Agentforce Is Flopping With Customers, Says KeyBanc. Salesforce Disagrees.
Salesforce has staked its future on AI agents. Analysts are increasingly unconvinced the bet is paying off.
KeyBanc Capital Markets has published a report on Salesforce that makes for uncomfortable reading in San Francisco. Drawing on a CIO survey and direct conversations with customers and partners, the investment bank's software equity research team concluded that Agentforce — Salesforce's AI agent platform — simply isn't landing.
"Agentforce, as a product, just isn't there," the report states flatly. Two problems keep surfacing: customer data is too messy for serious AI work, and even where the data exists, the product itself isn't convincing people to open their wallets.
KeyBanc was at pains to note this isn't just general SaaS pessimism. The analysts say they attend more Salesforce partner and customer events than for any other company they cover. The feedback, they claim, has been consistent. Partners are only now starting to turn proof-of-concept trials into actual pipeline deals, and more CIOs in the survey expected to cut Salesforce's share of their IT budget over the next year than to increase it.
Salesforce pushed back, naturally. A spokesperson told The Register that Agentforce is "the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history," pointing to customers like Engine, Falabella, and AAA deploying in weeks rather than months. Bold claim. It doesn't come with independently verifiable numbers, but then it rarely does.
The pricing picture makes things murkier. KeyBanc described Salesforce as pursuing aggressive price hikes while most customers remain unwilling to pay extra for AI features bundled into their CRM. In January, Gartner separately warned users that capped enterprise agreements for Salesforce's AI and data platforms might not be on the table at renewal time, raising the prospect of unpredictable costs. Salesforce denied this at the time.
KeyBanc isn't alone in its scepticism. Bernstein, in an earlier note, called Agentforce "still in early stage of adoption" and argued it won't meaningfully move Salesforce's growth numbers anytime soon. Bernstein also suggested Agentforce is likely to find its footing within Salesforce's core CRM market but struggle to compete more broadly, where hyperscalers and specialist AI platforms are already well entrenched.
Markets appear to have drawn their own conclusions. Salesforce stock is down over 36% this year. That's a significant vote of no confidence, whatever the press releases say.