Salesforce mulls consumption pricing for AI agents

Salesforce is mulling a new pricing model for AI agent conversations as it gears up for the release of Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform. Agentforce is a low-code/no-code platform for building autonomous AI agents that Salesforce co-founder, Chairman, and CEO Marc Benioff is expected to detail in his Dreamforce 2024 keynote in September.

During the CRM giant’s 2QFY25 earnings call on Aug. 28, Morgan Stanley Analyst Keith Weiss noted that with Salesforce promising big productivity gains from AI agents — deflecting up to 90% of calls from human agents — investors are worried that Salesforce customers will need to license fewer seats.

“How does the pricing change account for that?” he asked.

Benioff responded that Salesforce customers already have roughly 200 million AI agents in trials, and his personal goal is for customers to have 1 billion agents in use by the end of fiscal year 2026.

“When we look at pricing, it will be on a consumption basis,” Benioff said. “And when we think about that, we think about saying to our customers — and we have — it’s about $2 per conversation.”

He added that Salesforce may go with a per-conversation charge or sell consumption credits as it does with Data Cloud.

The vision, Benioff said, is a total business transformation of customers. He spoke of one customer, a large computer hardware company going through a major acquisition and reconceptualizing their whole business. He told the CEO that Salesforce would help turn the company into an “agent-first organization” that would make it a “margin machine.”

“We’re going to continue to automate their whole organization, but we have to not just build them a great sales force or a service force or marketing force or commerce force, analytics force or whatever, we have to build them an agent force,” he said. “Our goal is to be the agent supplier to our customers, which has to be deeply integrated into our data and our apps because these agents, at some point, are going to say, ‘Actually, I want to pass you off to a human now to talk and complete this.’ And there’s a seamless, automatic handshake between our agents and our apps because it’s just one platform.”

During the call, Salesforce reported revenue of $9.33 billion for the second quarter, beating Wall Street expectations of $9.23 billion.

The company also announced that CFO Amy Weaver, who stepped into that role in 2021, plans to step down at the end of the fiscal year. She will remain in place until Salesforce appoints a successor, whom she will help to onboard.