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In this edition: What Distinguishes Successful AI Pilots, the Informatica Acquisition, and the Trust Bottleneck | |
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Salesforce President and Chief Engineering and Customer Officer on How to Escape Pilot Purgatory | |
CIOs have had it with demos. They see the potential in AI, and they’ve made investments in AI. But some can’t get to broad deployment, can’t get to value, and can’t get to ROI. They’re stuck in “pilot purgatory.”
The MIT report making the rounds finds that only 5% of AI projects make it out of this purgatory – and it’s not a function of company size or model quality, but a function of approach. As the report notes, “Most fail due to brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and misalignment with day-to-day operations.”
Srini Tallapragada is Salesforce President and Chief Engineering and Customer Officer; he runs engineering, customer success, professional services, and the sales teams in India and ASEAN. The role gives him a unique vantage point on the full agent deployment cycle, and from that position, he has learned a few things about why AI pilots stall – and how they can really take off.
It starts, he writes, with the operation gaps where organizations get stuck: they lack clear goals and performance metrics, the agents don’t live where the work is actually happening, governance is an afterthought, the infrastructure isn’t sufficiently built out, and the agents don’t have context, leading to a kind of prompt doom loop. That’s where users have to constantly rewrite prompts to supply context that the agent should already know.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that, drawing on what Salesforce has learned as Agentforce “Customer Zero,” Tallapragada outlines three key principles for escaping pilot purgatory.
Once those are established, Tallapragada says he just tells CIOs to pick one low-risk use case and get going. He writes: “Starting with lower-risk internal use cases — employee tools, knowledge management, channel summaries — is a good way to build organizational confidence and get quick wins. Once you prove it works, move to customer-facing deployments. Invite their feedback. Iterate. That’s how you escape pilot purgatory. That’s how you turn AI from potential into performance as an Agentic Enterprise.”
Read the full story on the Salesforce Newsroom and
join the conversation on LinkedIn. | |
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Overcoming Challenges During Five Real-World Agentforce Rollouts Technologies as powerful as AI and agents aren’t always easy to roll out. Data needs to be organized. Guardrails need to be determined. Knowledge articles need to be created.
The customer stories in this piece, from companies as diverse as a tour operator and a hiring platform, show what can go wrong during an agentic rollout (hint: it’s often related to data) and how those snags unfurl into success.
Read the full story. | |
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How Businesses Are Really Using AI |
They’re making life more convenient for their customers and constituents: In the city of Kyle, Texas, an Agentforce-driven 311 app allows residents to flag anything from a broken bench to a pothole to a water leak, while at UChicago Medicine, AI helps patients escape the voicemail / phone transfer mess.
Businesses are also using it, not to get people to buy more stuff, but to make their customers happier and more delighted with the products and services they already have. |
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2025 Cyber Week is expected to drive $334 billion in global sales, $73 billion of which is attributed to the influence of AI and agents.
The Salesforce Shopping Index analyzes the activity of over 1.5 billion global shoppers across 1.5 trillion page views, powered by aggregate data from Agentforce, Agentforce Commerce, Agentforce Service, and Agentforce Marketing.
The Shopping Index early holiday indicators found:
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Over 19% of orders were influenced by AI and agents in the lead-up to Cyber Week.
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Digital retailers who used AI and agentic features on their channels saw a 5% higher conversion rate compared to those who didn't.
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These same retailers using AI and agents saw 10% sales growth YoY compared to 5% sales growth seen by those who didn’t.
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Traffic from AI and agent-powered sources like ChatGPT, Perplexity etc. also increased 2.5x YoY over the last seven weeks.
Read the full report. | |
Data and analytics leaders say their data strategies need a complete overhaul before their AI ambitions can succeed.
Call it the data disjunction: Nearly two-thirds of business leaders describe their organizations as data-driven, yet just as many data and analytics leaders say their companies struggle to drive business priorities with data.
Read the full State of Data and Analytics Report. | |
AI is no longer just automating decision trees — it’s reshaping how service teams spend their time, grow their careers, and meet customer expectations.
For example, 64% of service reps enabled with agentic AI say they have extensive opportunities to mentor colleagues; just 35% of service professionals who don’t use AI say the same thing.
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Data trust remains the biggest bottleneck to AI adoption. | |
For CIOs, the number one fear regarding AI at their company is data security and privacy, followed closely by a lack of trusted data. However, only 35% of CIOs say they are working more closely with chief data officers as a result of agentic AI and only 14% of their IT budget is dedicated to data security.
Read the full story. | |
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Salesforce News and Announcements | |
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Salesforce Completes Acquisition of Informatica |
The move brings Informatica’s rich data catalog, integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services to the Salesforce platform.
“You have to get your data right to get your AI right,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce. “Data and context is the true fuel of Agentforce, and without clean, connected, trusted data there is no intelligence – only hallucination. Informatica is the trusted platform that turns fragmented enterprise data into context, so every agent can reason, act, and deliver outcomes with precision. When companies get their data right, they get their AI right, and Agentforce becomes unstoppable.”
Read the full announcement. | | | | |
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Salesforce AI Research Introduces eVerse, a Simulation Environment for Enterprise-Ready Voice and Text Agents | |
eVerse has been used to power the development of Agentforce Voice, enabling it to handle unpredictable customer interaction scenarios — from spotty phone connections to background noise to diverse accents — with enterprise-grade reliability.
eVerse gives Agentforce Voice the ability to handle even the most unusual voice conversations. The AI agents are trained and stress-tested in eVerse’s virtual environments that mirror the noise, accents, crosstalk, and complexity of real-world operations.
Read the full announcement. |
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Salesforce Unveils Agentforce Commerce Capabilities as AI Assistants Grow Retail Traffic Volumes by 119% |
Fueled by the rapid emergence of consumer AI platforms and new discovery channels like ChatGPT, online traffic volumes driven by AI assistants grew by a massive 119% year-over-year in the first half of 2025.
Intelligent agents are projected to further drive 22% of global orders this Cyber Week, according to Salesforce data. This shift in shopping behavior presents retailers with a dual challenge: efficiently reaching shoppers across these new AI-powered touchpoints while maintaining brand value, voice, and control over their customer relationships.
Read the full announcement. |
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