Salesforce bringing fully autonomous agents to South Africa
Global customer relationship management (CRM) software provider Salesforce is on a drive to bring agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to the South African market.
It plans to achieve this through Agentforce, a complete, enterprise-grade system for agentic AI, which will enable businesses to move beyond simple chatbots to fully autonomous agents.
“It acts as the ‘agentic layer’ of the operating system of the Agentic enterprise,” Salesforce told MyBroadband.
“Salesforce has designed a four-layer platform: context, work, agency, and engagement. Salesforce unifies these four systems under its Agentic Enterprise Architecture.”
Salesforce said its architecture is open at every layer and integrated with all of the customer’s business systems.
The architecture is built on four platforms — Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and Slack — which offer the following:
- Data 360 — a contextual system for effectively activating corporate data
- Customer 360 — a data management strategy based on 27 years of innovation in enterprise applications
- Agentforce — a system for building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and evolving agents at scale
- Slack — a workplace communication and collaboration platform which incorporates AI agents
As part of its agentic strategy, Salesforce will be hosting the South African leg of its Agentforce World Tour in Johannesburg on Wednesday, 3 June 2026.
The event will focus on four key areas: building AI agents, agentic AI strategy, local success stories, and technical deep dives.
Attendees can benefit from a dedicated and hands-on training area where they can build their own autonomous agents.
The event will also feature more than 40 expert-led sessions on how AI can be used to handle tasks across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
Salesforce said it appreciated the great deal of interest from local companies and executives in attending the event. “We expect Agentforce World Tour Johannesburg to be a complete success,” it said.
Salesforce is one of the world’s top CRM software providers. The company recently reported a record-breaking fourth quarter in its 2025/26 financial year.
Its revenue grew by 12% year-on-year to $11.2 billion during the fourth quarter of the year. Its overall revenue of $41.5 billion for the financial year represented 10% year-on-year growth.
Enterprise CRM suites are critical for South African businesses
Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said the company has been rebuilt to become the operating system for the Agentic Enterprise, bringing humans and agents together on one trusted platform.
Agentforce’s annual recurring revenue reached $800 million, up 169% year-on-year, and the company closed 29,000 deals, up 50% quarter-over-quarter.
The company previously told MyBroadband that demand for CRM products remained robust in South Africa.
Linda Saunders, country manager and senior solution engineering director for Salesforce Africa, explained that the demand was driven by two primary trends.
“First, businesses with mature Salesforce CRM stacks are leveraging AI for competitive advantage, turning customer data into actionable insights and automated actions,” Saunders said.
“Second, organisations struggling to unlock AI’s value despite significant investments are turning to Salesforce for technical roadmaps, inspired by others’ AI-driven successes.”
Saunders said CRM is recognised as the foundation for AI, with much of its enterprise value coming from sales, marketing, service, and commerce.
“South African businesses are redefining CRM, moving from dated, siloed systems with basic functionality, high maintenance, and low scalability, to modern, cloud-based, AI-infused platforms,” she said.
“In South Africa’s dynamic, diverse, and competitive market, CRM is critical to stay agile, compliant with regulations like POPIA, and profitable.”
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