Salesforce adds AI to everything, jacks up prices by 6%

Salesforce is raising prices for a bunch of its products and claims that increasing integration with AI justifies the increased bills, even after one of its own researchers recently said that AI agents are often underdelivered on basic CRM tasks.

In an announcement on Tuesday, the CRM giant said it is raising prices by an average of 6 percent for both the Enterprise and Unlimited SKUs of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service, and "select Industries Clouds," on August 1. Salesforce Starter, Pro, and Foundations editions aren't getting a price bump.

It's also made generally available a couple of new SKUs of Agentforce, the company's platform for building and rolling out AI agents, for those same clouds. Agents are the buzzword du jour in AI, describing little pieces of autonomous code supposedly capable of executing complicated workflows without as much user intervention.

The lower-priced Agentforce "add-ons" start at $125 per user per month for Enterprise and Unlimited customers, and come with agent access for every licensed user, prebuilt templates for certain industries, analytics, and a tool to help users create useful AI prompts.

Agentforce 1 Editions starts at $550 per user per month, and adds more customized features for specific clouds and greater licensing flexibility, with one million Flex credits and 2.5 million Data Services credits per company per year.

Salesforce introduced Flex Credits in May, replacing its earlier $2-per-conversation model for Agentforce actions, and it claimed the move would give customers greater flexibility by allowing them to manage costs better. In June, Bill Patterson, Salesforce executive veep for CRM applications, said that AI vendors are still hammering out the right pricing model and any biz that thinks they have it "all figured out is kidding themselves."

Both Agentforce SKUs replace similarly named Einstein products, "Einstein" being the old and now disfavored branding for all of Salesforce's AI tech.

There are also a bunch of changes to Slack, the collaboration/chat platform that Salesforce acquired for more than $27 billion in 2021. It's adding AI features, and integrating Slack conversations into the Salesforce UI ("Salesforce Channels") for all customers, while raising prices for Business+ users from $12.50 per user per month to $15, "to reflect the significant value added through new advanced AI capabilities," it said.

In addition, Salesforce is introducing a new Slack Enterprise+ plan bundled with Agentforce 1 Editions. Enterprise+ smears AI search across Slack channels, Salesforce records and a handful of connected third-party apps, all via a single pane to hunt down your org's data.

Salesforce last raised its prices in August 2023, adding around 10 percent to bills across a range of products, saying the extra AI it was baking in justified the cost increases. That move wasn't popular with customers and CFO Amy Weaver cautioned price hikes "take a while to roll through our customer base," but Wall Street was very happy with the move and the stock price rose.

Not quite the same for today's announcements. Its stock saw a brief bump before falling right back to where it started, and comments on some user forums have been rather negative, along with complaints that Salesforce is overly prone to mistakes hallucinations.

This appears to be backed up by Salesforce's own research. On Monday, research led by one of its researchers found that LLM agents could only get a single-function task right 58 percent of the time, and that fell to 35 percent if a task needed multiple steps. ®