BUSINESS TECH | AI agent deployments nearly triple in a year — Salesforce
Salesforce said consumer-facing industries generally deploy high-volume, task-specific agents, while operationally complex and regulated sectors use agents for more versatile, multistep processes.
Businesses are deploying artificial intelligence agents at nearly three times the rate of a year earlier, with adoption expanding from routine customer service tasks to more complex, multistep business processes, according to Salesforce’s 2026 Agentic Enterprise Index released Aug. 10.
The index analyzed aggregated usage data from Salesforce’s Agentforce platform among businesses that had agents activated in production every month from February 2025 to April 2026.
The average number of agents activated per organization increased nearly threefold over the period. Once provisioned, businesses created those agents in an average of two days, with that time falling 53% across the analysis period.
Salesforce said consumer-facing industries generally deploy high-volume, task-specific agents, while operationally complex and regulated sectors use agents for more versatile, multistep processes.
Financial services, for example, combines large-scale deployment with more sophisticated agent capabilities. Salesforce said the sector accounted for about 10% of total monthly Agentic Work Unit (AWU) output, with activity increasing during seasonal demand periods such as tax season.
An AWU represents one discrete task completed by an AI agent. Salesforce said AWU output from Agentforce agents was increasing at a 15% compound monthly growth rate as of April 2026.
Agents are also becoming capable of handling more actions. The average agent could perform six skills, up from two at the beginning of 2025. During peak shopping season, the average retail agent handled nine skills, a 350% increase from its regular level, Salesforce said.
Retail agents generally remain focused on one or two routine actions during most of the year, but their capabilities expand during periods of high demand.
Salesforce cited global jewelry brand Pandora as an example. Its Agentforce-powered AI concierge, Gemma, handles routine customer inquiries involving order status, shipping and jewelry care, while also providing product recommendations. During peak traffic, Gemma handles 60% of routine support requests and has contributed to a 10% increase in Net Promoter Score, according to Salesforce.
In more complex industries, agents are being deployed across multiple business functions. Siemens, for instance, uses a coordinated multi-agent workflow to qualify inbound leads by gathering additional information, applying qualification rules and routing leads with context across its business divisions.
Salesforce’s index ranked agent activity using a five-tier Sophistication Index covering capabilities ranging from reading and coordinating information to writing data, analyzing information and parsing complex inputs.
Manufacturing, financial services and health and life sciences were found to be deploying more advanced agent networks than technology and retail, which Salesforce described as traditional AI front-runners.
Public sector and health and life sciences recorded particularly strong growth in AWU output, increasing 227 times and 19 times, respectively, during the analysis period.
Salesforce also reported increased employee engagement with AI agents. The average employee interacted with an agent 300% more often per week over the course of the analysis period. Slack agents averaged 67 sessions per week, three times the level recorded in February.
At Salesforce, its AI agent Slackbot is used regularly by 83% of employees and saves the average employee up to five hours of work per week, according to the company.
Customer-facing agents are also handling substantially more interactions. Salesforce said agents handled 170 times more customer service chats over the past five quarters than in previous years, resolving seven out of 10 conversations without human assistance.
“Whether you’re spinning up agents to operate at massive scale or orchestrating them through deep, multistep pipelines, the bottom line is they’re shipping real value,” said Joe Inzerillo, Salesforce president of Enterprise AI and Technology. “That ROI isn’t just showing up on the top line in sales numbers but in execution efficiency. We are moving from passive chatbots and predictive models to execution-driven agents that actually roll up their sleeves and drive real value.”
The company said the next stage of enterprise AI adoption will involve combining rapid deployment with more sophisticated, cross-functional workflows rather than choosing between the two approaches.
Salesforce said the index is based on aggregated usage data from a cohort of businesses using Agentforce and other Salesforce products. The companies included in the analysis had to have agents activated in production every month from February 2025 through April 2026. The results are not indicative of Salesforce’s own performance.
Full disclosure: All news articles published on the TechSabado website are written by human journalists, unless otherwise specified. Final text editing is also performed by human editors, with artificial intelligence (AI) used only to assist with additional grammar and style guide corrections..
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