For the past year, I have not sleep or take vacations, running a sales force with colleagues who have read for over 100 lifetimes. On a typical day, you'll sit around the table with a few executives, assessing the movements of your competitors, refine your keynote draft, or ask for surface strategic blind spots that you might have missed.
This colleague is my AI agent and we are constantly working together. Sometimes it surprises me. Sometimes it challenges me. Sometimes, like all of us, it makes a mistake. But always, it expands what I can see and expands what I can.
We are at the beginning of our time as an agent. This is the most important work transformation in history. For the first time, machines can perform not only repetitive tasks, but also cognitive tasks reserved for humans. These AI agents can reason, adapt and act on their own, but have already formed thousands of companies, and ultimately touch every job and everyone.
As CEO of a technology company that helps customers deploy AI to unlock new levels of performance and decision-making, I believe this innovative technology can guide exceptional economic growth and entrepreneurship while also creating important new opportunities to improve healthcare, education and quality of life.
The possibilities are so vast that some of my colleagues have seen this trajectory and predicted that AI is approaching a milestone called artificial general information that begins to coincide with human intelligence or exceeds it. The meaning is that while allowing us to move forward in all aspects of our lives, AI can ultimately make human intelligence obsolete.
So I disagree. Large-scale language models (LLMs) are extraordinary. But they've already brushed some of their caps. The biggest advancements come from AI agents who leverage the power of LLMS and data to gain a deeper understanding of business and drive results.
But no matter how powerful technology becomes, there is always a frontier where only humans can intersect. AI has no childhood or heart. It does not love or feel loss. Therefore, we cannot express true empathy or understand human connections. They are our superpowers. It can inspire great inventions, inspire artistic masterpieces, and build lasting bonds that allow us to read the room, earn trust, solve problems, and start a business that will make the world even better.
That's why the crucial question for all leaders is not only what AI can do, but what role should you choose for it. Will AI replace us or are you going to augment us? One approach controls the algorithm. The other is people at the heart, working alongside agents who broaden their reach and hone their strengths.
In Salesforce, I chose it. We are building an entirely new operating system for agent enterprises that are explicitly designed to help humans and AI work together. For decades, people have had to adapt to software. I clicked on the tab, chased the data, lost time. The model is now inverted. AI agents adapt to people, predict their needs, surface what is important, and take action immediately. In Agent Enterprise, AI acts as an orchestrator, bringing together the right functions in the right context and everything works in the concert.
This starts with giving all employees the opportunity to work with this technology. It uses tools that make it easier to understand what to delegate, when to intervene, and how to fine-tune human-machine partnerships. It understands text, speech, images and code and creates systems that work in multiple languages, across devices, for people of different abilities and backgrounds. It also rethinks its role to ensure that people gain the experience and context they need to lead in the hybrid world of human and digital workforce.
This is a radical change in the way we work, starting with our company. For example, since the end of last year, employee-managed customer service agents have conducted over 1.3 million conversations, solving 85% of incoming queries. It gives our team more time to deepen relationships with our customers, including proactively reaching out and ensuring they are making the most of our products. Over the years, more than 100 million prospects have contacted us in sales. This is too much for a human team to handle, but there are agents representatives who can bring back 10,000 leads in a week, turning the conversation into real revenue. And across our global facilities, agents are accelerating everything from repairing broken desks to troubleshooting technical issues, allowing employees to put energy into higher value jobs.
You can see the same shifts as thousands of customers on the Agent Force platform. At PepsiCo, agents track inventory and surface data to help teams coordinate promotions, maintain shelves inventory, and strengthen relationships with retailers. Goodyear is starting to use agents to equip teams with real-time insights, leveraging data such as inventory and service history to create recommendations that enhance the customer experience. AAA Washington deploys AgentForce for regular membership support tasks, allowing human agents to be there at their most important times. It supports marginalized drivers, supports members through insurance claims, and provides care only people can provide. The American sisters of the nonprofit Big Brothers rely on agents to narrow mentor games, leaving the final decision to match specialists, helping the organization reach more young people without losing human touch.
This means weaving AI into the structure of your business. It's not about overlaying new technology in older workflows. It's about completely rethinking the system and creating space for a new kind of partnership between people and machines. It is about amplifying people and restoring time and energy for the most important thing.
As my own founder and entrepreneur, I am particularly excited about how becoming an agent enterprise can recharge startups and small businesses. Take Happyrobot. This is a company that rethinks logistics with several employees. It's already working with REACH for a much larger organization once, by deploying agents to automate workflows, focus customer information, and reduce coordination time in half. This is just the beginning as AI lowers barriers to entry and success.
These changes are destructive and need to be ready. Roles change, and like all waves of innovation, some jobs disappear. But history offers a perspective. From printing presses to personal computers, new technologies have redefine work and have created more over time. Agent Enterprises opens doors to fresh career paths, new forms of leadership and opportunities that could not be imagined a decade ago. The responsibility we have now is to steer this transition thoughtfully. It's about rethinking how you recruit, how you equip people with training, and how you support them through change. We must recognize that AI is a human right. Otherwise, new technological disparities are at risk between those who have access to AI and those who have no.
Science fiction has long imagined a darker path. We all remember the movies Minority Report– A film that Peter Schwartz of our Salesforce Federated helped make. This created a police force that relies on future prediction algorithms and visions to arrest people before committing a crime. All actions are monitored and all decisions are pre-defined. It is a world in which technology not only guides human behavior, but also determines it and erases the qualities that make us the most human.
However, the future of agents is not pre-determined. It is shaped by the decisions we make now. Using it to replace human judgment, creativity and empathy, there is a risk of diminishing oneself. Designing it will help you unlock incredible new possibilities and advancements by increasing your ability to imagine, connect and take care.
You need to make a wise choice. It must be designed intentionally. And we must keep humans at the heart of this revolution. The real breakthrough is because we don't build the machine that thinks like we do. It builds a future that brings out the best of us.
