Dreamforce 2025 Had Fireworks, Robots, and a CEO Under Fire

This week on Funnel Frontier: Agentforce took center stage, but the Q&A session had Benioff sweating under the spotlights.
 

This week:

• Dreamforce 2025 had fireworks, robots, and a CEO under fire
• ServiceNow just gave AI a UI, and maybe a killer edge

Stat of the Week

53% of businesses experience improved customer satisfaction and retention with CRM tools. (CRM.org)

Dreamforce 2025 had fireworks, robots, and a CEO under fire

Matthew McConaughey opened Dreamforce 2025 calling Agentforce “the whisper turned full-blown reality.” But the loudest moment came later, when Marc Benioff got grilled about his shiny AI empire and its not-so-shiny adoption numbers.

After a year of Agentforce hype, Salesforce’s big reveal was Agentforce 360—a unified “agentic” layer connecting Sales, Service, Marketing, IT, and Slack. 

Agentforce 360 comes with renamed products (Agentforce Service, Agentic Sales), embedded AI agents, and Slack as the agentic OS. It’s all built on Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), the context engine powering it all.

The pitch? Humans + agents working side-by-side, in the flow of Slack, automating everything from prospecting to IT resolution.

Benioff gets roasted 

Then came the Q&A.

A reporter asked: Only 12,500 customers out of 150,000 are using Agentforce—why so few?

Benioff addressed the question by saying, “It’s the fastest-growing product in our history.” 

He argued that large enterprises take time to shift architecture, and that Slack’s million-plus users (and its new AI-infused Slackbot) should count too.

Still, the math didn’t impress the room, especially after a year of AI marketing and 8% adoption. The gap between the vision and the dashboards was impossible to ignore.

Expanding the AI empire

Despite the reality check, Salesforce rolled out serious integrations:

• OpenAI brought GPT‑5 and Codex to Slack, letting users query dashboards and automate tasks with natural language.
• Anthropic partnered on Claude models for regulated industries—like finance and healthcare, with Slack integration baked in.
• Salesforce acquired Apromore to inject process intelligence into Agentforce flows, mapping how work actually gets done.

PwC puts Agentforce to work

While many are still testing, PwC showed off a live deployment: its new Agentic AI Contact Center, built on Agentforce Service.

It’s already in use at a large global company, combining predictive AI, unified customer data, and real-time automation. It’s the first serious glimpse of Agentforce as more than a demo, and Salesforce is hoping others follow fast.

Dreamforce 2025: spectacle meets skepticism

The rest of the event was classic Benioff: robots playing chess, canceled celebrity gigs, and grand AI pronouncements. But the main takeaway was clear:

San Francisco weathered another Benioff monsoon of optimism. But behind the confetti, one truth stuck: Salesforce has built its AI operating system. Now it just needs customers to log in.

The Week @ CRM.org

CRM for Startups. Finding a startup-friendly CRM is like sneaking snacks into a theater—you need something discreet and effective. 

Open Source CRM. Total control, zero license fees. The trade-off? You’re also tech support now.

Weekly Bloom

Balancing Customer Retention & Churn. Customer churn is like having aliens abduct your paying customers. It’s time to power up the retention forcefield!

ServiceNow just gave AI a UI, and maybe a killer edge

“There’s always a moment when the line is drawn between yesterday and tomorrow. This is that moment.”

That’s how ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott opened his pitch for the company’s new AI Experience, multimodal interface where employees can summon AI agents to do real work, not just chat.

Translation? Yesterday was clicks and tickets. Tomorrow is agents on demand.

ServiceNow just drew the line and it’s shaped like an AI agent with admin rights.

AI is the new UI

ServiceNow isn’t just slapping a chatbot on top of old workflows. With its new AI Experience, it’s turning the whole platform into a smart command center.

From one screen, employees can summon AI agents to run apps, trigger workflows, pull data, and get stuff done, without bouncing between tabs or tools.

What’s inside the box:

• Web agents that browse like humans, not spiders
• Voice bots that actually resolve problems, not just read you the FAQ
• Build agents that spin up apps from plain English, no dev ticket required
• AI Lens that grabs data straight from screenshots or PDFs
• Data Explorer that digs through ServiceNow like it’s born to analyze

The pitch? No more search bar paralysis or workflow whack-a-mole. Just tell the system what you need and it figures out the how.

One interface, many faces

The twist? It’s all role-based. 

Sales sees pipeline heatmaps. IT gets incident graphs. HR gets… HR stuff. No more one-size-fits-none dashboards.

“It’s contextual, adaptive, and built around the user’s role,” said Liz Miller, VP at Constellation Research.

And since Salesforce is pushing Slack, and Workday bought Sana, it’s clear: everyone’s racing to turn AI into the new workspace.

Control Tower = adoption fuel

ServiceNow rolled out the AI. Now what?

Enter the AI Control Tower, a real-time scoreboard for usage, wins, and where your fancy agents are just taking up cloud space.

“Not just a quarterly report,” said analyst Rebecca Wettemann. “It’s visibility right in the product.” Translation: no more guessing if the AI’s doing anything.

And that’s the move. Most enterprise AI flops not because the tech is bad—but because no one knows if it’s working. Control Tower pulls back the curtain.

ServiceNow’s not trying to be your next shiny tool. It wants to be the nervous system behind all of them.

Agents that act, UIs that adapt, dashboards that tell the whole story? That’s how you win the AI stack war.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

Salesforce and Google Deepen Agentic AI Partnership with Gemini. Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 now uses Google’s Gemini to automate tasks, generate quotes, and answer questions across Gmail, Docs, and Slack. The goal: let AI agents handle the busywork while teams act faster with real-time context.

Provus Launches Agentic AI Platform for Services Quoting. Provus unveiled a quoting platform that uses AI agents to scope, price, and propose service deals automatically. Built for sales and finance teams, it replaces manual quoting with intelligent, context-aware automation.

AWS Outage Disrupts Dozens of Major Websites and Apps. A regional AWS failure on Oct 20 took down parts of services like Slack, Duolingo, and McDonald’s app. The disruption lasted hours, affecting login systems, APIs, and backend infrastructure across multiple industries.

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