What you need to know:

• Salesforce hired 200 police to maintain order last week at what it’s now billing as the biggest AI conference in the US, the annual Dreamforce extravaganza in San Francisco. Social unrest and major security risks didn’t eventuate – or at least go public. But there was plenty of angst and anticipation among the 50,000 global delegates last week. 
• A few top executives from American multinationals like PepsiCo, FedEx and Dell along with Denmark’s 3,200-store jewellery chain Pandora declared their early enterprise-wide moves to deploy a “digital labour force” of autonomous agents – essentially advanced bots that can reason and do the same stuff on their own that people do, sort of. The upshot, they said, was humans are now job sharing with AI and agents are doing better things, faster for customers. 
• So convinced is Michael Dell of the existential threat from agentic-savvy competitors to the computer firm he started in his teens that the great man is back hands-on and supercharged in the business, plotting Dell’s own masterplan for an army of autonomous agents.
• But there is a problem, one which Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff acknowledged numerous times during his customer-tech turned AI sales festival: The rise of agentic AI in one year, and the advances since, are outpacing business adoption at an accelerating rate. 
• In other words, the machines – and the hype – are getting way ahead of the ability of companies to actually deploy. 
• For investors in the makers and marketers of AI, there is too much enterprise hesitation and the proof is in Salesforce’ market value – down a third in the past year to circa $242bn.

Margin call

One NZ boss Jason Paris is sold. Agentic AI will rewire his wireless telco business entirely and he’s personally championing a rapid rollout of the tech company-wide – even as some of his people are “freaking out”, he acknowledged, in a candid briefing with journalists and analysts last week in San Francisco.

“We want to be the most AI-enabled telco on the planet,” Paris said. “Because we can see the productivity gains that we can get, the customer experience gains, the revenue gains.”  

Nearly 100 agents have been deployed in recent months at One NZ across marketing, customer service and One’s mobile network to optimise energy consumption.

The results so far have Paris, a one-time McDonald’s marketing exec, super bullish on the possibilities for his number-two ranked NZ mobile network. 

A 20 per cent cut in energy costs to operate One’s mobile network has already been bagged by agents and Paris said the marketing team is creating campaigns 60 per cent faster.  

“ff we compare it to the control group of customers going through our normal, digital channel, which is not an AI enabled agent that can have a conversation with you, we’re seeing four times greater [customer] engagement – they’re asking questions. We think it can give us a five point lift in our EBITDA margin percentage. We're in the early 30s [EBITDA] at the moment and we think that we won't be able to get to mid-30s without this technology. But in fairness, most of the gains we're seeing at the moment are in productivity, not so much revenue margin.”

On message

The numbers seem promising although Paris said some staff are “freaking out” when they discover up to 50 per cent of their job functions are being taken by faster, smarter autonomous agents.

It’s what Salesforce calls an agentic “digital labour force”, which perhaps in a nod to job fears the world over from AI, saw the tech giant pepper its event last week with messaging around agentics that “elevates, not eliminates humans”. Paris, for instance, has allocated 25 per cent of One’s agentic AI budget to employee capability training. 

“There's no job impact at this at this point in time,” he said. “My clear view is AI is coming to your role, not for your role. We've all got a to do list that's longer than our arm that we need to get through every day. I want the AI agents to do the stuff that we don't want to do, not the stuff that we really enjoy doing. Society has got to navigate through the challenge of AI coming at us faster and improving faster than we ever imagined. But at this point in time, it's about productivity and lift through customer experience gains…”

Retail wringer

He cited the ability for agents to take load off his people in retail stores who spend wasted time in compliance and process for customers buying phones and call and data plans.

“For that to be taken off the retail agent's to-do list, and instead go, ‘hey, can I talk to you about the new iPhone or some Beats headsets' - that is the stuff they want to have a conversation about and that's what the customers want to talk to them about. They're only waiting in line while you verify and then you provision... if you can take all of that work and give it to an agentic tool and allow the person to do the stuff that actually is way more enjoyable, the human important stuff, then we’re all better off.”

Redeployment ploy

Salesforce ANZ boss, Frank Fillman, cited YouGov survey data of ANZ c-suite execs using agentic AI that suggests they are seeing a 66 per cent lift in productivity.

"Frankly, we expected that but what we were surprised by was an over 80 per cent lift in employee satisfaction," he said. "The example is you’ve got a massive to do-list you don't have time for, this is providing relief for people but it also creates the requirement to meet people where they are and provide the right tech and the right guardrails to attract and retain that talent."

