Salesforce CEO Gets Booed Offstage After $27.7B “Talking Robot” Reveal Falls Flat

“I’m about to say ‘I understand your frustration’ so mf’ing loud…” -Salesforce new Voice Agent, probably

Ahead of this week’s Dreamforce spectacle (where Marc Benioff usually descends from a cloud to tell everyone business is evolving despite what the stock chart shows), the company unveiled Agentforce Voice… an upgrade that lets AI bots actually talk to customers, not just spam them with “How can I assist you?” pop-ups.

So next time you’re stuck on hold for two hours listening to royalty-free saxophone, your new emotional support robot will be right there saying, “I totally get it, Brenda… but unfortunately, that’s not covered under your plan.”

(Source: Neuron Expert)

According to Benioff, Agentforce can now sound (somewhat) human. Companies can tweak tone, pacing, and even pronunciation to keep their AI reps from sounding, well like your typical worthless AI agent. They can also communicate mid-sentence, meaning “Can I speak to your manager?” just became fair game again.

The voice system plugs into pretty much every corporate call center on Earth (Amazon, Five9, Genesys, NICE, Vonage) basically a who’s who of “please hold.” Salesforce says 12,000+ companies already use Agentforce… though analysts say it’s been about as widely adopted as Threads.

Meanwhile, Benioff’s ex–co-CEO Bret Taylor (the guy who left to “spend more time with generative AI”) is out here building his own rival empire called Sierra, where bots sound like they actually went to finishing school. Sierra’s already valued at $10 billion, with clients like ADT, SoFi, and SiriusXM… proving the apprentice has officially started stuntin’ on the master.

And it’s getting noisy in the voice-AI arena. OpenAI, Anthropic, and a whole bunch of startups have already rolled out supposed “lifelike” voice agents… but Salesforce’s counter is a concept it calls “hybrid reasoning” aka: “let the bots handle the easy stuff, then panic and transfer the rest to a human before they melt down.” It’s not exactly revolutionary, but hey, at least it’s self-aware enough to know when it’s in over its head.

Despite the new buzzwords and Dreamforce laser light shows, Wall Street’s still looking at Salesforce like, “Cute demo bro… now do profits” The stock’s down 28% this year, while the Nasdaq’s up 15%. Investors still haven’t forgiven that $27.7 billion Slack splurge, which aged about as well as that Bored Ape NFT my friend bought because “NFTs are the future of finance man.”

Of course, Benioff’s trying to justify it by shoving everything (Slack, voice, AI) into one new mega-platform called Agentforce 360, which sounds like something McKinsey would charge small businesses $800 an hour to explain incorrectly. But Benioff’s unfazed, of course. “Business isn’t zero-sum,” he proudly exclaimed. “It evolves.” Sure, Marc. But until this “evolution” shows up in the numbers, investors are gonna keep treating you like the Tony Robbins of SaaS… all talk, no traction.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon and SiriusXM as mentioned in the article.