Does adding artificial intelligence to a service justify a price hike? Salesforce says so.
Starting August 1, the customer relationship management (CRM) service provider is raising the costs of its enterprise and unlimited editions of Sales Cloud, select Industries Cloud, and Service Cloud offerings by an average of 6%, according to the release.
The company wrote that the new product packaging and pricing is to “[put] customers at the forefront of innovation and [make] it easy to give every employee access to the best AI and agentic tools.”
Salesforce wrote that the price increase in these editions is reflective of “ongoing innovation and customer value,” and reported that there are no planned pricing changes for Foundations, Starter, or Pro editions.
Additionally, the company announced that pricing and packaging will change for Agentforce, Customer 360 Apps, and Slack, “to simplify and accelerate your AI journey through unlimited Agentforce usage for employees and AI deeply embedded into daily operations within Salesforce and Slack.”
All paid plans for Slack will include the latest AI features, according to the company, including the ability to deploy multiple AI agents into Slack, “so employees can collaborate with them right alongside of their human coworkers.”
Add-ons for Agentforce, a platform that allows users to build and deploy digital labor for both customers and employees, will give users “key benefits” that include unlimited usage of generative AI.
The science is sciencing? This news follows a report released by the company just last month, where Salesforce’s AI researchers found that LLM-based AI agents are not performing adequately for CRM testing and fall short in “realism, data fidelity, agent-user interaction, and coverage across business scenarios and industries.”
The study acknowledges that LLMs with their agentic applications are “increasingly being explored for their potential to automate and augment complex tasks within professional environments” but reported that “rigorously evaluating the true capabilities and limitations of these agents in realistic work scenarios remain a significant challenge.”
The study found that leading LLM agents have a success rate of 58% for a single-turn interaction, but drop to 35% with multi-turn interactions.
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