THE TECHNOLOGY INTERVIEW

He expects agentic capabilities to spread across the entire value chain – and sooner than you might think – reshaping front- and back-office functions, stitching together marketing, sales and service processes that have traditionally lived in separate systems. Trust, safety and governance As enterprises across industries embrace agentic AI, trust, safety and governance are, understandably, top priorities. Paul insists that, for Salesforce, this is far from a new conversation.

“ Trust has been Salesforce’ s number one value since our inception in 1999,” he says.“ It’ s guided our product development and the way we’ ve structured our business for more than 25 years. We’ re leading the way in deploying AI safely and securely across the enterprise. The trust layer in Agentforce 360 allows us to check for hallucinations and toxicity and to apply guardrails around everything.”

As well as this, Salesforce has launched functionality in Agentforce Builder that allows customers to script components within an agent, giving even more control and more deterministic outputs.

“ That means the agents our customers deploy are safe, secure and accurately represent their business,” Paul adds.

Despite the momentum of Agentforce and agentic AI more broadly, many organisations are still at the pilot stage with AI agents. There is some anxiety there, as Paul notes:“ There’ s always some nervousness. Over the past few years, with the rise of ChatGPT, there’ s been concern about whether AI might replace people. But the reality is that it won’ t – it will elevate what people do. It enables them to focus on higher-value work.”

He lends some advice to those starting on their agentic journeys:“ Start small: iterate, test and learn. Don’ t be afraid to experiment. Try things out in specific domains, test with small customer segments and then build from there. Over time, you can expand your agent’ s capabilities to unlock more value for your business.

“ It’ s all about starting somewhere – leaning in, asking for support. This is going to be a phenomenal pivotal moment for enterprises to really transform, to move into that agentic era.”

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