I’m the solo admin for our CRM and Pardot, and am drowning. I unfortunately don’t have time to learn any new functionality or to go through the process of introducing it to my firm.’’

Another respondent working for one of the largest banks in Central America, added,”Troubleshooting has become more difficult as well as security on large scale organizations, more robust debugging tools must be available.’’

Sourabha Jayanna, a Salesforce specialist at software vendor Revinate in Palo Alto, CA, for four years until she left recently, said the job of a Salesforce Administrator has to evolve and low-level access management tasks will be rendered obsolete. Jayanna, who is now with Intuit, added that she is optimistic about what Agentforce can bring over DIY approach, having spent a year building its own digital agent at Revinate but to no avail.

In response to the survey findings, Salesforce provides ARTW with this comment:  “Agentforce is built on the (Salesforce) Platform, and Salesforce Admins govern the Platform, so here as well the role of the Admin (and the Developer) is critical.’’ See additional responses from Salesforce below.

What works to Salesforce’s advantage is the fact that any meaningful contribution from Agentforce to ease the workload of its customers will be well received.

Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect and Administrator at BACA Systems in Lake Orion, MI, expects Agentforce to add considerable value to his company by improving customer experience, rather than cutting costs. Because of BACA’s increased investments in Salesforce since 2022, Russo said his workload has actually increased given the kitchen countertop machinery provider’s expanded use of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and now Agentforce specifically for prompt building.

Russo expects the payoff will come overtime, having already seen tangible benefits earlier from using Einstein Co-pilot, the predecessor to Agentforce, for predictive analytics especially in email marketing that combines personalization with proprietary sales insights derived from direct customer interactions.

Salesforce will need more converts like BACA, which standardizes everything on Salesforce for CRM, Gen AI and ERP following its recent migration from Sage to Rootstock, which runs on the Salesforce platform.

During its latest earnings call in December 2024, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said it has signed 200 customers for Agentforce, followed by upward revision to 2,000 the number of Agentforce deals at different stages of being signed during its recent Agentforce 2.0 launch.

For the time being, Salesforce is sitting pretty in CRM applications with a 29% market share, or a 21-point advantage over Adobe, the No. 2 vendor. But competition is stiffening with Adobe remaining a looming danger and the deep-pocket Microsoft representing a much-reviled existential threat. In recent public statements, Benioff has been chastising the subpar performance of Microsoft Co-Pilot and its lack of progress. Meanwhile, ServiceNow is now partnering with Five9, Genesys, and Zoom in its bid to expand into the CRM space, having already dominated IT Service Management.

Similarly, the renewed efforts from Oracle and SAP could siphon shares away from Salesforce because of their database and ERP platform advantage. The same applies to Zoho with its suite and embedded hyperscaler, as shown in the following table that shows the middling growth of Salesforce since 2019 because of the law of the big numbers.

Key CRM Applications Vendors And Their 2019-2024 Growth, $M and CAGR

Source: ARTW Buyer Insights Technographic Database, December 2024

Both nCino and Veeva have been closely associated with Salesforce with the former relying on its platform to sell into the banking vertical and the latter expecting to sever its ties in 2025 after years of co-developing solutions for life sciences customers. Their CAGR’s performance over Salesforce’s is a reminder of  the delicate balance that Salesforce needs to strike to sustain a vibrant ecosystem without compromising the staying power of its core products.

Another matter of concern is Salesforce‘s customer attrition and revenue leakage, which has been stuck in the 8% range in recent quarters, compared with 7.5% in January 2023. For a vendor the size of Salesforce, any rise in customer attrition and revenue leakage suggests bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in a given year.

One of the most admired chief executives in the Cloud, Benioff, the cofounder who led Salesforce for decades and took full control once again in 2022 after briefly sharing the top post with Bret Taylor in 2021, is in no mood to let it fester. Since a companywide reorganization in 2023 that saw a 10% headcount reduction at Salesforce, there has been a constant shuffling of its top executives.

The latest was Clara Shih, the CEO of Salesforce AI who was ubiquitous during Dreamforce keynotes and executive appearances talking up Agentforce at the September 2024 event. Shih left Salesforce in November 2024 to become vice president and head of Business AI at Meta. Salesforce named Adam Evans EVP and GM Salesforce AI after Shih’s departure.

Another recent appointment is Kris Billmaier, who became EVP & GM of Sales Cloud in October 2024, replacing Ketan Karkhanis, who left a month earlier just days after keynoting at Dreamforce. In fact, five of its six officials in charge of its pillars including Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Tableau, Commerce Cloud, and Platform have only been in charge of those products since 2023. If change is what it takes to sustain Salesforce, Benioff’s mantra is to start from the top. One of the ways to stem the attrition is to expand into activity based pricing as in the case of Agentforce’s conversation cost, which starts at $2.

For more than a decade, Salesforce has been adopting variations of activity-based pricing by custom object, org, order, unit, login, API calls and gross merchandise volume  for different  products, Agenforce’s conversation cost represents a departure from Einstein’s per user per month pricing suggesting Salesforce’s confidence in monetizing AI agents at a granular level.

While it is too early to tell how Salesforce would want to incentivize big users of Agentforce, suffice it to say that it is likely to follow its typical practice of offering different tiers of price breaks between 20% and 47%+ off list.

