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Salesforce has crossed a significant threshold in the enterprise AI race, surpassing 1 million autonomous agent conversations on its help portal — a milestone that offers a rare glimpse into what it takes to deploy AI agents at massive scale and the surprising lessons learned along the way.
The achievement, confirmed by company executives in exclusive interviews with VentureBeat, comes just nine months after Salesforce launched Agentforce on its Help Portal in October. The platform now resolves 84% of customer queries autonomously, has led to a 5% reduction in support case volume, and enabled the company to redeploy 500 human support engineers to higher-value roles.
But perhaps more valuable than the raw numbers are the hard-won insights Salesforce gleaned from being what executives call “customer zero” for their own AI agent technology — lessons that challenge conventional wisdom about enterprise AI deployment and reveal the delicate balance required between technological capability and human empathy.
How Salesforce scaled from 126 to 45,000 AI conversations weekly using phased deployment
“We started really small. We launched basically to a cohort of customers on our Help Portal. It had to be English to start with. You had to be logged in and we released it to about 10% of our traffic,” explains Bernard Shaw, SVP of Digital Customer Success at Salesforce, who led the Agentforce implementation. “The first week, I think there was 126 conversations, if I remember rightly. So me and my team could read through each one of them.”
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This methodical approach — starting with a controlled rollout before expanding to handle the current average of 45,000 conversations weekly — stands in stark contrast to the “move fast and break things” ethos often associated with AI deployment. The phased release allowed Salesforce to identify and fix critical issues before they could impact the broader customer base.
The technical foundation proved cr …