Agentforce World Tour London

Agentforce World Tour is now in the rear view mirror, and was quite different to the typical October/November Salesforce events. Titled Salesforce Essentials or Innovation Week, these are usually more entry level events that introduce Salesforce to prospects that don’t know too much about it, or showcase customer success stories to encourage customers to upgrade/use more clouds.

Not so this year - after the buzz generated by Agentforce at Dreamforce, every event is an Agentforce World Tour and is mostly focused on the new AI tool. This must have been ounces of fun for the events team as they changed everything in a couple of weeks, but somehow they pulled it off. It probably wasn’t great if you wanted to attend an Essentials type event for an intro to Salesforce and had Agents rammed down your throat at every turn, but that’s first world problems when it’s a free event.

The proximity to Dreamforce meant that there was a lot of interest in the London event, so it was also much expanded - probably around twice the floorspace that we’d usually see. There were also plenty of opportunities to get hands on with agents, and my old friend Kavindra Patel was back in town to guide everyone on the trail.

There were also guided workshops, but the queues for these stretched out the door a good half hour before the started, so I didn’t get the chance to try out the hands on exercises around Data Cloud and unstructured data, but I’m sure I’ll be able to find something on Trailhead to cover the same ground.

I did get to build an Agent with Franny Hsiao that would answer questions from prospects with content from the Credera web site, which was very cool.

While a lot of the contents of the keynote from Zahra Bahrololoumi was quite familiar for those of us who attended Dreamforce, there were a couple of things that stood out for me.

The presence of Patrick Stokes to replay live his customer service call to the Saks agent underlined the importance of these Agentforce events to Salesforce. It is somewhat unusual to see an EVP over from the US for the main World Tour event in May/June, but unheard of for the smaller events.

The maxim of “Don’t DIY your AI” came up quite a lot - to me this suggests Salesforce see this as the threat.

One thing that is interesting about the messaging here is the focus on cost - not that DIYing is cheap, but that it’s hard to compare costs as nobody seems to know how Agentforce will be priced. We’ve all seen the $2-3 per conversation figure, but if these conversations leverage Data Cloud then there will be an additional consumption charge for the tokens there. I also couldn’t get any clarity about how we’d be able to track and control usage costs - the consensus seemed to be that if your Agent turns out to be extremely popular then you could expect to receive a large bill the following month. Personally I can’t see many CFOs signing off on something like that, so I think Salesforce have more work to do in this area before they’ll see the billion Agents they are expecting over the next year.