Ultimately, the more conversation volume taken over by digital agents to connect customers and businesses will drive better results for all the parties involved by optimizing satisfaction for the former and business value for the latter. That in turn will lead to lower costs of doing business for Agentforce’s paying customers, which in turn will result in a more sticky relationship. After all, once ATMs, drones, robots, and now digital agents start running 24X7 they cannot be easily switched out as the costs for doing so would be prohibitive.

If Agentforce were to become a smashing success, it could portend a volcanic eruption that disrupts the lives of key stakeholders like Salesforce Administrators, but also the growth trajectory for the vendor and the enterprise applications market for years to come. 

Methodology of Agentforce Special Survey

Role of Salesforce Administrators In Agent-Ready Salesforce is the title of the Agentforce Special Survey.

Funded and executed 100% by Apps Run The World, the survey was conducted online between November 12, 2024 and December 19, 2024 with supplemental results from in-person interviews held at the Dreamforce event in September 2024.

In total, more than 5,000 Salesforce Administrators have been contacted and at least 234 are considered validated respondents who have completed the survey after being verified to be working as Salesforce Administrators for organizations in more than 50 countries.

Among the organizations they represent are Balder Danmark A/S, Imperial Brands PLC, Philips, T-Mobile and Uber Technologies.

For a full list of these organizations and their history of running Salesforce, please register and sign up as a subscriber to ARTW to access the full survey report and purchases made by millions of software customers around the world.

Here are the questions and answers being raised in the survey:

1. How long have you been a full-time Salesforce Administrator?
2. Agentforce will enrich the role of Salesforce Administrators in the future:

• Strongly Disagree
• Disagree
• Neutral
• Agree
• Strongly Agree

3. The role of Salesforce Administrators as a gatekeeper for the use of Salesforce will become challenging with more AI Agents than human users accessing Salesforce.

• Strongly Disagree
• Disagree
• Neutral
• Agree
• Strongly Agree

4. Salesforce Administrators must reskill in order to stay relevant by taking on new responsibilities such as analytics, integration, security, training, testing and other skills, please specify:

• Strongly Disagree
• Disagree
• Neutral
• Agree
• Strongly Agree

5. The number of Salesforce users that you manage has increased since 2020.

• Strongly Disagree
• Disagree
• Neutral
• Agree
• Strongly Agree

6. The number of Salesforce users that you manage will increase in 2025.

• Strongly Disagree
• Disagree
• Neutral
• Agree
• Strongly Agree

Statement from Salesforce on Agentforce Special Survey Findings:

Agentforce is built on the (Salesforce) Platform, and Salesforce Admins govern the Platform, so here as well the role of the Admin (and the Developer) is critical.

Salesforce intends to help Admins scale their work through Agentforce, but like any team or role, Salesforce sees Digital Labor as something that makes work sustainable. Teams in every business and vertical, in any geography and of any size, are all saying the same thing: too much work, not enough people.

Agentforce is the equalizer: autonomous AI agents that can reason and act, and that operate within the guardrails of your organization. Admins set those guardrails and orchestrate Agentforce within them, so they have one of the most important jobs of all.

(Role of a) Salesforce Admin is more important than ever. Agentforce can augment and improve the life of admins by helping with rote tasks, but managing one’s Agentforce will require the Admin skillset: data governance, testing, access controls, program managing when and where agents are rolled out, iterating on agents through feedback loops – all of these are new dimensions to the Admin skillset that will be valuable within Salesforce and beyond, as every app and workflow will become agentic in the future.

Agentforce is built on the Salesforce Platform and observes all existing security and access controls. Every interaction goes through the Trust Layer, and features a session log and trace, which are persisted in the Trust Layer’s Audit Trail. And with tools like Testing Center Salesforce is enabling its customers to pressure test Agentforce using new AI-powered tools that it is rolling out right now.

One of the important things Salesforce invested in from the beginning with Agentforce is a familiar, no-code experience. Creating an Agent is as simple as describing what it should or should not do. Adding context is as simple as uploading a file that you want Agentforce to refer to when answering questions. These abstractions make governing Agentforce easy for small customers, and in time will also help those solo admins get even more work done.

For Admins today, creating a new business process to meet goals like increased case deflection or higher lead throughput can involve extensive custom work and administration. But Agentforce is built through natural language descriptions, and can dynamically use the right data and workflows required within the guardrails you set. This enables Agentforce to take more complex work off an admin’s plate, and presents to admins an entirely new and powerful way to solve pressing business challenges.

Salesforce also provides additional color on Agentforce’s performance:

• Eight of Salesforce’s top 10 deals in its 3QFY25 included both Data Cloud and AI, inclusive of Agentforce.
• Salesforce is also seeing amazing Agentforce energy across the ecosystem with its global partners involved in 75% of its Q3 Agentforce deals and nine wins of its top 10 wins in the quarter.
• Over 80,000 system integrators have completed Agentforce training and hundreds of ISPs and technology partners are building and selling agents.

List of Respondents To Agentforce Special Survey and Their Salesforce Purchases

Source: ARTW Buyer Insight Technographics Database, December 2024

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