Dreamforce 2024 conference attendees watch as AI Agentforce robots are demonstrated in the "National ... [ ] Park" on Wednesday, September 18, 2024 in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo by Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Generative AI is moving beyond AI chatbots to agentic AI — capable of performing tasks ranging from “checking a car rental reservation at the airport to screening potential sales leads,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
This does not surprise me. In Brain Rush, I speculated on the future of AI — including the emergence of autonomous agents. Such agents would plan and execute tasks, such as designing and delivering a marketing campaign that would iteratively query large language models to sense and respond to external feedback.
Agentic AI — a global market expected to end 2024 with $31 billion in revenue and to grow thereafter at a 32% annual rate for the next few years, according to Emergen Research — could revive enterprise software as a service providers such as Salesforce.
Agentic AI could also help propel Salesforce stock — which has risen 13% in 2024 — to a record high. Here are three reasons Salesforce’s agentic AI service — Agentforce — could boost the company’s revenue growth:
Salesforce’s most recent earnings report featured expectations-beating revenue growth and a slightly disappointing revenue forecast for the current quarter. Here are the key numbers:
Salesforce increased its adjusted operating margin guidance for the full year to 32.8% — 0.2 percentage points higher than the May 2024 guidance.
Company executives previously “pointed to longer sales cycles and scrutiny of budgets,” CNBC reported. “We are assuming that the conditions we’ve been experiencing over the past few years........