Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company was “all in on Agentforce” when it launched in 2024, but so far only 34% of customers have adopted it. As a result, the company has lost more than $200 billion in market value, and analysts say Agentforce isn’t ready to debut.
So, are companies not interested in AI or simply not ready for it? And what does this mean for marketers?
When Salesforce introduced Agentforce, it pitched the platform as a way for companies to build and deploy autonomous AI agents to handle customer service, sales, and marketing tasks.
Benioff said agents will be the next big evolution in enterprise software, transforming how businesses interact with customers and automating routine work. Initial customer response, however, has been modest, with many users reporting that they spent as much time preparing and organizing data as they did using the AI.
The debate intensified this month after KeyBanc Capital Markets downgraded Salesforce, citing slow adoption of Agentforce and warning that only about 23,000 of the company’s 150,000 customers use the platform. Bernstein issued his own downgrade the same day, an unusual convergence for a company of Salesforce’s size.
Customers are not ready for autonomous AI
KeyBanc research highlights two reasons why Agentforce adoption has been slower than Salesforce expected.
The first is data availability. AI agents depend on clean, structured, connected data to make decisions and complete tasks, but many companies continue to struggle with fragmented CRM records, disconnected systems, and inconsistent customer information.
The second is the maturity of the product. Based on conversations with Salesforce partners and customers, analysts concluded that Agentforce is still in the early stages of adoption, with many implementations still limited to proof-of-concept projects rather than enterprise-wide deployments. Their survey of CIOs also found that more organizations plan to reduce Salesforce spending in the next year than increase it.
“Partners we speak to are just now starting to convert Agentforce proofs of concepts into deals in the pipeline, and more CIOs in our survey plan to de-prioritize Salesforce within their IT budgets than vice versa over the next 12 months,” KeyBanc analysts led by Jackson Ader wrote in their report.
This suggests that the challenge is not to convince companies of the potential of agent AI. It gives them the data and operational foundation needed to implement it successfully.
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Wall Street questions Salesforce’s AI strategy
Analysts’ concerns had financial consequences. Salesforce shares have fallen more than 50% from their December 2024 peak, wiping out more than $200 billion in market value as investors question whether Agentforce could become the company’s next big growth engine.
KeyBanc summed up its concerns bluntly: “Customer data is not needed to do meaningful AI work” and “Agentforce, as a product, simply doesn’t exist.”
Salesforce rejects that assessment. Benioff publicly dismissed the KeyBanc report as a “bad decision” and pointed to internal metrics that show Agentforce is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history.
“People think our backs are against the wall when, in fact, the opportunity has never been greater,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Not all analysts share KeyBanc’s view. Andreessen Horowitz recently reported that companies investing heavily in AI increased their median spending on Salesforce by 3% over the previous three months. Guggenheim upgraded the stock to Buy, and Monness, Crespi and Hardt also raised their ratings, arguing that Salesforce stock has significant upside despite current concerns.
Salesforce is also investing to address issues slowing its adoption. The company has added technology that automatically pulls customer data from external sources and has expanded its data management capabilities through acquisitions, including Informatica, to improve data integration and governance before customers deploy AI agents.
The takeaway for marketers
The Agentforce debate is less about Salesforce than it is about the state of enterprise AI.
For marketers, this shifts the priority. Organizations hoping to automate campaign execution, lead qualification, customer service and personalization will likely see greater returns from improving data quality, integration and governance than implementing multiple AI agents before their CRM data is ready.
The Agentforce adoption rate is a measure of enterprise AI readiness. The companies that move the fastest won’t necessarily be the ones that buy the latest AI software. They will be the ones who have already built the database that these systems need to provide meaningful results.
