Salesforce Agentforce faces client skepticism, analysts say

Salesforce’s push to make Agentforce the center of its AI strategy is running into resistance from customers, according to a new note from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

The investment bank said its recent CIO survey showed weak sentiment toward Salesforce’s plans for AI agents. In the report, Jackson Ader, KeyBanc’s managing director for software equity research, and three other analysts wrote that customer checks and conversations around Agentforce have been underwhelming, with disclosed numbers showing little sign of momentum.

KeyBanc said the problem is not just broader weakness across software companies, sometimes described as the “SaaS-pocalypse.” Instead, it pointed to two recurring issues from Salesforce partners and customers:

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• customers' data is not organized well enough for meaningful AI work
• Agentforce itself “just isn’t there” as a product

The analysts added that partners are only now starting to turn Agentforce proof-of-concepts into pipeline deals. Their survey also found more CIOs expect to deprioritize Salesforce in their IT budgets over the next 12 months than increase spending.

Salesforce pushed back. A spokesperson told The Register that Agentforce is the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history, and said customers including Engine, Falabella, and AAA are going live in weeks, not months. The company also said it is helping customers move faster through forward-deployed engineers and out-of-the-box agents.

KeyBanc also said Salesforce is overseeing aggressive price increases while most customers are not willing to pay for AI capabilities through their CRM provider, even though the company still holds a commanding position in the CRM market.

That pricing debate has been building for months. In January, Gartner warned that a capped enterprise agreement for Salesforce’s AI and data platforms might not be available at renewal, potentially making costs harder to predict. Salesforce disputed that claim at the time. Bill Patterson, Salesforce EVP of Corporate Strategy, said:

“The claim that we are moving away from capped agreements is inaccurate.”

A separate earlier report from Bernstein also described Agentforce as “still in early stage of adoption” and said it would not drive Salesforce growth in the short term, arguing that usage-based monetization will take longer than expected and that the product is likely to be strongest inside Salesforce’s core CRM base rather than beyond it.

Investors appear uneasy as well: Salesforce stock is down more than 36% this year.