At the Agentforce 2.0 event, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced that the company is currently in the midst of a hiring surge, with plans to add a “couple thousand” employees to sell their AI-focused products. This news comes as the company has received an impressive 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions they have opened up. Agentforce 2.0, which was unveiled at the event, is being touted as the “digital labour platform for building a limitless workforce.” This new release brings advanced reasoning and RAG capabilities, allowing for precise answers to complex multi-step questions. It also includes a new library of integrations and the ability to deploy Agentforce in Slack, as well as the capability to perform tasks across Slack, Tableau, and AppExchange. Additionally, Agentforce can now be extended to any system using MuleSoft. The new release also features an improved Agent Builder that can understand instructions in natural language, offering unparalleled flexibility and speed. Agentforce 2.0 is the successor to the first iteration and is an AI-focused platform that helps businesses create and deploy agents leveraging language models and tools within the Salesforce ecosystem. Benioff has previously stated his vision to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by 2025. While earlier reports indicated that Salesforce was planning to hire a thousand people to sell their AI products, the company had also laid off 700 employees in January and announced another round of layoffs in June. Despite this, Salesforce AI Research recently launched Moirai-MoE, the first mixture-of-experts time series foundation model, which aims to empower time series foundation models with a sparse mixture of experts (MoE) and achieve token-level specialization in a data-driven manner. Benioff has made it clear that he is taking the agents’ game seriously and has engaged in a war of words with Microsoft, stating that their rebranding of Copilot as “agents” is a sign of panic. He also pointed out that Salesforce Agentforce’s Large Action Models (LAMs) leverage both structured and unstructured data across their secure and scalable ecosystem to drive real-time, intelligent, autonomous actions, unlike Microsoft Copilot. With this latest announcement, it is evident that Salesforce is committed to expanding their AI capabilities and creating new job opportunities in the process.
