KeyBanc says Salesforce Agentforce is failing to convince CIOs

KeyBanc Capital Markets has published a bearish assessment of Salesforce’s Agentforce, saying CIO survey work and customer conversations show limited confidence in the company’s flagship AI agent platform. The report challenges Salesforce’s central AI growth pitch: that agents built around its CRM and data systems can become a new buying cycle for enterprise customers.

The report was written by Jackson Ader, KeyBanc’s managing director for software equity research, and three other analysts. KeyBanc said its view was based on checks across Salesforce customers, partners and CIOs, rather than a general negative view of SaaS companies.

According to KeyBanc, the customer feedback has been consistent on two fronts: many companies do not have their data ready for useful AI projects, and Agentforce is not yet mature enough as a product. The analysts said Salesforce stood out negatively in their latest CIO survey, with more CIOs expecting to reduce the priority of Salesforce in their IT budgets over the next 12 months than those expecting to raise it.

Salesforce disputed the readout. A company spokesperson told The Register: “Agentforce is the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history, with customers like Engine, Falabella, and AAA going live in weeks, not months. We’re focused on helping customers move faster, including through forward-deployed engineers and out-of-the-box agents.”

Agentforce is carrying a large part of Salesforce’s AI story

Salesforce has positioned Agentforce as the core of its enterprise AI strategy. The platform is meant to let customers build, test, deploy, manage and coordinate AI agents that work across Salesforce systems through conversational interfaces. The broader ambition is a less interface-heavy version of CRM, where agents pull and act on business data without users working directly through traditional application screens.

KeyBanc’s report said that partner conversations show some Agentforce proof-of-concept projects are only now beginning to turn into sales pipeline. That is a more cautious signal than the kind of rapid conversion investors would expect from a product being pitched as a major new growth driver.

The analysts also pointed to pricing pressure. KeyBanc said Salesforce is imposing aggressive price increases while most customers are not prepared to pay their CRM provider for AI features. The bank still said Salesforce holds a commanding position in CRM, which gives the company leverage, but the report suggests that leverage may not translate cleanly into AI revenue.

Pricing has already been a point of tension. In January, Gartner warned Salesforce customers that capped enterprise agreements for AI and data platforms might not be available at renewal, potentially making costs harder to forecast and value harder to measure. Salesforce rejected that claim at the time. Bill Patterson, Salesforce’s executive vice president of corporate strategy, told The Register that the claim Salesforce was moving away from capped agreements was inaccurate.

KeyBanc is not the only firm taking a cautious line. Bernstein previously described Agentforce as being in an early stage of adoption and said it was unlikely to drive Salesforce’s near-term growth. Bernstein also said consumption-based revenue from Agentforce would take longer than many expect, and that the product would likely perform best inside Salesforce’s core CRM base rather than across broader enterprise software use cases, where hyperscalers and other SaaS vendors are pushing their own AI tools.

Investors have already marked down expectations. Salesforce shares are down more than 36% this year, according to the report, reflecting broader concern about the company’s growth story and the time it may take for AI products to show up meaningfully in revenue.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.