For the past year, I’ve been running Salesforce with a colleague who never sleeps, never takes vacations, and has read more than I could in 100 lifetimes. On a typical day, sitting with a few executives around the table, I’ll ask it to evaluate a competitor’s moves, refine a keynote draft, or surface strategic blind spots we might have missed.
This colleague is my AI agent, and we work together constantly. Sometimes it surprises me. Sometimes it challenges me. Sometimes, like all of us, it makes a mistake. But always, it expands what I can see and do.
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We are at the beginning of the Agentic Era, the most significant transformation of work in history. For the first time, machines can perform not only repetitive tasks, but cognitive work once reserved for humans. These AI agents–which can reason, adapt, and act on their own–are already reshaping thousands of companies and will ultimately touch every job and every person.
As the CEO of a technology company that helps customers deploy AI to unlock new levels of performance and decision-making, I believe this revolutionary technology can usher in extraordinary economic growth and entrepreneurship, while also creating significant new opportunities to improve healthcare, education, and quality of life.
The potential is so vast that some of my peers look at this trajectory and predict we’re approaching a milestone called artificial general intelligence, where AI begins to match, or even exceed, human intelligence. The implication is that while enabling leaps forward in every aspect of our lives, AI could eventually render human intelligence obsolete.
There I disagree. Large language models (LLMs) are extraordinary. But they’re already brushing against some of their upper limits. The biggest advances will come from AI agents that harness the power of LLMs and data to deeply understand a business and drive outcomes.
Yet no matter how powerful the technology becomes, there will always be frontiers only humans can cross. AI has no childhood, no heart. It does not love or feel loss. Because of that, it’s incapable of expressing true empathy or understanding human connection. Those are our superpowers: the forces that spark great inventions, that inspire artistic masterpieces, that enable us to read a room, earn trust, and forge lasting bonds that empower us to start businesses that solve problems and make the world better.
That’s why a pivotal question for every leader isn’t just what AI can do, but what role we choose for it. Is AI going to replace us, or augment us? One approach puts algorithms in control. The other keeps people at the center, working side by side with agents that extend our reach and sharpen our strengths.
At Salesforce, we’ve made our choice. We’re building an entirely new operating system for the agentic enterprise that is explicitly designed for humans and AI to work together. For decades, people had to adapt to software: clicking through tabs, chasing data, and losing time. Now that model is flipped. AI agents adapt to people, anticipating needs, surfacing what matters, and taking action instantly. In the Agentic Enterprise, AI acts as an orchestrator, pulling together the right capabilities with the right context so that everything works in concert–people and AI achieving more than either could alone.
This starts with giving every employee the opportunity to work alongside this technology, with tools that make it easy to understand what to delegate, when to step in, and how to fine-tune the partnership between human and machine. We’re creating systems that understand text, voice, images, and code, and that work in multiple languages, across devices, and for people of diverse abilities and backgrounds. We’re also reimagining roles to ensure that people gain the experience and context they need to lead in a hybrid world of human and digital labor.
This is fundamentally changing the way we work, starting at our own company. Since the end of last year, for example, customer-service agents managed by our employees have carried out more than 1.3 million conversations, resolving 85% of incoming queries. That’s giving our teams more time to deepen relationships with customers, such as by reaching out proactively to ensure they’re getting the most from our products. In sales, where more than 100 million prospects have contacted us over the years—far too many for any human team to handle—we now have an agentic representative that can call back 10,000 leads in a single week, turning conversations into real revenue. And across our global facilities, agents accelerate everything from repairing a broken desk to troubleshooting technical issues, so employees can put their energy into higher-value work.
We’re seeing the same shift with thousands of our customers on our Agentforce platform. At PepsiCo, agents track inventory and surface data to help teams adjust promotions, keep shelves stocked and strengthen relationships with retailers—all with visibility that keeps employees firmly in the driver’s seat. Goodyear is beginning to use agents to equip its team with real-time insights, drawing on data such as inventory and service history to make recommendations that enhance the customer experience. AAA Washington deploys AgentForce for routine membership support tasks, allowing human agents to be there when it counts most: helping stranded drivers, supporting members through insurance claims, and delivering care that only people can provide. The nonprofit Big Brothers Big Sisters of America relies on agents to narrow mentor matches while leaving the final decision to their match specialists, helping the organization reach more young people without losing the human touch.
This is what it means to weave AI into the fabric of business. It’s not about overlaying a new technology on old workflows. It’s about rethinking the system entirely, making space for a new kind of partnership between people and machines. It’s about amplifying people, restoring time and energy for what matters most.
As a founder and entrepreneur myself, I’m especially excited about how becoming an agentic enterprise can supercharge start-ups and small businesses. Take HappyRobot, a company reimagining logistics with just a handful of employees. It’s already operating with the reach once reserved for much larger organizations by deploying agents to automate workflows, centralize customer information, and cut coordination time by half. This is just the beginning, as AI lowers barriers to entry and success.
These changes will be disruptive, and we must be ready. Roles will shift, and as with every wave of innovation, some jobs will disappear. But history offers perspective: from the printing press to the personal computer, new technologies have redefined work and, over time, created more of it. The agentic enterprise is opening doors to fresh career paths, new forms of leadership, and opportunities we couldn’t imagine a decade ago. The responsibility we carry now is to steer this transition thoughtfully: rethinking how we recruit, how we equip people with training, and how we support them through change. We must recognize that AI is a human right; otherwise, we risk a new tech divide, between those who have access to AI and those who don’t.
Science fiction has long imagined a darker path. We all remember the movie Minority Report—a film that our Salesforce futurist, Peter Schwartz, helped make—about a police unit that relies on predictive algorithms and visions of the future to arrest people before they commit crimes. Every action is monitored, every decision preordained. It’s a world where technology doesn’t just guide human behavior but dictates it, erasing the qualities that make us most human.
But the agentic future is not preordained. It will be shaped by the decisions we make now. If we use it to displace human judgment, creativity, and empathy, we risk diminishing ourselves. If we design it to elevate our ability to imagine, to connect, to care, we can unlock incredible new potential and progress.
We must choose wisely. We must design intentionally. And we must keep humans at the center of this revolution. Because the real breakthrough isn’t building machines that think like us. It’s building a future that brings out the best in us.