Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce UK & Ireland CEO, delivered the keynote address at this year’s Salesforce World Tour event at London’s Excel Centre. Bahrololoumi discussed the increasing importance of AI agents acting with greater autonomy in the workforce. She described today’s reality where such agents perform tasks from front-end customer service to back-end data processing and reporting. Bahrololoumi believes this trend will require businesses to adapt and rethink their operations and business models.
Bahrololoumi highlighted Salesforce’s commitment to values, innovation, and philanthropy. The company announced a $2.35 million donation to educational organisations focusing on AI literacy and STEM careers. Since its inception, Salesforce has donated $10 million globally, with significant contributions in the UK. In June 2024, the company launched its AI centre in London, which has since hosted 12,500 visitors and trained over 1,000 AI agents. More recently, Salesforce has formed a partnership with Brunel University’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence. The partnership aims to curate leadership on technical AI development and responsible AI implementation.
Enhancing customer service
Bahrololoumi emphasised the importance of agentic AI in enhancing customer service. She cited Salesforce’s own $50 million savings from AI handling 850,000 conversations. In addition to the 30,000 sales conversations initiated by AI. The discussion also covered the integration of AI with business processes, aiming to unlock $6 trillion in value through digital labour.
Bahrololoumi provided an example of agentic AI in action in Salesforce’s use of its Agentforce on the help.salesforce.com customer helpdesk. Since introducing Agentforce in Autumn last year, Bahrololoumi says the company has seen around 84% of helpdesk queries dealt with by agentic AI. “Not deflected,” adds Bahrololoumi, “resolved”. Only 2% are escalated to a human.
Over the course of the year, Salesforce expects the number of queries handled by AI to increase to 50+ million. This has enabled the company to redeploy “a couple of thousand people” from its helpdesk operation to “other high-value areas” across the business – “because we’ll always need good people,” adds Bahrololoumi.
“You think about that value case,” Bahrololoumi says. “Businesses can’t ignore that.”
Bahrololoumi advises the key is using a unified platform that connects AI agents with data and business applications. This enables intelligent, context-aware interactions that can significantly improve operational efficiency and customer experience.
Digital labour is a massive leap
Paul O’Sullivan, SVP at Salesforce joined Bahrololoumi, on stage to expand on the concept of digital labour and its significance for businesses. Digital labour is the relationship between AI agents working alongside human teams to extend workforce capabilities and unlock additional productivity. O’Sullivan described a working environment where AI agents don’t just communicate, but actually resolve issues and take appropriate actions. Such agents can operate 24/7 across different business functions and work across multiple systems and applications.
These agents have the capability to schedule appointments, resolve customer queries instantly and potentially provide personalised learning and coaching. They can also handle repetitive and mundane tasks and integrate across different business workflows. As a result, they can help enterprises overcome capacity and productivity challenges by reducing employee burnout through handling routine tasks. O’Sullivan suggests that Agentic AI can support a more effective personalised and instantaneous customer service for businesses.
The need for authentic AI
“Digital labour is a massive leap forward for businesses. However, to realise the promise of digital labour, we need authentic AI,” says O’Sullivan.
“It needs data to be trained from. The AI needs to learn from structured and unstructured metadata and semantic data. Then it needs to be connected and integrated with all the apps across every line of business, including industry apps, analytics, automations and APIs. It needs to be integrated with all enterprise apps so that it can take action on behalf of the business. Finally, the solution needs the AI to be connected to agents in the business.
“Customers are seeing 16 times faster time to value and 75% more accuracy in those responses as well. Now Agentforce is powered by an open ecosystem so that you can bring all of your data together.”
O’Sullivan says the business benefits of agentic AI will be the unlimited workforce potential it will offer enterprises. Furthermore, he suggests there will be no trade-off between quality and scale in its ability to meet customer demands. These benefits can be achieved across multiple channels.
Enterprise Times: What this means for businesses.
The overarching message from Salesforce World Tour in London is that AI is not just a technology upgrade. It is a fundamental reimagining of how businesses operate and deliver value. As a result, the company is positioning digital labour as potentially more transformative than the internet’s arrival in 1995. This will represent a fundamental shift in the nature of work and how work gets done.
However, Agentic AI, like mainstream AI, needs responsible implementation. For Salesforce, this means maintaining critical core values like trust, innovation, equality, and sustainability. In addition, a unified, trusted platform that ensures effective data integration, compliance with any regulatory requirements, contextual understanding of data, and access to open and extensible capabilities is also needed.
Businesses must adopt a more strategic approach to embracing the technology, and AI must be more than just large language models. The emerging technology stack will require comprehensive integration with business data, applications, workflows and existing systems. Businesses are expected to unlock unlimited growth potential since Agentic AI will enable personalised, instantaneous customer service. Collaboration between human workers and AI agents is key.
