Artificial intelligence continues to advance at a dizzying clip, forcing enterprises to develop and release new products quicker than ever or risk becoming irrelevant to a faster-moving competitor.
Salesforce believes it has found a strategy that allows it to keep up even if it isn’t clear where AI is headed next. The customer management software giant is crowdsourcing its AI roadmap in real time.
Salesforce is certainly not the only company to work intimately with its customers for feedback on its products. However, it’s notable considering the sheer size of the company, the pace of new product launches or fixes to existing ones, and the granular level of these relationships. These aren’t annual or even quarterly discussions. Salesforce is meeting with some customers as often as once a week.
“The 18,000 customers are a wellspring of information and a wealth of information that is really needed to get to customer success,” Jayesh Govindarajan, executive vice president at Salesforce AI, told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “The stack that we’ve built that has resonated with these customers. Over time we can get context to be better, and as it gets better, and LLMs get better, agent systems do more and more fully autonomous behaviors. That’s a long running innovation track and we’re going to invest in that.”
Salesforce was one of the first companies to launch AI agent management software in late 2024 before agentic AI started to dominate headlines the following year. The company has since doubled down and continues to release new products for voice AI and Slack at a rapid pace.
Salesforce credits its customers for the rate of its product releases. The company told TechCrunch that by letting its customers lead the way it is able to build an AI product roadmap that can quickly react to where AI technology is headed. …