Building the Agentic Enterprise: Salesforce News and Stories That Shaped 2025

2025 was the year Salesforce translated its Agentforce vision into reality. What emerged was not merely an expanded product line ready for the era of AI agents but an entirely new operating model: the Agentic Enterprise. 

Here’s a look at the news and stories along the journey.

The Platform Gambit and Strategic Plays

While the industry focused on the changing capabilities of specific large language models (LLMs) — such as those introduced by DeepSeek — Salesforce championed its unified, LLM-agnostic platform, which offered customers flexibility and independence from any single model.

By March, Salesforce unveiled a visions for how autonomous AI agents could usurp apps as the new user interface for companies interacting with their data. This promise of AI agents working behind the scenes to deliver business outcomes began to take shape.

TDX ’25, Salesforce’s spring developer conference, served as a critical launchpad for this vision. Salesforce not only unveiled the latest Agentforce iteration but also made a market-defining move: the launch of the world’s first agent marketplace, AgentExchange. With this new ecosystem addition, partners and developers could participate in the $6 trillion digital labor market and help extend the reach of Agentforce around the world.

Soon, CIOs were outlining a concrete path to agentic AI adoption. At events at and around TDX, Salesforce customer CIOs shared their guiding perspective, sharing best practices for other companies looking to add AI agents. Shortly afterward, Salesforce released its own guide for CIOs, a four-step roadmap for success in the agentic era.

The Data Foundation: Fueling the Engine

In April, Salesforce’s data-centric AI strategy gained momentum. The central talking point — data as the fuel for the AI engine — intensified, and scaling metadata for agentic AI became a focus.

Data and metadata also provided the answer to another question on many leaders’ minds: Is AI trustworthy enough for the enterprise? In May, Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Informatica, further establishing the company’s focus on providing unifying and standardizing data and metadata from different sources.

As summer kicked off, the news about the release of Agentforce 3 became the year’s most-read product announcement. The release featured a new command center for the kind of testing and observability that would help ensure agents meet their objectives in a trusted manner. This was swiftly followed by news of advanced multi-agent collaboration and orchestration capabilities, opening up the conversation about Agent2Agent (A2A) protocols and other new models for the Agentic Enterprise.

The Human Element 

While products were center stage throughout much of the year, Salesforce also emphasized how humans and agents could work best together. One piece focused on digital labor and how it would impact the larger workforce. The company then shared a blueprint for a collaborative AI-human workplace and a playbook to help companies build it.

The human-AI partnership was also apparent in Salesforce’s reporting on its own Agentforce adoption. A deep dive into the lessons learned showed how the company brought agents on board with the customer support team, including the bumps along the way from pilot to production.

Bringing the Agentic Enterprise to Life 

In July, Salesforce CEO and Co-Chair Marc Benioff coined the term “Agentic Enterprise,” envisioning a world in which companies operate with boundless capacity, precision, and speed by pairing human expertise with AI-powered agents. 

Hundreds of companies had already stepped into this role, and thousands more were on the path. This was apparent in coverage of organizations across sectors using Agentforce to create new capabilities, revenue streams, and ways of working:

• How Agentic AI Will Ease Healthcare’s Workforce Crisis
• Why Agentic AI Is Gaining Traction Among Global Telecoms Looking to Reduce Churn and Reignite Growth
• From Stress to Success: How Agentic AI Is Streamlining Vacation Planning 
• Amid Global Trade Turmoil, an AI Agent Can Help Businesses Respond
• Meet the Digital Workforce Scaling Up Sustainability and Climate Disaster Response
• How a Texas Boomtown Used AI to Reinvent City Government
• How a Small BioTech Firm is Using Agentic AI to Take on Industry Giants 

Adoption Acceleration for Dreamforce ’25

In the lead-up to Dreamforce, all attention was on deployments. Salesforce shared new pricing and guidance to help companies incorporate Agentforce into their budgets.

The company also released its first Agentic Enterprise Index, showing 119% agent growth in the first half of 2025.

At Dreamforce ’25, the company features stories and deployments across industries, and Agentforce 360 — Salesforce’s full suite of apps, AI, and data solutions — made its debut. Slack introduced context-aware apps and AI agents; Salesforce’s AI research team detailed advancements; and Agentforce Voice debuted as a critical, new component of the company’s strategy.

The company also debuted a striking expansion of partnerships with major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Google, and AWS, solidifying its ecosystem approach.

Heading into fall, Salesforce shared deeper insights on deployment ROI. Salesforce responded with CIO trend research and key learnings on avoiding failure in AI pilots, and it reaffirmed its core value of trust with Agentforce Studio observability tools, ensuring that AI ROI could continue its ascent. An earnings report in December validated the progress, showing Agentforce as it’s “fastest growing product ever.” And, a mid-month Agentforce World Tour in New York City showcased partner ecosystem growth and more customer adoption stories in education and government.

After a successful 2025, Benioff, is bullish about the future. “Everyone knows that they want … to bring AI in, become more productive, become more efficient, become elevated,” he said in the Q3 earnings call. “But they all know now, they’ve got to become Agentic Enterprises. And I don’t think for a lot of them, two years, three years ago, maybe even a year ago, they really understood that opportunity. And they are now more motivated than ever to do it.”

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