One NZ's Paris said when dealing with those spooked by their job role changes because of agentics, it's key to underline that scoping change does not mean an end to their job. “So we're going, 'okay, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff we're not getting to'. How do we make sure, if you’ve got the right attitude and you're into it, that we can deploy you in another part of the business?”. Paris says ultimately successful agentic rollouts are held up as much by culture and organisational structure as tech. "Me included, no-one really likes change and I do things how I've always done them. That's not going to cut it."  

Re-AI-lity check?

For all the apparent upside, Paris remains an outlier, along with some big blue chip global brands going public on their agentic AI mission. 

Salesforce was first to market last September with autonomous agents, crashing Microsoft’s simpler co-pilot party, but has been under pressure all year from investors expecting revenue growth to match the software giant’s penchant for talking up bullish customer revolutions.

Salesforce’ market cap is off 37 per cent in the past year to $242 billion. Microsoft’s value, meanwhile, is up 23 per cent to $3.8 trillion and Google parent Alphabet is up 55 per cent to $3.1 trillion. Adobe, which directly competes with Salesforce on numerous fronts, is back 31 per cent to $143bn in the past year. Equity markets are often bewildering - Adobe and Salesforce are punished with enterprise AI products in market while exhuberence reins for others such as Open AI, which is burning cash faster than autonomous agents can code. 

Marc Benioff was front-foot fighting last week on this – asked at a media conference about lacklustre sales for Agentforce, Benioff countered: “A year ago Agentforce was just a whisper idea. Today it's the fastest growing product we've ever launched.”

But he acknowledged there was a problem. Companies the world over are not keeping pace with the rate of AI innovation.

“For so many customers, it's been incredibly overwhelming for them,” he said. “This is the moment where technology innovation is outstripping customer adoption. Our job is to get those customers into adoption mode. The way to do it is by showing them customers who are frontrunners in this so when you look at these customers, they are making it happen”.

One of the biggest hurdles for adoption is that agentic AI in an enterprise context requires substantive data infrastructure, process and organisational commitment - and needed the CEO’s backing. 

“This is also deep enterprise technology … this is architectural changes. This isn't just ChatGPT running on my phone, right? This is running their businesses,” per Benioff.

Still, Salesforce built plenty of FOMO into its messaging. Dell founder Michael Dell was live in Benioff’s keynote, warning fellow CEOs they must move fast, as he is, before rivals eat their business via autonomous agents. 

(While caution tempers many Australian companies, publicly at least for fear of blowback on jobs, One NZ CEO Jason Paris was firmly in Dell’s camp as was another New Zealand firm, Fisher & Paykel, along with PepsiCo, FedEx and Pandora.)

Dell said executive leadership needs to “reset" and "reimagine” their businesses fast before someone else did. Benioff concurred.  

“We thought about this as well," said the Salesforce chief. "If we don’t really get on this, a new company is going to come along and it's going to put us out of business and they’re going to be better than us, faster than us, in every business that we're in – and lower cost. The only way we can prevent that is we’re going to become that company.”

The choice of a new generative

PepsiCo was another rolled out at Dreamforce for the agentic AI cause. Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer Athena Kanioura declared the consumer goods giant would be the “first company which will be AI-first by the end of 2026 in every part of the business, connecting all our processes, the way we think about the business and strategise the business.”

Fear factors

In the Australian market, although the YouGov data cited by Fillman showed ANZ c-suite execs were upbeat about the performance of agentic AI programs they had deployed – countering a broader narrative of caution and under performance – the appetite to reinvent appears to be lacking urgency among Australian CMOs and marketing teams, according to Salesforce ANZ CMO Leandro Perez. He said CMOs risk further slippage in their importance compared to other commercial roles within their ogrganisations if they didn’t adjust. 

“I'm not seeing them move at the pace that I think that is required for this time,” he told Mi3.

“This is a real opportunity for them. I see it as the biggest risk and the biggest opportunity. Some people aren't getting engaged, but the downside is if you're not participating then new titles get created because it's happened. New titles like chief customer officer, chief growth officer. There's CIOs, there's chief people officers. Who actually knows the customers? Who has the voice of customer, who has all the touch points, who's doing all the campaigns, who owns the website marketing? If you're not leaning in, you're not going to be there.”

Bigger ad budgets

One NZ’s Paris as CEO might offer an antidote to hesitant marketing teams – self interest via bigger budgets. 

He said the cost efficiencies from agentic AI in One’s case, at least, meant “we can spend more money on advertising – so paid media but also actually we're spending more time on our brand layer, the emotional stuff ... We're spending probably more time on our emotional brand layer than we are on the day-to-day. Brand is going to be more important now, because there is a danger that this becomes a little bit transactional with your customer. You can make things so brilliant that... you could probably forget about us. Is that good? I'm not sure.”

Maybe marketing has a view?