Salesforce CEO Defends AI Ads as Standard Tech Marketing

Salesforce is promoting in its marketing content artificial intelligence (AI) features that are not yet fully deployed by its clients, Bloomberg reported Friday (May 22).

For example, a Salesforce promotional video released in October shows a healthcare network’s patients booking appointments with the help of Salesforce’s Agentforce AI tool, while that network still uses humans schedule appointments, according to the report.

Deployment of Salesforce’s chatbot for that application has been delayed by the healthcare network’s compliance departments and is being rolled out in phases due to sensitivities around healthcare, the report said.

Agentic capabilities shown in other presentations are also not widely used, per the report.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg that forward-looking marketing is common in the tech industry and that when Salesforce uses that kind of marketing, the company always makes it clear that the technology is not yet available.

“Whatever technology we have ever marketed, we have always delivered,” Benioff said in the report.

While some agentic AI capabilities have been marketed but are not yet available, others are live and delivering results for clients, according to the report. The report cited as an example a company that reduced its service calls by 20% by adopting automated product troubleshooting with the help of Salesforce’s Agentforce.

Salesforce has said that some customers that have adopted Agentforce have at least doubled their annual spending with the company, per the report.

PYMNTS reported in October that Salesforce went all in on what Benioff called the “agentic enterprise” when it unveiled Agentforce 360, a new platform designed to connect humans, agents and enterprise data on one trusted system.

The launch of Agentforce 360 built on Salesforce’s expanded partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic to bring their frontier models into the company’s platform.

PYMNTS reported in February that software stocks had taken a beating due to investor concerns around the growing verticalization of enterprise AI providers such as Anthropic.

According to Friday’s report by Bloomberg, Salesforce has become a symbol of the stock meltdown known as the “SaaSpocalypse” as the company lost 21% of its value in 2025 and has dropped another 30% this year.