Marc Benioff, CEO of American cloud computing software firm Salesforce, said the future of artificial intelligence lies in autonomous agents rather than large language models (LLMs) in the form of AI chatbots.
“I actually think we’re hitting the upper limits of the LLMs right now,” he said on The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” podcast on Nov. 23.
We’ve all “got drunk on the ChatGPT Kool-Aid” over the past few years, he added, arguing that this has led the average consumer to believe that AI is more powerful than it is and that large language models are key to technological advancement.
The future of AI advancement lies in autonomous agents, he said, and not in LLMs like those used to train popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta’s Llama.
“Let’s replace bureaucracy with an agentic layer that serves people, not politics. Welcome to the future — welcome Agentforce!” he said on X on Nov. 25.
Marc Benioff posting on AI agents on X. Source: Marc Benioff
Autonomous agents, or “agentic AI,” can be deployed to conduct tasks independently, such as executing sales communications or marketing campaigns, said Benioff, who added that this would be beneficial for companies trying to become more efficient.
Salesforce is already implementing this vision through its prebuilt AI agents for customer service automation.
“We have incredible tools to augment our productivity, to augment our employees, to prove our margins, to prove our revenues, to make our companies fundamentally better, have higher fidelity relationships with our customers,” Benioff said.
He cautioned against overhyping AI’s current capabilities, particularly criticizing “AI priests and priestesses” and “AI evangelists” who make unrealistic claims about AI solving major global challenges like curing cancer or solving climate change.
This is a “huge disservice to these enterprising customers who can increase their margins, increase their revenues, augment their employees, improve their customer relationships,” he added.
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OpenAI is also preparing to launch its agent, codenamed “Operator,” in January 2025. It will reportedly be capable of performing tasks such as writing code or booking travel independently on behalf of human users.
The world’s largest company by market capitalization, Nvidia, is also getting in on the action and aims to spearhead the shift to AI agents. “We’re starting to see enterprise adoption of agentic AI really is the latest rage,” said CEO Jensen Huang at the company’s Q3 earnings call on Nov. 20.
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