Salesforce Is a Dark Horse in the AI Race

-- In the frothy business of selling artificial intelligence service, Salesforce Inc. has been punching above its own weight. You can attribute this feistiness to Marc Benioff, the larger-than-life chief executive officer of Salesforce whose maverick strategies helped him spearhead the software-as-a-service revolution, and grabbed him a client base that includes 90% of Fortune 500 companies, including Walt Disney Co. and Ford Motor Co. Salesforce makes money by selling subscriptions to applications like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, which companies use to keep track of their sales and customer service processes. Salesforce’s big pitch at Dreamforce this week — its lavish conference that all but takes over downtown San Francisco each year — was Agentforce, a new service that lets customers deploy autonomous AI-powered agents. What’s also daring: Salesforce has become quite comfortable addressing an issue that AI companies until now have mostly tiptoed around — that success for their business customers is measured by cutting costs, a.k.a. Salesforce’s entrenched, wide distribution puts it in a strong position at a time when larger companies are generally slow about adopting new tech, including generative AI.