Marc Benioff Addresses ‘Low Agentforce Adoption’ at Dreamforce ‘25
Marc Benioff was grilled over the arguably low adoption of Agentforce at a Dreamforce Q&A session with the media.
The Salesforce CEO was asked about the figures surrounding Agentforce, with 12,000 adoptions from 150,000 customers, equating to a rate of around 8%.
Benioff said that Agentforce is their fastest-growing product ever, explaining that large enterprises, which represent many of their customers, take time to make architectural changes for such deep enterprise technology. He added that the product was only fully released at the end of October 2024, making the 11-month adoption period impressive compared to competitors.
Benioff said: “It’s the fastest-growing product in our history. There’s never been a faster growing product.”
He added: “Also, you’re not taking into consideration Slack. First you have 150,000 core customers and then you have about a million Slack customers. But then you’ve got, for example, Slackbot – you’re going to see more adoptions, for all those core customers.”
Is Agentforce Adoption Slow?
In February this year, Salesforce’s Q4 ‘25 results were released, showing that the company had closed around 5,000 Agentforce deals. Salesforce’s Chief Financial Officer, Amy Weaver, said that we can expect “modest” sales of Agentforce over the next year.
In the Q1 ‘26 results, Salesforce revealed that it had closed more than 8,000 Agentforce deals.
That figure had grown to 12,500 by Q2 ‘26 – 6,000 of which were paid. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) for ‘Data Cloud and AI’ stood at more than $1.2B – up 120% year on year.
Salesforce is clearly focusing strongly on Agentforce, and we now have some data to judge it on.
While the number of deals is rising – at the fastest pace in Salesforce’s history, according to Benioff – Agentforce has not yet broken out as a clear driver of revenue.
But it’s worth remembering that there could be something of a snowball effect as Agentforce continues being upgraded, with new functionality constantly being announced by Salesforce.
Just because a business was not an Agentforce 1 customer, it does not mean they will not be an Agentforce 360 customer.
Is the Slack Comment Fair?
Benioff said that we should consider Slack – and particularly Slackbot – when discussing Agentforce adoption.
According to The Verge, Slack is testing a Slackbot update to turn it into an AI assistant with the ability to create custom plans tailored to a workspace, sift through messages, and gather information.
Rob Seaman, Chief Product Officer of Slack, said: “Slackbot today is fairly rudimentary. But what we’ve done is we’ve actually rebuilt it from the ground up as a personalized AI companion.”
It is understood that Slackbot will appear as an icon next to the search bar, and when it’s clicked, a DM-style panel will open up where the user can input prompts like ‘What are my priorities for today?’
It seems a fair point for Benioff to make. While Agentforce deals do not appear to be a primary revenue driver at the moment, if Slack is to be considered an Agentforce product – which is arguable – then yes, the number of people using Salesforce AI is much greater than it first appears.
Final Thoughts
While Agentforce adoption is certainly on the rise – and the number of Slack customers out there is formidable – it’s certainly a reasonable question to ask in relation to why so few Salesforce customers are paying for Agentforce.
Like Benioff says, it’s the fastest-growing product in Salesforce’s history, and it’s barely a year old. While the adoption figures could be argued to be underwhelming at the moment, they are certainly growing. It might just be a question for the CEO at Dreamforce ‘26.
