40% of Fortune 1000 works to be elevated by AI by 2029: Salesforce

• AI will not replace humans, but augment their capabilities by taking over routine, time-consuming tasks, enabling employees to focus on higher-value work.
• Humans and AI agents will work together to deliver more proactive, personalised and efficient customer service.

By Shannine Daniel

Forty percent of work at Fortune 1000 companies will be elevated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) by 2029, Salesforce Senior Director Sridhar Hariharan stated at a media meet held in Colombo recently. 

Hariharan asserted that Salesforce, and the tech industry all together, does not intend for AI to replace humans, addressing very valid fears and concerns that jobs will be taken away by AI. 

“We firmly believe that these agents can assist humans, augment their capabilities and free up time they spend doing mundane tasks. We believe this will allow the entire workforce to be more productive,” Hariharan affirmed.

He said he sees humans and AI agents working togetherto deliver a better, more proactive and highly personalised customer service that most people expect. 

“Artificial Intelligence has been around for some time. In fact, Artificial Intelligence as a phrase was coined in the mid-1950 and it has progressedsteadily,” Hariharan said.

“Emerging technologies, the availability of big data, and more powerful cloud infrastructure, all of these things converged to create predictive AI and now agentic AI, through Large Language Models (LLMs),” he added.

AI agents--independent, proactive applications that can execute specialised tasks to help employees and customers--use LLMs to analyse and understand the full context of customer interactions or an automated trigger, then reason through decisions on the next steps autonomously.

They are also capable of operating 24/7 across various platforms like self-service portals and messaging channels. 

When faced with complex issues beyond their scope, AI agents can escalate the matter to human agents.

“The move from predictive AI to agentic AI is not just an upgrade. We think that it is a fundamental shift happening in the entire tech industry. I highly encourage people to look at using AI agents for their businesses,” stated Hariharan.

Salesforce is an agentic enterprise. It uses AI through its Agentforce platform---currently the only one that brings humans, applications, data and AI agents together---to deliver a better customer service solution.

Through Agentforce, Salesforce acquired US$ 100 million in support savings, US$ 60 million in annualised pipeline from early rollout, and a 15 percent increase in its marketing website pipeline.

According to Hariharan, with the agentic enterprise, customer loyalty grows, trust deepens, employees achieve more, operations run leaner, decisions get smarter. 

He added that more than 12,000 Salesforce customers trust Agentforce, which was introduced in October 2024. 

The current model is Agentforce 3, which was introduced last year, features enhanced interoperability and governance. 

“We proudly call ourselves the world’s leading AI CRM platform. We have incredible market share, we continue to invest in research and development, and we work with thousands of customers around the world, including Colombo,” Hariharan stressed.