At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff positioned his company at the centre of what he called the Agentic AI Revolution. The shift, he said, would move organisations from reactive systems to intelligent, self-learning networks, “where humans and agents drive customer success together”.
Benioff described this as the next great inflexion point following cloud, mobile and predictive AI. The agentic enterprise would, in his words, “bridge the agentic divide” between fast-moving consumer AI and slower, siloed enterprise systems. The goal is to create context-rich, integrated, and trusted AI ecosystems that make businesses both smarter and more human.
Agentic Enterprise In Action
The keynote featured five partner stories -- Williams-Sonoma, Pandora, PepsiCo, FedEx and Dell -- each showing a different aspect of AI-driven transformation. Through these, Salesforce demonstrated that “AI built in, not bolted on” is becoming the new standard for enterprise design.
For Williams-Sonoma, AI-powered digital agents now answer questions on décor and cooking in real time. At Pandora, retail experiences are being reimagined as emotional, storytelling journeys supported by conversational AI. FedEx shared how it uses AI to convert logistics intelligence into customer growth, while Dell outlined its automation of supply-chain workflows across 19,000 users to free up time for strategic work.
The Bedrock Of Trust And Data
Benioff underlined that no amount of artificial intelligence could succeed without a disciplined foundation of data. “You don’t have your data right, you’re not going to get your AI right,” he cautioned, adding that every enterprise must “get to more integrated solutions, set the right priorities, and get the governance right.”
The agentic enterprise, he said, depends on context -- the connective layer between information and insight. “You don’t have your data, you don’t have your context. You need that deep data integration,” he noted, explaining that Salesforce has rebuilt its products around this single idea of data-led intelligence
Expanding on this, Benioff reminded the audience that “AI alone is not enough… it needs all of these capabilities to connect it, to give it the context, to give it the guardrails.” As enterprises rush to embrace generative AI, those that get their data right and their governance stronger will define the future of trusted intelligence.
Athina Kanioura’s PepsiCo Playbook
Among the most striking stories came from Athina Kanioura, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at PepsiCo. She described how the company is embedding AI across marketing, sales, service and supply chain functions. “We want every employee not to be comfortable, every employee to do what is possible and reach their full potential. We are the first company which will be agentic AI-first by the end of 2026 in every part of the business, connecting all operations and processes, the way we think, innovate, commercialise and execute.”
Quantifying the progress, she said, “We already get 25 to 30 per cent efficiency through the power of agentic AI. Agent Force is now in more than 1.5 million stores globally, and our target is 50 million by 2026, starting with the toughest, the mom-and-pop shops.”
Her remarks brought to life Benioff’s thesis that the next generation of enterprise success will depend on human-machine collaboration, not competition.
Michael Dell On Becoming ‘That Company’
Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, captured the urgency of transformation in his candid reflections. He said, “We all woke up around November 2022 and saw these incredible models. It created an opportunity to unlock the power of all dark data in the world. We saw the industry moving from calculating and computing to thinking, machines that are thinking for us. The only way to prevent being outpaced by a new competitor is to become that company ourselves. We’ve totally reset and re-imagined the business.”
What This Means For India
While stories or cases from India were not a major part of the keynote, the implications are unmistakable. Salesforce’s leadership has repeatedly acknowledged India as both a developer hub and a customer market of growing strategic weight. With the scale of its digital workforce, diversity of enterprise use cases, and a strong focus on governance and data integration, India could well be the testing ground for this new model of agentic enterprise.
For Indian companies, especially in BFSI, telecom, and manufacturing, the agentic model aligns with an existing appetite for automation with human oversight. It positions India to evolve from build-for-scale to build-for-intelligence, mirroring the global push that Benioff articulated.
Benioff closed with a return to Salesforce’s core values of trust and customer success, noting that the agentic enterprise is not about replacing people but augmenting them. “Humans and agents working together in harmony”, he said, is what will define this decade of enterprise progress.
From the partner stories to the platform vision of Salesforce itself, Dreamforce 2025 showcased a new grammar of business, one where intelligence is not outsourced to machines but built into the rhythm of how companies think, serve and grow. |
