The Salesforce AI Landscape Heats Up: Agentforce, Governance , and Growing Pains

A Week of Turmoil and Transformation

The Salesforce world has had one of its most eventful and contentious weeks of the year. Recent developments in the Salesforce ecosystem, including advancements in AI integration and automation technologies, have significantly influenced both the regulatory landscape and operational processes.

With everything from a political backlash to some truly game-changing AI partnerships, the headlines surrounding Salesforce have really put the company’s promise and pressure on show - all in the era of the intelligent enterprise.

1. Leadership Backlash & Governance Shake-Up

Marc Benioff's recent comments endorsing President Trump and calling for National Guard patrols in San Francisco have left the company facing a right old backlash – culminating in Ron Conway’s resignation from the Salesforce Foundation board. Board members have significant responsibilities in upholding governance standards, ensuring the organization acts in accordance with governance principles, and maintaining accountability to shareholders. Independence among board members is crucial for objective decision-making, while relevant expertise is necessary for effective oversight and strategic guidance. The board's structure should support these responsibilities and facilitate ethical practices.

While Benioff has since gone on to apologise for his comments, the incident really reignited some deeper conversations going on right now about corporate governance, civic responsibility, and where we get the balance right between leadership and personal conviction. A clear governance structure within the organization is essential to support accountability, transparency, and effective management. Democracy also plays a role in ensuring legitimacy and participation in governance processes.

For a company that’s positioning itself as a champion of “business as a platform for change,” the backlash is a big deal - and it’s come at a really bad time for them, with Dreamforce on the horizon. As an organization subject to governance frameworks, Salesforce must adhere to relevant laws and regulations that shape corporate governance and accountability, while recognizing the influence of shareholders in company policies and long-term value creation.

2. Dreamforce 2025: The "Agentic Enterprise" Vision

Despite all the controversy - and I mean, this is big - Salesforce is pushing forward with its vision of the “Agentic Enterprise” – where humans and AI agents work together seamlessly. This vision is underpinned by five pillars: stakeholder treatment, transparency, board responsibility, accountability, and risk management, which serve as foundational elements for responsible innovation.

This aligns closely with the company's AI strategy, which emphasizes a shift toward agentic AI to gain a competitive edge in digital labor and enterprise AI solutions. This year’s Dreamforce event was all about Agentforce 360, taking Data Cloud, Customer 360 Apps and Slack and merging them all into one unified AI driven ecosystem, focusing on agentic AI and enterprise automation.

This year’s highlights included:

• Agentforce vibes - a new sort of “vibecoding” interface that uses OpenAI GPT-5 and Data 360 to convert context into code, powered by advanced AI models for real-time assistance and automation.

• Agentforce for Sales - promising that every lead gets looked at, every appointment gets scheduled

• Agentforce Supply Chain - automating logistics and supplier workflows through autonomous agents. Here, each agent acts as an independent decision-maker within the AI system, navigating complex environments and supporting enterprise operations.

The message is pretty clear: if you want the future of CRM to be exciting, it's going to be dynamic, conversational and super context aware. Effective management is essential for overseeing the integration of AI agents into workflows, ensuring smooth adoption and policy implementation. These innovations are also shaping the broader market, influencing competitive dynamics and market confidence.

3. AI Partnerships and the Legal Hurdles

Salesforce teaming up with Google to link Agentforce 360 up with Gemini is just another example of this great big rush to get all the different enterprise data and AI reasoning to play nicely together. These integrations are powered by advanced AI models like Gemini 2.0 and Vertex AI Agent Builder, which enable real-time assistance and automation across platforms.

Recent advancements in AI are being led by innovations in agentic AI and enterprise automation, driving new capabilities in productivity and contextual intelligence. So far it's all sounding pretty positive but I reckon we could see some tighter control over enterprise data and some real innovation in productivity and contextual intelligence.

