Constellation Research analyst Larry Dignan distills the latest Salesforce news coming out of this week’s gigantic Dreamforce event in San Francisco: Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 “wants to be your AI agent platform.” Dignan summarized, “The general idea is to connect humans, AI agents, apps and data across the entire enterprise.”
Central to this announcement appears to be:
- The use of AI-enabled chatbots connecting the core, updated salesforce and marketing automation products with the customer.
- Orchestration—Everything connects to everything through the AI agent hub.
Dignan writes, “…it’s worth noting that Salesforce is trying to thread the needle between predictability, which is an enterprise must-have, and creativity, a customer must have. By controlling AI agent behavior, Salesforce is trying to give enterprises the ability to provide a unified brand voice and customer experience as AI agents and humans run a CX (Customer Experience) relay race.”
Salesforce provided several customer service chatbot use cases including:
“Peter Burns, Director of Marketing, Digital and E-commerce at Heathrow Airport, used Agentforce to create Hallie, a personal customer agent. Heathrow uses Salesforce’s platform for its customer contact center. Burns said Heathrow uses Agentforce to provide a simple interface to a complicated technical ecosystem. ‘We think about creating experiences in the front and back of house. In the back of house, Agentforce and Salesforce power our customer center. Agentforce helps answer and manage those conversations,’ said Burns—”
Read the great overview by Larry Dignan of Constellation Research. (October 13)
More: Welcome to the Agentic Enterprise: With Agentforce 360, Salesforce Elevates Human Potential in the Age of AI (October 13) – press release
From tipsheet: Everyone is getting into the customer service game. There are similarities here with Meta and its recent Business AI chatbot announcement and Salesforce’s foray into customer service and the chatbot. The more data feeding a company’s AI, the more powerful the company’s products become. Ads in the case of Meta. Marketing and salesforce automation in the case of Salesforce. From here, these two companies are overlapping even more with their interests in data, AI and orchestration.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Pitching agents, receiving data
Reporter Catherine Perloff picks up the Salesforce AI agent thread by teasing her latest The Information story on LinkedIn yesterday:
“There’s a new land grab happening within ad tech — agents to plan and evaluate media buys. Ad tech incumbents Amazon and Google have been pitching agents for media planning this year, but so have other players — notably Salesforce, Microsoft and a new initiative from AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley. Most clients of Robert Webster, CEO of consultancy TAU Marketing Solutions, are testing agents from Google, but 10%-20% are also testing Salesforce.
Agents might be able to simplify the extreme complexity in media buying, and help brands better compare which campaigns worked, which is difficult across the walled gardens. Could it also make certain layers of the ad tech stack obsolete, or remove some of the divisions between ad tech and mar tech?”
See it on LinkedIn. (October 13)
More: AI Ad Tech ‘Land Grab’ Pits Salesforce Against Google, Microsoft and Amazon – The Information (October 13)
From tipsheet: Makes sense to me. If more data makes the most powerful AI, then all the walled gardens want to keep their powerful tentacles in ad tech and martech. Also, Ms. Perloff noted working “across the walled gardens.” Indeed, that’s an opportunity. Added to the complexity of “cross-garden” optimization will be the black boxes of each platform’s AI systems.
LLMS & CHATBOTS
Developments
- OpenAI and Broadcom announce strategic collaboration to deploy 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed AI accelerators (October 13) – OpenAI
- Anthropic says it’s easy to poison LLMs, no matter what size they are (October 10) – Cybernews
- Browser wars, a hallmark of the late 1990s tech world, are back with a vengeance—thanks to AI (October 11) – Fortune on Yahoo!
BRANDS
Brand Strategy and AI
At a Kantar-sponsored event last week, industry trade Adweek explored, “Beyond Efficiency: How AI is Rewriting the Rules of Brand Strategy.”
Among the key takeaways for brands:
- “Rather than using AI to improve the shopper journey, marketers should focus on how the technology will reshape it.”
- “AI’s real power will arrive when marketers stop thinking about it as just a tool for boosting productivity.”
- “An AI agent that provides constructive criticism can do more good than one that’s totally aligned to the brand’s vision.”
Read more in Adweek. (October 13)
BRANDS
Behind the boss’s back on AI
“One in 10 marketers are using AI behind their bosses’ backs because the use of the technology is against their companies’ policies.
Separately, one in 10 (10%) say they do not know where to start with AI. When it comes to barriers blocking marketers’ effective use of AI, just under one in three (28%) say managing multiple AI tools makes it harder to track performance, while around one in five (18%) report poor integration between generative AI and the rest of their tech stack.”
