While delivering his messianic and compelling vision for the power of AI agents and “digital labor” on Salesforce’s Q3 earnings call last week, CEO Marc Benioff suggested that Agentforce can help healthcare customers slash the costs of pre-op and post-op communication by upwards of 98%.
For me, that small detail synthesized and made real the grand dreams and sky-high expectations for AI agents expressed by Benioff throughout the call as he drew on his vast array of storytelling skills to illustrate the “digital labor” future. From the Salesforce Q3 call, here’s just a small sample of what Benioff believes the agentic future holds:
- “We’re really at the edge of a revolutionary transformation. This is really the rise of digital labor.”
- “We’ve created a whole new market — a new TAM — a TAM that is so much bigger and so much more exciting than the data-management market that it’s hard to get our head completely around.”
- “In the last week of the quarter, Agentforce went into production. We delivered 200 deals and our pipeline is incredible for future transactions.”
- “We’ve never seen anything like it. We don’t know how to characterize it.”
- “This is really a moment where productivity is no longer tied to workforce growth, but through this intelligent technology that can be scaled without limits.”
- “Agentforce represents this next evolution of Salesforce.”
As I said, that’s just a smattering of the amped-up vision shared by Benioff throughout the call, which also included this remark from the Salesforce founder: “We are all about to learn and grow and expand and evolve and become a different kind of industry that’s providing a different kind of value and this is the most excited I’ve ever been about the software industry.”
And while Benioff and president and COO Brian Millham offered a few customer examples along the way, about two-thirds of the way through the call I was still feeling like I’d just watched a trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in the world’s largest iMax theater without really understanding what happened in the first two installments of that extraordinary trilogy.
It felt like Benioff’s vision was about some far-off possibility that might happen sometime if a lot of variables all fall into place.
But then, as Benioff told the story of his ruptured Achilles tendon and his interactions with his healthcare provider and the possibility of some related costs going down by about 98%, the entire Agentforce vision became much more real to me (and perhaps to a lot of others attempting to grasp what appeared to be so perfectly clear to all the Salesforce folks but perhaps much less so to us outsiders).
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
The story emerged during the Q&A portion of the call when Benioff was asked about how Salesforce intends to price its agents (it’ll be consumption pricing at $2.00 per call). Benioff mentioned that he’s wearing a boot because he recently ruptured his Achilles tendon while on a scuba-diving trip to celebrate his birthday.
“So I got a call from my hospital telling me that I’m coming in to get scheduled for another MRI,” he said.
“And at the end of the call — it was kind of pre-operative care and then there’ll be another call for post-operative care and so forth — I was just saying to myself, ‘Wow, what did that cost them?’
“And they just don’t have enough people as it is — their doctors are already burned out, their nurses are burned out. I talk to those folks all the time and there’s a lot of pajama time for all these doctors — that’s what they call it because they’re all working late at night at home with their families, trying to get through all of their messages,” Benioff said.
“Everybody is maxed out at UCSF. I mean, it’s an incredible org, but I can’t believe the amount that they have to do with such a limited workforce. And then while I got this call, I said to myself, ‘They kind of know all of this already about me. They’ve got all of my data, they have all of my care, they have my family history. They’ve got all my scans. They can have an agent do this work.
“And that call probably cost them $100 — and it didn’t have to happen. I think [Agentforce] could have done the call for probably about $1.50.
“And I think that is the message to our customers, which is how are you going to give some of your people a break, let them get back to their strategic work, let them focus on what really matters to their customers?
“And some of the work that’s a little bit more administrative and bureaucratic and political that’s done by these political layers or higher levels that’s like, you know what, I think that could have happened with an agent,” Benioff continued.
“That’s kind of how I look at it. And I think we’re just at an incredible moment where we can really grow our country’s revenue, our GDP, and do a lot more, have a lot more productivity without hiring a lot more people.”
Final Thought
First of all, good luck to Benioff with that nasty injury — hope his recovery is quick and complete.
And while his injury is unfortunate, one good outcome is that it provided Benioff with the material to tell a story about everyday life and everyday work that everyone can relate to, and about how AI agents are ideally equipped to allow organizations to reshuffle their people, their budgets, their time, and their priorities to achieve their slices of the extraordinary future that Benioff so vividly painted.
And to every company in the Cloud Wars Top 10: please bear in mind that the excitement and passion and energy you currently feel for AI agents as a technology are not shared by most businesspeople — but those businesspeople are incredibly excited and passionate and energized about the business outcomes those agents can help deliver.
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