Jason M. Lemkin on Marc Benioff's AgentForce: Salesforce has 2,000 people building AI agents and roughly two years to prove it works for enterprises. Startups move faster, but companies sitting on massive structured and unstructured data have a real shot.
I think the fact that Marc Benioff has put 2,000 people on AgentForce tells you the future right there.
He's already got 2,000 people on it.
Well, it tells you his intentions, it doesn't tell you his ability. We are still early on enterprises and I think if you, if you ask Salesforce in particular, they've got two years to unlock all this capability. I think with the rate of change it's just Mark has to do it because two years is not a lot of time at Salesforce like traditionally that's like a major release. Right. Snowflake turned out to have time. Like we might have thought Snowflake was struggling at the start of the year.
Right.
We don't think Snowflake. So there is more time in the older enterprises and where that breaks for those that have massive amounts of data, I am not smart enough to predict. I would not bet against anyone that is managing a huge amount of structured and unstructured data. I wouldn't bet against anyone.
What will probably happen is if you want to build agents that are just using your CRM data and your Salesforce shop just like a Microsoft was able to bundle Microsoft products, you'll probably take the agent from Salesforce and get a combined thing. But I think and to Jason's point, I think enterprise will want to build more powerful agents. Were not just drawing the data from one app that is Salesforce but drawing the data from maybe five or six different sources. The more likely architecture for that is some version of stuff it all in Snowflake and then run an agent directly against that. And I think as you were talking Jason earlier about, you know, what you're saying with Snowflake. I remember one of the things we did five or six years ago that was turned out in retrospect was very smart is just Lilly opt to stuff all the data in Snowflake across all the systems so over time you have access to that. So if I'm a large enterprise and I want to use my internal, let's say I'm a bank, I want to use my deposit system plus my Salesforce system plus something else at a certain size it won't work easily in just a Salesforce. So you'll want to go just like every large enterprise since the dawn of time. Some apps you'll want to build yourself and if agents become strategically important enough for super big companies, then they'll throw $5 million and a bunch of Snowflake at it and data breaks and just build it themselves.