But, at the same time, Salesforce is facing a lawsuit from authors claiming that the company has been using their work to train AI without permission - and this is kind of a big deal. This highlights the crucial role of laws in governing AI data use and intellectual property, ensuring compliance and ethical conduct. This all ties into the industry wide debate over AI data ethics, intellectual property and consent. The outcome is going to shape how Salesforce and the other SaaS players develop their AI responsibly.

4. Security and Data Integrity Under Fire

We’ve also got a bit of a security scare, with 404 Media reporting that a hacking group used stolen Salesforce customer data to build dossiers on over 22,000 U.S. government officials - including those from DHS, NSA and ICE. Although it's still unclear if the Salesforce systems were actually breached, this story highlights just how important governance, identity control and zero trust architectures are when it comes to AI. Leveraging AI can also enhance governance by improving the effectiveness, transparency, and accountability of security practices in both public and private sector organizations.

And to add to our worries, ValoSecurity just released a slide deck showing some 2025 Salesforce breaches and warning companies to get their incident response frameworks and supporting structure sorted before they start scaling their AI deployments. Management also plays a critical role in overseeing data integrity and security within organizations deploying AI.

Public Sector Involvement: Government’s Expanding Role in Salesforce AI

As the Salesforce AI landscape continues to evolve, the public sector is stepping into a critical role—one that goes far beyond simply adopting new technology. Governments around the world are recognizing that AI agents aren’t just a tool for business efficiency; they’re a vital tool for enhancing governance, driving economic growth, and delivering better public services. In developing countries especially, the push for good governance, transparency, and accountability is fueling rapid adoption of AI solutions, with public institutions looking to AI to streamline decision making processes and boost citizen participation.

Policy makers are increasingly turning to advanced AI models to analyze complex data, inform policy, and ensure that their company’s AI strategy aligns with the broader needs of society. The public sector’s embrace of AI is also encouraging the private sector to step up, with tech giants like Google and IBM leading the charge in AI research and development. Google Cloud, for example, is making waves with its Agentforce Builder platform, empowering governments to create custom AI agents that automate routine tasks and support more effective governance.

But it’s not all smooth sailing. The implementation of AI in the public sector brings its own set of challenges—regulation, accountability, and transparency are top of mind for policy makers and stakeholders alike. As governments deploy agentic AI to transform public services, they must also ensure that these systems are governed by robust regulations and ethical frameworks. The competitive landscape is heating up, with tech giants and businesses vying to provide the most innovative and secure enterprise AI platforms for public sector clients.

Looking to the long term, the adoption of AI technology in government is set to have a profound impact on society. Effective governance will depend on ongoing investment in education, a commitment to transparency, and close collaboration between governments, businesses, and civil society.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in public institutions, the focus must remain on ensuring that the benefits—economic growth, improved public services, and greater citizen participation—are shared equitably. The future of public governance will be shaped by how well we balance innovation with responsibility, and how committed we are to building AI solutions that serve all stakeholders.

5. A Divided Ecosystem: Clarity Needed After Dreamforce

Dreamforce 2025 drew a massive crowd - over 50,000 attendees - and got a lot of attention, but it also left a lot of questions unanswered:

• Do customers start with Data Cloud, Agentforce or Agentbuilder?

• What's the minimum investment needed to start seeing some real ROI?

• Are SMBs getting left behind while Salesforce focuses on all these super-scaled innovations?

Some of the team are saying they're confused about the branding and overlapping products - and I reckon that's a fair point. Meanwhile, admins are feeling a bit like they're getting overlooked. All of this has just made the call for a clearer roadmap and more customer-centric communication even louder.

6. The Road Ahead

As Salesforce doubles down on getting AI and humans working together, it’s got a dual challenge on its hands: rebuilding trust and delivering some real business outcomes for its Agentforce vision. The next few moves - on governance, product clarity and data protection - are going to determine whether it can turn all this negative attention into some positive energy.

Autonomous agents are widely seen as the next big thing in enterprise AI, and Salesforce is positioning itself at the forefront of this movement.

At the end of the day, one thing’s for sure: Salesforce isn’t just shaping the conversation about AI in the enterprise - it is the conversation.