Read: “Effectiveness, creator marketing, AI usage: 5 interesting stats to start your week” (October 13) – Marketing Week
BRANDS
AI loves contextual —pass it on
Last week at an investor event, New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon interviewed ex-Meta and Microsoft exec Karan Anand, who is now CEO of Character[dot]AI, “the leading AI entertainment platform with 20 million monthly active users worldwide.”
Character.AI is an emerging competitor to Roblox and the discussion pointed to the importance of contextual advertising in AI environments.
Mr. Salmon shared:
“50% of Character’s audience is female, which indexes higher than many interactive and AI entertainment platforms, and this has been attractive to early advertising testers. Anand still rates the platform’s advertising performance at a C-minus — in part because the industry is not yet ready to serve AI native contextual ads — but aims to help assuage concerns about contextual generative ad creative, and lead development of technology in this area.
Anand noted that ‘CPMs could be 3-5x higher overnight’ and eventually 20x higher if it can grow AI native contextual ads and take advantage of the depth of engagement with its chatbots. Anand sees the company and the industry as “less than 1% done” for advertising in AI experiences. The first step is for users to become more comfortable with them, just as they have become with interstitial ads, and an important second step is the development of an AI native ad stack. Anand is constantly looking for startups doing generative AI ads with whom he can partner and potentially seed…”
Mr. Salmon noted the range of monetization solutions that Character[dot]AI currently uses:
“Character is leveraging [Google’s] AdMob for its advertising stack initially, with plans to develop more of its own proprietary ad tech when “100s of millions of users” are in view. Character has also tapped into [Applovin] and [Meta’s] Audience Network for demand as well, which has driven improvement in ad auction dynamics now that multiple demand sources are in place bidding into Character’s ad supply…”
From tipsheet: Contextual advertising is back, thanks to AI.
RETAIL MEDIA
AI powering Walmart retail search
Walmart[dot]com is using AI for search results according to Khurrum Malik, vp of marketing at Walmart Connect. He explained on Modern Retail:
“We show a mix of sponsored and organic results designed to be relevant to each customer, using AI and machine learning, to make product discovery even easier for our customers… Sponsored search ads appear alongside organic searches but can vary by factors like product category or type of search. We continue to test new ways to serve dynamic ads to make sure we get the customer experience right, meaning different customers may see a different combination of ads at any given time.”
Read more. (October 13)
Related: From keyword to dialogue: How Hyundai optimizes for AI-driven search (October 7) – Marketing Dive
MEASUREMENT
Brand safety and blocklists
Brand safety and suitability were the topics du jour of a Fox-sponsored panel discussion at Advertising Week last week. Executives from Fox, Prudential and AI-enabled ad tech startup Mobian joined the stage.
(Fox and Mobian announced a strategic partnership last week.)
AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff reported:
“Brand safety has been broken for a long time.
Kieran Geyer, a paid media manager at insurance company Prudential, is still having a lot of the same brand-safety problems today as he did years ago, he said last week during a panel at Advertising Week in New York City.
And it’s pretty damned frustrating.
Depending on the campaign, a brand might experience ‘exorbitantly high block rates,’ Geyer said, while ‘still showing up in unequivocally brand-unsafe environments that no brand would want to appear next to.’
In other words, the worst of both worlds.”
Read more. (October 13)
Related: Why advertisers are quietly returning to news-driven media channels (October 9) – Digiday
EVENTS
This week
- Prebid Summit – Today – agenda
- Salesforce’s Dreamforce – Today thru Thursday – agenda
- Agentic Advertising Standards & Community Launch (webinar) – Tomorrow – registration (1500+ signed up)
- IAB Attention Measurement Workshop (webinar) – registration
- Optable Connect – Thursday – agenda
MORE
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- UK: “AI flags 48% of alcohol-free ads could be breaking rules” (October 13) – The Spirits Business
- “In this moment, AI is a technological catalyst for growth, and digital advertising, as the engine of the internet economy, is the instrument with which its impact has already been (and will likely continue to be) realized.” (October 13) – Analyst Eric Seufert on Mobile Dev Memo
- California becomes first state to regulate AI companion chatbots (October 13) – TechCrunch
- AI search and social influencers are the new go-to sources for B2B buyers (October 10) – The Drum
- The Open Internet 2025, Part 3: SSPs, Not Dead Yet (And Why They Still Matter) (October 7) – OpenX