Salesforce announces Agentforce 360 as enterprise AI competition heats up

Salesforce announced the latest version of its AI agent platform on Monday as the company looks to attract companies to its AI software in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

The customer relationship management giant unveiled the new platform, called Agentforce 360, ahead of its annual Dreamforce customer conference that kicks off on October 14. This newer version of Agentforce includes new ways to instruct AI agents via text, a new platform to build and deploy agents, and new infrastructure for messaging app Slack, among other things.

One notable aspect of Agentforce 360 ​​is the new AI agent prompt tool called Agent Script, which will be released in beta in November. Agent Script gives users the ability to program their AI agents to be more flexible and better responsive to “if/then” situations. This allows AI agents to be programmed to be more predictable in less rigid situations such as customer queries.

Users can use ‘reasoning models’, which claim to think before reacting, rather than reacting based on patterns. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini enhance these ‘reasoning’ agents.

Salesforce also announced that it is releasing a new agent building tool, Agentforce Builder, that allows users to build, test, and deploy AI agents from one place. The tool, which will be released in beta in November, includes Agentforce Vibes, an enterprise-grade App Vibe encryption tool that Salesforce announced earlier this month.

The company also announced broader integration between Agentforce and Slack. Salesforce said its core apps, including Agenforce Sales, IT and HR, will appear directly in Slack starting this month and will be extended through early 2026.

Slack is testing a new version of its Slackbot chatbot that is intended more as a personalized AI agent that learns about the user and offers insights and suggestions.

Salesforce wants Slack to also serve as a search tool for enterprises in the future and plans to launch connectors with platforms such as Gmail, Outlook and Dropbox in early 2026.

This latest update from Salesforce comes at an interesting time for the business AI market. Companies continue to release AI features aimed at their enterprise customers, while businesses struggle to see a return on their investment for these tools.

Last week, Google announced Gemini Enterprise, a suite of tools – many of which were already available – for building enterprise-level AI agents, which counts the likes of Figma, Klarna and Virgin Voyages as early customers.

Anthropic also began to gain traction with its enterprise product, Claude Enterprise. The company announced it had struck a deal with consulting giant Deloitte to bring its Claude chatbot to Deloitte’s 500,000 global employees – its largest enterprise deal to date. Anthropic announced a strategic partnership with IBM the next day.

Salesforce claims that Agentforce has 12,000 customers – significantly more than any of its competitors, according to the Agentforce press release. Early pilot customers of the Agentforce 360 ​​upgrades include Lennar, Adecco and Pearson.

All this despite a recent one MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail before reaching production as companies still struggle to justify spending money on these AI tools.