Salesforce (CRM) has embarked on a hiring spree as it looks to market its new artificial intelligence product, Agentforce. The customer relations management software company plans to hire up to 1000 people to sell the new generative AI agent product for $2 per agent conversation.
Salesforce Agentforce
The new artificial intelligence-powered platform is designed to assist businesses in scope, testing, and deploying an array of autonomous agents that can augment their existing workflows. The AI tool is designed to help companies create custom AI agents that carry out repetitive tasks and connect functions across the Salesforce ecosystem.
Agentforce achieves all this by taking the natural language description of any task and isolating relevant resources within a business environment to develop an AI agent prototype that automates the entire process. Salesforce claims its customers have built over 10,000 AI gents serving various industries while leveraging Agentforce.
According to Salesforce’s CEO, Agentforce is already redefining what is possible in a business setting and beyond while ushering in a new era of AI abundance and limitless workforces that augment every employee. Likewise, the tool should continue to build deeper customer relationships while driving unprecedented growth and profitability.
Salesforce embarking on a hiring spree to market Agentforce to more clients and businesses is a surprise, as the San Francisco Company has worked to control its operating expenses through job cuts over the past year. The company has been persuading customers to use more self-service and third-party purchasing options.
Nevertheless, faced with getting Agentforce to more clients as one of the ways of generating significant subscription revenue, the company needed to hire sales and marketing representatives. Likewise, the hiring spree should allow the company to better compete against ServiceNow and Microsoft (MSFT), which are also developing autonomous agents and looking to get them into the hands of many businesses.
Saudi $100B Investment
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia plans to spend close to $100 billion in developing a new technological hub as it looks to rival the United Arab Emirates in artificial intelligence. Part of the investments will go towards financing the development of data center startups and infrastructure, which are key to enhancing the development of artificial intelligence in the Kingdom.
Project Transcendence is the new undertaking by the Kingdom that also seeks to recruit some of the biggest artificial intelligence talent to develop the local ecosystem while encouraging tech companies to put resources in the country.
The project has already brought Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) and Saudi Arabia’s PIF together to develop an AI hub that could be the foundation of a larger project. Reports indicate the firms intend to invest $5 billion to $10 billion in the collaboration, which will involve developing AI models in Arabic. According to the people, Project Transcendence would seek to collaborate with big, well-known tech firms, with Saudi assistance providing capital and infrastructure. They estimated that the final investment could range from $50 billion to $100 billion.
Meta AI Boost
Separately, the use of Meta Platforms Inc.’s (META) AI models by US government agencies and defence contractors has been approved, paving the way for Meta’s technology to be a vital component of national security and military initiatives.
More than a dozen US agencies and contractors, including Lockheed Martin Corp., Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., and Palantir Technologies Inc., will have access to Meta’s massive language model, Llama. Although developers are free to use Meta’s AI models, the company’s acceptable use policy” prohibits their use for any projects involving military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, and espionage,” among other things.
