Salesforce’s push to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) agent business is the focus of this edition of Business Day Spotlight.
Host Mudiwa Gavaza is joined by Linda Saunders, country manager and senior director for solution engineering in Africa at Salesforce. The discussion focuses on Salesforce progress around agentic AI.
Salesforce’s Agentforce platform has successfully handled over a million customer conversations, “demonstrating how AI can scale to meet high demand without sacrificing quality or customer experience”, Saunders says.
This is part of a growing trend around AI-powered agents, known as agentic AI, taking over more tasks from human beings — for example, an agent that works like a personal assistant — making bookings, creating meetings and summarising notes and other important information.
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For Salesforce, a large part of this is focused around resolving customer queries.
According to Saunders, 85% of support requests are now resolved autonomously, with only 5% of cases escalated to human agents on the new platform.
In addition, users are getting answers faster, with a 65% reduction in response time for 90% of users since January 2025.
She explains some of the work that has been to improve the system over time and how the company monitors the large volume of interactions.
Through the discussion, Saunders outlines the development of Salesforce Agentforce; evolution of agentic AI; use cases for agent platforms; and how the technology could develop over time.
Salesforce specialises in cloud computing and customer relationship management programs for businesses. Valued at $242.bn (R4.275-trillion), Salesforce is one of Silicon Valley’s largest players.
The group uses its SA offering as the headquarters for its Africa operation.
• Business Day Spotlight is an Arena Podcasts Production.
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