By Jeffrey Dastin
(Reuters) - Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) has closed more than 1,000 paid deals for "Agentforce," its platform for creating virtual representatives powered by artificial intelligence, its CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday.
At a company event in San Francisco, Salesforce previewed improvements for how businesses could build bots for recruiting, customer service and other specific tasks on its platform and in its messaging app Slack.
Salesforce has done as much for its own operations, said Benioff. He said his company now needed half the number of humans to resolve simple customer queries, though he still wants to increase the company's headcount in sales by 10% or more.
Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, many companies have piloted AI without yet deriving major savings or revenue from it.
For Benioff, who in recent months has focused his cloud company on agents, "digital labor" is poised to augment humans and expand the economy. Further out, Salesforce will start a "robot force partner program" that can connect real-world machines with virtual ones, he told reporters.
Benioff cited hotel chains as an example. They could handle back- and front-office work with an army of focused digital assistants, while robots could clean guests' rooms, he said.
The Salesforce co-founder and Time magazine owner said he hoped President-elect Donald Trump's administration would engage CEOs on the topic of digital labor. Trump appeared on a recent Time cover as the magazine's "Person of the Year."
Asked if he expected to donate to Trump's inaugural fund as others have done, Benioff said: "I think we just donated the photo. He can use the Time cover at no charge."