AI agents in the enterprise? Here's what Salesforce's Agentic Enterprise Index says

In order to understand how the adoption of agent-based artificial intelligence within enterprise-class companies is actually progressing, one could knock on the door of the main vendors operating in this segment. According to the most recent Buyers Guide 2025 published by the consulting firm ISG Research, Oracle, Service Now and Salesforce in that order, with IBM, Microsoft, Google and AWS following closely behind. Alternatively, one would have to find an I.O.C. or IT manager willing to take the veils off the AI projects actually brought into production. Or, more easily and conveniently, one can rely on one of the many authoritative studies that measure the progress of the implementation (and integration) of AI agents at the heart of corporate information systems. The question, which has been revolving around this issue for some time now, is more or less always the same: how do these intuitive and totally customisable tools really work at the level of individual processes and, above all, what benefits are they able to generate?

The latest edition of Salesforce's Agentic Enterprise Index, based on usage data from its proprietary Agentforce platform, provides a fairly accurate snapshot of how enterprises are integrating AI agents to improve the customer experience and make critical business processes such as sales and other internal operations more efficient. What do the report's figures say? They say that in the first half of this year, the number of agents created by companies that first espoused the cause of AI agents increased by 119 per cent and the average number of customer service conversations handled by a digital agent grew 22-fold. The most active sectors, as can be easily guessed, are those with direct contact with consumers, i.e. financial services, travel and hospitality, and retail, while the sales and customer service areas are by far the main use cases for the technology (with the number of actions completed by agents overall growing at an average rate of 80% on a monthly basis. As for whether they produce returns (in economic terms), Joe Inzirello, Chief Digital Officer of Salesforce, has no doubts: 'AI agents are already tremendous value multipliers for businesses, and the data shows that as their adoption on a large scale increases, so does both the efficiency and the value they can generate'.

Let's take other numbers from the Index as confirmation. From January to June, employee interactions with AI agents on a monthly basis increased by an average of 65 per cent and the actions performed by agents as a result of these

interactions have increased by 76 per cent; in parallel, conversations between employees and AI have become more frequent and articulate (growing by 35 per cent in the last quarter) and have led agents to act more and more autonomously. Are people's jobs therefore gradually disappearing? Absolutely not, compared to a course of action in which many companies are combining human skills with those of virtual agents, entrusting artificial intelligence with the management of initial contacts and the most common questions and leaving the more complex cases to flesh-and-blood employees. One percentage reflects this trend well, and that is the increase (of 32 per cent, up from 22 per cent in the first three months of the year) in transitions to human agents recorded in the second quarter of 2025, a sign - according to Salesforce - that virtual agents are improving in their ability to direct customers and consumers to the most suitable experts.

Going back to the most common and accepted definition of 'agentic enterprise', the paradigm shift that large organisations have to face and ride is not limited to the mere automation of existing workflows, but to the real transformation of processes through the drastic reduction of operational time and costs and the substantial improvement of the customer experience. Customer service (where conversations handled by agents have grown at an average monthly rate of 70%), internal and corporate automation and sales, as the report states, are the areas with the highest presence of agents. Specifically, their action relates massively to drafting and sending e-mails, creating to-do's, sending meeting requests, requesting and identifying contacts, and summarising information and interactions related to a contact. With respect to the most intensive use of the tool, it is therefore not surprising that the travel & hospitality sector, notoriously one of the fastest to transpose and experiment with technological innovations, is the one with the largest increase in agent actions in the first half of 2025 (the leap forward is 133%) and with the largest percentage of active corporate users on the technology (a sign of the effectiveness of the training provided to employees).