What We Learned From Salesforce’s Dreamforce; Using OpenAI and Anthropic For Different Tasks

Dell Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell. Photo via Getty Images

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Salesforce is shifting its artificial intelligence strategy to boost flagging growth as even CEO Marc Benioff this week acknowledged a gap between the technology’s capabilities and corporate customers’ willingness to buy it, Erin and I reported Wednesday.

At its annual Dreamforce event for customers in San Francisco, we were surprised to see Salesforce announce it would allow ChatGPT customers to control Salesforce apps and AI directly from the chatbot.

But we were even more surprised by the absence of Disney, which was one of the featured customers for Salesforce’s AI at last year’s Dreamforce.

There was also a bright spot for Salesforce: Dell.

The server maker uses Salesforce AI tools, dubbed Agentforce, to automate tasks such as adding new suppliers, said Simon Mulcahy, the recently departed president of AI startup Regrello, which Salesforce recently acquired, during a keynote presentation at the event.

Salesforce’s first wave of customer examples for Agentforce mostly focused on automating customer service and sales-related communications. With Dell, Salesforce is aiming to show its AI can help big companies run supply chains faster too.

Mulcahy, a longtime Salesforce executive who served as its chief innovation officer in 2022, discussed how Regrello’s technology helps Agentforce customers automate what he described as the “donkey work” of sending emails, gathering information, writing spreadsheets and obtaining contract approvals.

Benioff hasn’t talked much about Regrello, but its supply chain automation software could play a key role in getting more large companies to try Agentforce. While it’s unlikely that Salesforce will be able to topple the two main providers of supply chain management software, SAP and Oracle, AI informed by sales records and supply chain data could be valuable to retailers—precisely the kind of customers that have avoided Agentforce for customer service because they don’t feel it can accurately handle tasks such as changing orders to a different shipping location.